"We Adore You, O Christ, and we Praise You"

"Because by Your Holy Cross You have Redeemed the World."

So begins each station in the traditional Lenten prayer, the Stations of the Cross.

I just got back from it.

It officially opened our silent recollection. Naturally, I'm blogging. There's something about the deep, prayerful silence of a recollection that sends my comtemplator into overdrive-- and there's no distractions to stop me diarizing it here.

Anyway, the Via Dolorosa (Stations of the Cross as it's generally known in English) has got to be among the most emotionally powerful prayers the Church has in her armoury. It IS the embodiment of what Lent is meant to be; the reliving of Christ's passion and death. It doesn't hold anything back.

Station 1: Jesus is Scourged.
Station 2: Jesus takes up the Cross.
Station 3: Jesus falls (carrying the Cross) the First Time.
Station 4: Jesus meets His mother on the road.
Station 5: Jesus is assisted in carrying the cross by Simon of Cyrene.
Station 6: Jesus' bloody face is wiped by Veronica.
Station 7: Jesus falls the Second Time.
Station 8: Jesus meets the mourning women of Jerusalem.
Station 9: Jesus falls the Third Time.
Station 10: Jesus is stripped of his clothes.
Station 11: Jesus is nailed to the Cross.
Station 12: Jesus Dies.

Station 13: Jesus' body is taken down from the Cross.
Station 14: Jesus' body is laid in the Tomb.

Even the "happier" stations, where Jesus is assisted by Simon or Veronica only serve to highlight the fact that he needed that help in the first place, that he was so weak and bloody as to need assistance.

Not all forms of the Stations include the Fifteenth station--at least not all the ones I've seen used. The Fifteenth station is the Resurrection, which is of course the reason that for all the suffering in the first place. But unlike the Easter season, the focus of Lent and Via Dolorosa is the SUFFERING and DEATH of Christ.

It's a very serious season indeed, and I've always found it to succeed a great deal better than Advent at capturing the serious feeling of the pre-festive season. Probably that has to do with all the carols blaring on the radios, decorations everywhere, and frantic shopping and partying going on. Lent, mercifully, is free of such concerns, and assisted in this goal by a sharper focus on penance, with days of Fasting and Abstinence, the custom of giving something up for Lent, and the somehow very noticeable removal of the Alleluia from all worship.

It's more than that, of course. Advent is a serious season, a season of anticipation for the coming of Christ, just as all the centuries before A.D. 1 were anticipating Christ. It's a hopeful, eager, if solemn season. It's a housecleaning and refocussing season.

Lent, by contrast, is a preparation for Easter. And just as Advent echoes the reality of waiting for the first Christmas, so Lent recalls the events that led to the first Easter, namely the suffering and death of Jesus.

It's a very powerful season... and I find it gets moreso each year. Of course, it's the feast of Easter that makes it worthwhile. As St. Paul said in his letters, if Jesus didn't rise from the dead, there's absolutely no point to Christianity--and no point to Lent.

Lent is an awesome season, but thank You, God, that it comes only once a year. Just as you can only go about forty days without food, you can't go much longer with that kind of sorrow. You need the promise of Easter to make it worthwhile.