Bonus: A Meditation on Holy Week

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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James Finley (0:08)

Greetings, I'm Jim Finley.

Kirsten Oates (0:11)

And I'm Kirsten Oates.

James Finley (0:13)

Welcome to Turning to the Mystics.

Kirsten Oates (0:23)

Welcome, everyone, to another bonus episode of Turning to the Mystics with Jim Finley.

We're still finding ourselves in very challenging situations, and we're hearing on the news this week that this is likely to be the hardest week for us in America, that the deaths will escalate, and then we're also facing economic hardship. And so Jim and I just send love and care out to everyone and hope you're taking care of yourselves and taking care of others as you are able.

And we find ourselves heading into Holy Week this week. And so when Jim and I were talking about what this bonus episode might focus on, we thought a focus on Holy Week might be helpful. We know that many people won't be able to be with their church communities in ways they have in the past. And we also feel like this Holy Week ritual has power in it and that it's lasted throughout history for a reason that it offers us something. And so we focus on a Holy Week teaching today and I'll turn over to you, Jim. Thank you.

James Finley (1:46)

Thank you, Kirsten.

Yes, you know, the dovetailing of the pandemic crisis we're all going through together in Holy Week and looking on this maybe being like the hardest week yet, maybe. And liturgically it dovetails the week in Jesus that was the hardest week he ever went through. And so I thought it'd be fitting. I like this idea then of dovetailing this liturgically with Holy Week. And what I'd like to do here is to share with you a kind of a poetic meditation on the story of Veronica's Veil.

That in the Catholic tradition, there's the devotional practice of the Stations of the Cross. There's 14 Stations of the Cross. And sometimes during Holy Week, they're celebrated together as a form of devotional practice. But also sometimes people individually can pray the Stations of the Cross by going to Station to Station. So each Station of the Cross is a scene from the passion of Christ. So Jesus is condemned to death, for example. Jesus picks up his cross and so on. So you stop at each one and meditate on that one, on what it reveals to us about God's love for us and the whole mystery of the cross and the resurrection. And each of these 14 Stations is in the Gospels. It draws the scene from the Gospels. The one exception is the sixth Station, which is Veronica's Veil. It's a very early tradition. I think it was early the second century, maybe earlier. And so the story is that Jesus is carrying the cross on the way to his crucifixion. And the crowds are lining the streets. And Veronica is there. And she's there among the crowds of people there. Some of them are jeering and that kind of thing. Some are there out of curiosity because they saw these public executions going on. And some were Jesus' disciples. They were just grief-stricken by this traumatizing event that was happening. And Veronica was one of these disciples of Jesus. And as Jesus passes by, she's so moved by compassion for Jesus that she steps out of the crowd at a risk to herself because it wasn't safe to be publicly identified with Jesus at a time where it was a risky business to do that. And she offers Jesus the only thing she can offer, which is her veil, so that he can wipe the dirt and the blood from his eyes and from his face. And so there's this kind of primal moment where Jesus takes her veil and he closes his eyes and lowers his face into her veil. And in that moment, the softness of her veil is the only solace he can find in a world turned harsh. At a deeper level, the solace he finds is her compassion for him that he finds. And I want to say this then poetically, that in the moment Jesus closes his eyes to lower his face into the veil, in closing his eyes and lowering his face, the world around him disappears. She disappears, everyone disappears. Just like right now if you look around the room where you are right now, wherever you are, when you close your eyes, if you would close your eyes and put your face in the palms of your hands, the world around you would disappear from view. And so in the moment he closes his eyes and lowers it into the softness of the veil, the world around him disappears. And poetically then say this, that in that moment, Jesus, without going anywhere, descends down into the depth-like, infinite, tender mercy of God, the Father, sustaining him in that moment. And in that moment, Veronica, in this kind of waking dream, she descends without going anywhere, down into this depth of God's oceanic, tender mercy for her. And all the people there along the roadside, both the disciples and the cheering crowd, the soldiers, they all descend down into this infinite mercy of God. And in this moment, you and I descend down into the infinite mercy of God. So it is a moment in the midst of the tragic, in which a single gesture of compassion is the solace that grants the descent down into the sustaining depths of this oceanic, tender mercy.