The New Stations of the Cross: The Way of the Cross According to Scripture - Softcover

McKenna, Megan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0385508158 ISBN 13: 9780385508155

Verlag: PRH Christian Publishing, 2003

Inhaltsangabe

One of today’s most popular and respected Catholic writers presents the first guide to the new Stations of the Cross, reflecting the revisions made by Pope John Paul II.

A traditional devotion for Catholics for more than four hundred years, the Stations of the Cross commemorates the route Jesus traveled from being sentenced to death, crucified, and then buried in a borrowed tomb on the outskirts of Jerusalem. In the past, the devotion included a number of stations based on popular stories of piety and devotion, but not mentioned in the Gospels. Over the past eight years, however, Pope John Paul II has made substantial changes to the devotion in his Good Friday celebrations of the stations, removing those not found in the Bible and replacing them with stations that more accurately follow scriptural accounts of Christ’s passion.

The revised Stations of the Cross focuses on the condemned Jesus and on the community walking the way with him to the cross. Unrelieved by stories like Veronica’s wiping blood off the face of Jesus and his meeting with his mother; this is a story of an execution. The new stations deal directly with the pain, suffering, betrayal, and injustice to which Jesus was subjected. In explaining his reasons for revising the stations, the Pope has said that the alterations are intended to serve as a model for other devotions and to encourage the return to the Scriptures as the source of and inspiration for contemporary worship.

In this helpful, authoritative guide, Megan McKenna presents the fourteen new stations with the scriptural passages that Pope John Paul II uses on Good Friday. She also provides a basic introduction to the practices and reflections on the importance of the devotion for present-day Catholics and Episcopalians.

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MEGAN MCKENNA is an internationally known author, lecturer, retreat leader, and spiritual director. She received her doctorate from the Graduate Theological Union in Berkley, California, and has taught and worked in India, Singapore, Manila (East Asian Pastoral Institute), Maryknoll Mission Institutes in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Dublin, and Albuquerque, New Mexico, where she currently lives. In 2001 Megan McKenna was made an Ambassador of Peace by Pax Christi USA. She is the author of more than fifteen books, including Send My Roots Rain, published by Doubleday.

Aus dem Klappentext

s most popular and respected Catholic writers presents the first guide to the new Stations of the Cross, reflecting the revisions made by Pope John Paul II.

A traditional devotion for Catholics for more than four hundred years, the Stations of the Cross commemorates the route Jesus traveled from being sentenced to death, crucified, and then buried in a borrowed tomb on the outskirts of Jerusalem. In the past, the devotion included a number of stations based on popular stories of piety and devotion, but not mentioned in the Gospels. Over the past eight years, however, Pope John Paul II has made substantial changes to the devotion in his Good Friday celebrations of the stations, removing those not found in the Bible and replacing them with stations that more accurately follow scriptural accounts of Christs passion.

The revised Stations of the Cross focuses on the condemned Jesus and on the community walking the way with him to the cross. Unrelieved by stories lik

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First Station

JESUS PRAYS IN THE GARDEN OF OLIVES

Scripture: Luke 22:39-42, 45-46

He went, as usual, to the Mount of Olives with the disciples following him. When they reached the place, he said to them, "Pray now, that you may be faithful to what God wants." Then he withdrew from them about a stone's throw, knelt down, and prayed, "O Holy One, if you are willing, remove this cup from me; yet, not my will but yours be done." . . . When he rose from prayer, he returned to his disciples but found them sleeping because of their grief. He said to them, "Why are you sleeping? Rise up and pray so that you may be faithful."

Or

Scripture: Mark 14:33-36

Jesus took Peter, James, and John with him to the garden. He was greatly distressed and troubled. He said to them, "My soul is sorrowful, even unto death. Remain here. Watch." He fell on the ground and prayed if it were possible, this hour might pass from him. "Abba, Father, all things are possible to you; remove this cup from me: yet not what I will, but what you will."

Prayers and love are learned in the hour when prayer has become impossible and your heart has turned to stone.

THOMAS MERTON

It begins: the Way of the Cross, the Via Crucis, as Jesus, the Holy One, turns his face toward Jerusalem and the destiny of all the prophets of God. This is the time of decision, of determination and conscious prayer in the face of the destruction that lies ahead. This is where Jesus begins to face down his fear. And it is where we, as his followers, begin to face down our fears. Death is close, but it is the death that is conceived in hate, in violence, leading to the deliberate, extinction of another's life. It is the death of the prophet, the truth-teller, the person who serves and obeys the will of God above the will of any nation, any government, any religious body, any group with affluence or power. His death will be a long time coming, in anguish, terrible aloneness, betrayal, and horror, the vicious horror that only human beings can inflict on one another.

Jesus enters the garden deliberately, in preparation, intending to face his fears by facing his God, his Father. His greatest fear is to offend his Father, to disobey his own calling, his integrity, and the word of God in his life. This is the prayer of hope and desperation, of acceptance and commitment, the cry for strength and endurance, the prayer that he might live, and if he must die, to die with hope, with steadfast belief in his Father, and if need be, without consolation. He prays to be faithful to what God wants, and exhorts his followers, already caught in the grip of grief and fear that grows palatable, to pray with him and to pray for themselves in this time of darkness.

The Father is the God of life, of love, of forgiveness and freedom for all. And he himself has come for life, life ever more abundant and creative. And so Jesus falls before his Father, on his knees, begging and pleading for life instead of the cup of bitterness that others will offer him as they wrest his life from him in violence. But this night, this garden will be the place of freedom and obedience for Jesus, and he will look and watch and pray. He will contemplate and will himself to a death of nonviolent and loving response toward all, even toward those who seek only to kill him, silence him, and stop such goodness and unbearable truth from existing in a human being in this world.

Contemplation is a long, loving look at reality, especially reality that is painful and hard to look at, but this is what Jesus does. He bends before his Father and his God and recommits himself in obedience to life, the life of the freedom of the children of God. He prays for peace, for holiness and wholeness even as his life begins to pour forth from him. He lives and faces terror and violent death and reveals to all how to exist in spite of the hate and harm that others intend for us. We must learn. We must imitate. We must pray and we must demonstrate again as we begin this journey to the cross that we are dedicated to a life of nonviolence and a life of contemplation, in obedience to our God, following on the way of our brother and master, Jesus.

Our history tells us of those who walked this way, struggling as Jesus did, seeking life in the face of death. Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote in one of his journals while he was in prison, "Once Jesus bids you come and follow him, he bids you come and die." He sought to express his knowledge, born of prayer in the face of fear, this way:

There is no way to peace along the way of safety. For peace must be dared. It is the great venture. It can never be safe. Peace is the opposite of security. To demand guarantees is to mistrust, and this mistrust in turn brings forth war. Peace means to give oneself altogether to the law of God, wanting no security, but in faith and obedience laying the destiny of the nations in the hand of Almighty God, not trying to direct it for selfish purposes. Battles are won, not with weapons, but with God. They are won where the way leads to the cross.

(DIETRICH BONHOEFFER, NO RUSTY SWORDS: LETTERS, LECTURES AND NOTES, 1928-1936 [COLLINS, 1965])

Some people do this with their whole life, as a way of living, of resisting evil, and others find themselves having to face their fears and resist because of history, because of how the world of evil and violence intrudes upon them rudely and unexpectedly. In the 1970s in Argentina the military dictatorship brutally "disappeared" anyone who spoke out against injustice, against the regime, against the military, or anyone the dictatorship suspected of support for the opposition, sometimes two or three or more members of the same family. Husbands and wives, pregnant women, single men and women, leaders and organizers--all suffered the same fate: being "disappeared." It was their mothers, many of them elderly, but from all age groups, who responded to the horror by gathering together publically in the Plaza de Mayo in the downtown area They gathered, congregated as they would in church, carrying placards like banners, chanting, praying, mourning, crying out their frustrations with the military and the government bureaucracies, all of which refused them a hearing or any information on their loved ones. They came, week after week, day after day, facing the prospect that they too would be recognized and later suffer the same fate as their children and loved ones. Their stories are told, still, now thirty years or more later. Listen. Watch. Pray.

When the women congregated at the plaza, police snapped at them to keep moving. So the fourteen mothers walked the plaza in slow circles. They kept coming back to protest, braving nightsticks, police dogs, and military spies who infiltrated the group and killed three leaders.

"They say the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo were fearless," said Maria Adela Antokolez, now eighty-five, who moves with slow, tottering steps and enormous dignity, "but we were scared to death. We learned to walk with fear, to live with fear. We had an obligation to find our children."

The mothers still march every Thursday afternoon demanding justice. The ritual moves bystanders to tears and applause. The women are elderly and fragile now. They walk arm in arm, hunched beneath the white head scarves that have become an international symbol of the fight for human rights.

"We never found our children," Maria Adela said. "But in the plaza we went to school. We told our story fifty times. We cried together. It was our educational academy. The plaza saved us from the madhouse." . . . It spread by word of mouth. When Cortezar, our great writer, heard about it in Paris, he said, "The mothers are out, the military have already...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: PRH Christian Publishing
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2003
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0385508158
• ISBN 13: 9780385508155
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 144
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: LiveRowing; Verkauf@bari.de; ; D�lkener Str.20; Viersen; nrw; 41747; Deutschland