Palm Sunday
We were flogged again with storms yesterday and last night. While out doing our weekly shopping yesterday afternoon, we huddled in the car while the sky turned inky and the lightning threw its crooked line daggers down, down near us. When we returned home, we learned that an area not far from where we had been was pelted with enough hail that it needed shoveling. The photos from the local weather station looked as if three inches of snow had fallen, and the damage to the siding on many homes looked as if a machine gunner had strafed the neighborhoods. I hoped all those eager young people who bought vegetable plants last weekend were not now looking out of their windows at gardens beaten flat by icy white stones.
We slept little last night, the storms howling around us and the NOAA weather radio shrieking into the air every half-hour, warning us of wind and hail and flooding. For the first time ever, we received warnings of a “life threatening situation” and were cautioned not to attempt to leave home unless it was necessary to escape a flood. My wife and I took turns comforting Jinx (Dixee seemed to sleep through the night, snug in her little kennel). At one point, Mrs. Orr got down in the floor with the spotted menace and held him and talked quietly to him. By the time dawn peeked in through the curtains, we were bleary and tense but unharmed.
And so Holy Week begins, with the commemoration of Christ’s entry into Jerusalem. As we’ve all heard from our tender years up until now, the joyous rain of “Hosannah!” would take less than a week to be transformed into the bloodthirsty tornado: “Crucify Him!”
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I had a dreary week at work, due in part to my age — the older I get, the more difficult it is for me to learn and apply new software programs. I have spent much time at prayers during this Lenten season, and it has been a comfort on trying days. On one day (I think it was Thursday), I was so overwhelmed and feeling so inadequate and isolated, I was afraid to ask God for help or even encouragement. I did pray about the situation, and He provided me with comfort and guidance and grace. It’s striking for me to contemplate that He Answered prayer even as I was reluctant to ask Christ for help….and whence my reluctance? I confess it was because I feared He wouldn’t answer, or that the answer would be “No,” and I would be disappointed or angry at Him. I was more willing to go it alone, at least initially, than to risk marring the sweetness of the placid hours I have had with Christ during these weeks leading up to the commemoration of His crucifixion.
This is painful. And I contemplate it deeply because it is painful. So much boils down to a lack of trust, a lack of belief, a conviction that He can’t be trusted. This relates also to allowing myself to become upset at the actions of others, ignoring the fact that if I truly put myself in His hands, He’s going to use the situation for my good. He might not pull me out of it — as Venerable Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen noted while adopting the first-person point of view in his Life of Christ, “I want My missionaries and martyrs to love me in prison and in death as I loved them in My own suffering.”
For me, I must believe that He will use my difficulties, my anxieties, my trials, my sufferings…use them for my good, for my growth.
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It occurred to me this morning while walking with wet Jinx on the wet gravel beneath the wet heavens that the praise that meant the most to me as a child was praise that I was not meant to hear, praise that I overheard one adult express to another concerning me. Or perhaps they knew what they were doing and stage-whispered the conversation for my benefit. Either way, when I overheard an adult say to another adult something complimentary about me, I was willing to fight crocodiles in order to win the sort of praise I wasn’t supposed to have overheard. Participation trophies were not a reality in my boyhood, and I like to think I would have scorned them. But I would have crawled over brimstone for someone who complimented me behind my back.
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Mental prayer makes this season very precious and immediate in my heart. I was grateful to find the website of a young priest whose writing and speaking has encouraged me greatly in recent weeks. His name is Father Nix, and his website is here. I particularly benefited from his counsel regarding using the Little Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary (which Mrs. Orr recently bought for me and which I have been using with intense focus during Lent). Father Nix sees the Little Office as more appropriate for lay Catholics than the regular Divine Office. I believe that I have indeed grown in faith and grace while saying this office.
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Mrs. Orr and I watched an old Firing Line episode in which the twitchy, sharklike William F. Buckley interviewed the wizened little Mother Teresa. He asked her why God allows pain, and her answer was simple in its beauty and beautiful in its simplicity. She told Buckley softly and directly that pain and suffering are gifts from God, gifts that allow us the privilege of participating in Christ’s work. It was fascinating to watch Buckley ask the little nun a series of follow-up questions, questions that demonstrated that he in no way understood her simple, sublime answer.
Mr. Buckley was much more well-read than a midwit exiled wannabe Catholic like me will ever be. I wonder if he ever read much Flannary O’Connor? Because in her beautiful and unsettling prose, Flannary, crushed daily by her lupus and the primitive treatments for the disease, hammered steadily at the truth that finding meaning in suffering means finding Christ there with us in our suffering.
He rode into town on a beast of burden, a donkey with a cross etched on the hide of its shoulders and with a cross-bearer draped across its middle. He suffered for His people, and we have the honor of suffering for him and with him. Can we understand this? Can I?
~ S.K. Orr
