Alleluia!

"At daybreak on the first day of the week 

the women who had come from Galilee with Jesus 

took the spices they had prepared

and went to the tomb.

They found the stone rolled away from the tomb;

but when they entered,

they did not find the body of the Lord Jesus.

While they were puzzling over this, behold,

two men in dazzling garments appeared to them.

They were terrified and bowed their faces to the ground. 

They said to them,

“Why do you seek the living one among the dead?

He is not here, but he has been raised.

Remember what he said to you while he was still in Galilee, 

that the Son of Man must be handed over to sinners

and be crucified, and rise on the third day.”

And they remembered his words.

Then they returned from the tomb

and announced all these things to the eleven

and to all the others."

Gospel of Luke

Chapter 24:1-12

"Las tres Marias at the Empty Tomb" 

(Mary Magdalene, Mary Caifas, Mary Salome)

by Angel Rodriguez-Dias

[In commemoration of the 275th Anniversary of 

San Fernando Cathedral, 

1731-2004, 

San Antonio, Texas]

this is it: blessings on your Palm Sunday

This is my closing Lenten post until Easter begins. As I mentioned before, during this Holy Week, I will be fasting from blogging, FB, Twitter, Pinterest, and most all things electronic.

Also, please pray with me as I ponder over the next couple of days the significance of fasting for the opinion piece I’ll be presenting to the NYTimes for their Good Friday “Room for Debate” section.

I’ve thought a lot about what I wanted to write for this Palm Sunday post, but after this morning, I had no doubt. I want to give you a taste of the powerful homily that our gifted pastor gave us this morning. It was a beautiful Palm Sunday liturgy at St. Mark the Evangelist.

Discussing why we commemorate the Passion of Christ, Fr. Tom Boyer emphasized,

The movies and the media and some shallow spiritualities might want to impress us with the ugliness, the suffering, the injustice, and the persecution, and that might be fine for moment or two, but you can’t stop there. The Passion of Christ is not about how Christ suffered, what happened to him, and how awful we might think it was. The Passion of Christ is about his response, not his persecution. 

For a long time before Jesus, people persecuted each other, and it has continued without a pause since Jesus himself suffered and died. People die horrible deaths. Innocent people die too, put to death by legal injection, the miscarriage of justice and the abuse of power and authority. Christ is still suffering in the poor, the abused, and victims of violence all over this earth. The tragedy is that it is all so common, and so disciples must look to the master to learn from him the response to all this because the Passion is not about suffering and persecution. It is about the response of Jesus. 

Watch and learn from the master. Despite his fear and his agony, he is focused on God and on others. He meets women who are weeping for him, and he tells them to weep for themselves. He hangs there with a criminal, and he comforts him with a promise of Paradise. No matter what happens in this Passion, it is never about him. He remains attentive and focused on God and the needs of others…   This is what we can learn from the Passion; not how Christ died, but what he still teaches us through his death about hope, about sacrifice, and about love for others.

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My prayer for you, and for me, for this holiest of weeks:

“Have mercy, Lord, on your Church,

as she brings you her supplications,

and be attentive to those who incline their hearts before you;

do not allow, we pray, those you have redeemed

by the death of your Only Begotten Son,

to be harmed by their sins or weighed down by their trials.

Through Christ our Lord.”

[Prayer over the people during Lent]

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O Sacred head, sung by Fernando Ortega

In this your bitter passion, Good Shepherd think of me.

With your most sweet compassion,

Unworthy though I be:

Beneath your cross abiding

For ever would I rest,

In your dear love confiding,

And with your presence blest.

keep your eye on the ball

I have described myself before as a slow processor, and I've also learned that there are many of us out there! 

Over at ShirtofFlame.com, for example, author Heather King describes herself as, 

"one of those people for whom every week of experience takes two to process (which partly explains why I need to spend a lot of time alone)." 

Since this is my first Holy Week as a blogger, I don’t know what is the proper or regular protocol as far as balancing these things. But I've discerned that in order for me to enter Holy Week fully and with my whole heart, it's going to be important that (at least this year), I make a point of fasting from blogging, Facebook, Twitter, and most anything related to electronics. 

As a basketball fan, I'm already fairly distracted by march madness. 

Holy Week, especially the Easter Triduum, is a treasured time for our family, and this year we will have all of our grown children and their families (yes, including Elenita and the Twinkies!) celebrating with us. How blessed am I?! It will be our family version of march madness.

But before I sign off for Holy Week, I want to point out a couple of things. 

First of all, as I’ve already written here before, my current book project is a biography of Servant of God Fr. Stanley Francis Rother, an Oklahoma priest who was killed while ministering at an Oklahoma mission in Santiago de Atitlán, Guatemala.

And Wednesday of Holy Week – March 27 – is Father Rother's birthday.  So I’d like to tell you a little bit about his final Holy Week and how important it was for him. 

Each year, Fr. Rother sent a Christmas letter for publication in the two Oklahoma diocesan newspapers. In his final Christmas letter of 1980 he pointed out, 

“This is one of the reasons I have for staying in the face of physical harm. The shepherd cannot run at the first sign of danger. Pray for us that we may be a sign of the love of Christ for our people, that our presence among them will fortify them to endure these sufferings in preparation for the coming of the Kingdom.” 

A month later, and six months before his death, Fr. Rother and another local priest left Guatemala under threat of death after witnessing the abduction of a parish catechist. 

But Fr. Rother returned to his beloved community in Santiago Atitlán in time to celebrate Holy Week with them, ignoring the pleas of those who urged him to consider his own safety. Not only did he know in his heart that the shepherd cannot run, he also lived with his entire being what it meant to be "a sign of the love of Christ" for his people.

That July, in a statement read in all the nation’s parishes, the Guatemalan bishops denounced “a carefully studied plan” by the government “to intimidate the Church and silence its prophetic voice.”

At 1:30 am on July 28, 1981, three Spanish-speaking Ladino men (non indigenous) snuck into the rectory of Santiago Apostol (St. James) church in Santiago Atitlán, beating Father Rother and shooting him twice in the head.

Please pray for me as I continue to work on this beautiful life story. 

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On a completely different subject, I was asked yesterday to be one of the contributors for a Lenten "discussion" in the New York Times section called "Room for Debate."  The topic is: "Is there a point in giving up something for Lent?"

I will try to remember to post a link to the final product here, but since I'll be offline and it will be published on Good Friday, I'd like to ask #1, for your prayers as I ponder  and discern what to say--and #2, if you happen to think of it, please drop by the NYTimes and leave a friendly comment?