The Third Sunday in Lent

My Old Farmer’s Almanac tells me that today marks the beginning of the hummingbirds’ migration north. The little wonders will arrive here and we will have their feeders ready for them, and our hearts will be glad to see them, and we will enjoy their company morning and evening as they swoop past and talk to us with their whirrs and squeaks.

Speaking of birds, I have neglected to mention that we have a lovely little screech owl living in our barn. She was perched on the limb of the maple out back the other night when I was outside with Jinx, and she flew closer to the house and perched in a knot of honeysuckle. I called Mrs. Orr outside, and we marveled at her compact beauty. Being Orrs, we were unable to restrain ourselves from naming her — everything in our few acres gets named –and she is now known as Mabel. May she raise up a clutch of fine young owls. Perhaps we will hear Mabel or one of her progeny this fall when they begin sending their ghostly calls across the holler.

When I was on my forced march the other day, I heard geese honking as I neared the waterfall. I searched the sky but didn’t see any. Then I looked down from the sheer drop on the side opposite the waterfall and saw a gaggle of Canada geese on the banks of the pond in front of a farmhouse. They were enjoying the sunshine, and I enjoyed the playful song until the sound of rushing water obliterated it.

It’s midmorning here and we have only seen one bird on our new feeders. I worry that they don’t understand that these are just as good as the old cafes where they once dined. And they’re not even under new management.

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I have been meditating on our Lord’s Passion, helped along by a book, The Life of Christ by Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen. My thoughts have also led me to ponder how the respectable world has twisted His words to suit their own ends, and how completely despised and rejected He really was during His earthly ministry, and how completely despised and rejected He is today, especially under the well-lit ceilings of the buildings that call themselves “churches” and “worship centers.”

Let Him Who says, “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” come into the world that believes in the primacy of the economic; let Him stand in the market place where some men live for collective profit, or where others say men live for individual profit, and see what happens. He will be so poor that during life He will have nowhere to lay His head; a day will come when He will die without anything of economic worth. In His last hour He will be so impoverished that they will strip Him of His garments and even give Him a stranger’s grave for His burial, as He had a stranger’s stable for His birth.

Let Him come into the world which proclaims the gospel of the strong, which advocates hating our enemies, which condemns Christian virtues as the “soft” virtues, and say to that world, “Blessed are the patient,” and He will one day feel the scourges of the strong barbarians laid across His back; He will be struck on the cheek by a mocking fist during one of His trials; He will see men take a sickle and cut the grass from a hill on Calvary, and then use a hammer to pinion Him to a Cross to test the patience of One Who endures the worst that evil has to offer, that having exhausted itself it might eventually turn to Love.

Let Him come into our world which ridicules the idea of sin as morbidity, considers reparation for past guilt as a guilt complex and preach to that world, “Blessed are they who mourn” for their sins; and He will be blindfolded and mocked as a fool. They will take His Body and scourge it, until His bones can be numbered; they will crown His head with thorns, until He begins to weep not salt tears but crimson beads of blood, as they laugh at the weakness of Him Who will not come down from the Cross.

Let Him come into the world which denies Absolute Truth, which says that right and wrong are only questions of point of view, that we must be broadminded about virtue and vice, and let Him say to them, “Blessed are they who hunger and thirst after holiness,” that is, after the Absolute, after the Truth which “I am”; and they will in their broadmindedness give the mob the choice of Him or Barabbas; they will crucify Him with thieves, and try to make the world believe that God is no different from a batch of robbers who are His bedfellows in death.

Let him come into a world which says that “my neighbor is hell,”  that all which is opposite me is nothing, that the ego alone matters, that my will is supreme law, that what I decide is good, that I must forget others and think only of myself, and say to them, “Blessed are the merciful.” He will find that He will receive no mercy; they will open five streams of blood out of His Body; they will pour vinegar and gall into His thirsting mouth; and, even after His death, be so merciless as to plunge a spear into His Sacred Heart.

Let Him come into a world which tries to interpret man in terms of sex; which regards purity as coldness, chastity as frustrated sex, self-containment as abnormality, and the union of husband and wife until death as boredom; which says that a marriage endures only so long as the glands endure, that one may unbind what God binds and unseal what God seals. Say to them, “Blessed are the pure”; and He will find Himself hanging naked on a Cross, made a spectacle to men and angels in a last wild crazy affirmation that purity is abnormal, that the virgins are neurotics, and that carnality is right.

Let Him come into a world which believes that one must resort to every manner of chicanery and duplicity in order to conquer the world, carrying doves of peace with stomachs full of bombs, say to them, “Blessed are the peacemakers,” or “Blessed are they who eradicate sin that there may be peace”; and He will find Himself surrounded by men engaged in the silliest of all wars—–a war against the Son of God; making violence with steel and wood, pinions and gall and then setting a watch over His grave that He who lost the battle might not win the day.

Let Him come into a world that believes that our whole life should be geared to flattering and influencing people for the sake of utility and popularity, and say to them: “Blessed are you when men hate, persecute, and revile you”; and He will find Himself without a friend in the world, an outcast on a hill, with mobs shouting His death, and His flesh hanging from Him like purple rags.

From The Life of Christ by Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen (1958, McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc, New York, NY, pp. 120-121)

Rest today and may God bless you, my dear readers. May your hearts be inclined to ask Christ the great Intercessor to pray for you, and to ask the Blessed Mother of Sorrows to pray for you, and for the saints to pray for you. If we could know at any given moment how many of the great cloud of witnesses are praying for us, to say nothing of the Son of God and His Mother, our hearts would be shattered by love and awe.

~ S.K. Orr