Palm Sunday March 28, 2010 Reflections for Vespers by Sister Patricia Crowley, O.S.B., Prioress

I. Introduction:
On this day, we celebrate Christ’s triumphant entry into Jerusalem. We, who know the story of the coming week, pause to ponder the mystery of Christ preparing to empty himself in the powerful reality of the cross. In that act and the subsequent glory of the Resurrection, God is in our world, in our lives - in an amazingly new way.

During these past days of Lent, we have explored the value of emptying ourselves. We have used the symbol of an empty cup. We have looked at Luke’s first two beatitudes and how hunger and poverty might be a means to experience a fruitful emptiness. We have shared with one another what we long for, what we need in community.

II. Today’s focus:
Today we look at the last two beatitudes found in the 6th chapter of Luke:

Blessed are those who weep, who mourn…….

Happy are those who are persecuted, rejected, mocked, misunderstood, maligned because of me…..

In this reflection, I draw primarily from Jim Forest’s 1999 book entitled - Ladder of the Beatitudes.

III. Luke’s 3rd blessing:
The third Lucan beatitude once again startles us with a seeming contradiction – happy are those who are sad?

We each can touch into the emptiness that fills our being when someone we love dies. In that experience, we lose a piece of ourselves, a part of who we once were.

We each know, too, the sense of sadness when we realize that we have done something that affects others negatively and we recognize that we cannot find a way to erase that piece of our past. Jim Forest says that anyone who has lived into adulthood has memories that arouse shame and regret.

Sadness we know. Tears are sometimes hard to come by. Jim quotes a friend who lost a baby after years of waiting to be pregnant. A very wise priest confessor advised a regular visit to church to put flowers in front of the statue of the mother of God. After months of not being able to weep, the tears came in abundance, and were freeing.

For most of us, the mourning process is made more complete when tears do come. Weeping can move us toward a new kind of transparency and an integration of that sense of loss into our whole being.

IV. Luke’s final blessing

The final beatitude of Luke is also one that seems unreal. When we think about Rome and the early Church, we do recognize that martyrdom was the defining characteristic of sainthood (based on Robert Ellsberg’s All Saints page 1). We also acknowledge that the Cross is the main symbol of our faith (Gal. 6:14).

However, being insulted and maligned ourselves feels like a different story….. I was reminded of this fact last week when I returned to my office one evening and found a vitriolic message on my voicemail in the wake of some Sisters in LCWR leadership having spoken out publicly for the passage of the health care reform bill.

Jim Forest points out (page 148) that:

Accepting persecution as a blessing is the final act of death to self – a poverty of spirit that allows us to cope with condemnation and rejection without bitterness or hatred.

One of the central themes of the gospel, echoed in this morning’s passage from Luke, is: “ I tell you, if they keep silent, the stones will cry out!”

Weeping, mourning, feeling persecuted and being insulted – all of these can be ways for our human existence to know emptiness. Emptiness prepares us to experience happiness and blessing.

Each of the beatitudes has to do with dying to self (p. 146):

• emptying one’s self,
• making room for God within us and within our world.

The gospel says this in so many different ways - that the only way we can find ourselves is to lose ourselves.

In Luke, Jesus lays out four ways in which we can practice losing ourselves, dying to ourselves:

• hunger
• poverty
• weeping
• speaking out and being persecuted for Christ’s sake – for gospel values.

This coming week invites us to a final Lenten experience of emptying ourselves and making room for God’s fullness within us.

In Christ’s emptying of himself, we can move through the Paschal Mystery of our own lives each day.

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