This week, I served as the reader for stations of the cross at the parish I attend here in New Haven. If you’re unfamiliar with stations, here’s a quick rundown of how the service works.
In addition to a priest, there are four servers required: 1 crucifer, 2 torchbearers, and 1 reader. The service begins with a few short, opening prayers at the crossing. Then, the reader, priest, and congregation follow the cross and lights to each of 14 sequential stations, each depicting a scene from the Via Crucis, Jesus’s path from his sentencing to crucifixion to his death on a cross at Golgotha and subsequent entombment. At each station, there’s a scriptural reading followed by a response and a prayer. The whole group sings a verse of a hymn (either the Stabat Mater or the Trisagion) whilst moving between stations. The fourteen stations are as follows:
1. Jesus is Condemned to Death
2. Jesus Carries His Cross
3. Jesus Falls for the First Time
4. Jesus Meets His Mother, Mary
5. Simon of Cyrene Helps Jesus Carry the Cross
6. Veronica Wipes the Face of Jesus
7. Jesus Falls a Second Time
8. Jesus Meets the Women of Jerusalem
9. Jesus Falls a Third Time
10. Jesus is Stripped of His Clothing
11. Jesus is Nailed to the Cross
12. Jesus Dies on the Cross
13. Jesus is Taken Down from the Cross
14. Jesus is Laid in the Tomb
Movement drives the service, and, while not as accessible to folks with physical disabilities as I would like it to be (One day I hope to produce a non-ableist liturgy for stations, among other services. Please contact me with suggestions, if you have them!), it does encourage participants to think about their affective experience with seeing/hearing the story of Jesus’s endurance of physical, epistemic, and spectacularized state violence. Traditionally, the accompanying readings simply tell the story of each scene . However, since the parish I attend happens to have had a series of liturgically-creative rectors, the reader’s booklet offered multiple choices for each station’s reading. Where possible, I chose the more figurative readings over the scriptural play-by-plays (e.g. using plaintive psalms for the places when Jesus fell, pairing the prophecy of Rachel weeping for her children with Jesus’s encounter with the weeping women of Jerusalem, offering psalms that query the possibility of praising God from the grave/the finality of death for the entombment of our Lord).
Partially an attempt to overcome the staid, rote pattern of reading the same passages, in my attempt to freshen the service I also wanted to play up the deep emotional reservoir behind the scriptural stories. The end result was a very Comp Lit kind of worship: in addition to connecting motions of mourning from other places in the Bible and reifying the presence and empathy of the women’s voices in Jesus’s life, work, and the circumstances surrounding his death, incorporating new readings encouraged me to pay more attention to my own affect and the collective affect of the room. Looking around, I saw more than a few tears fall, and rather than asking ourselves “What does the crucifixion of Jesus mean?”, the question of the day became “How does the crucifixion of Jesus feel?”. While I think that rumination on both questions produces valuable insight about what Lent and Easter are all about, the second question encourages a deep, personal wrangling with one’s own experience with pain and interpolating the suffering of others that I think is intrinsic to understanding Jesus’s humanity and one’s own.
Looking for the voices of Mary, Mary Magdalene, Mary Salome, and the other women who followed Jesus can help us contemplate the feelings of helplessness we might often encounter in the face of state violence. Jesus’s death, and indeed the social purpose of crucifixion in the Roman Empire on the whole, was part of a state program of humiliation and aimed to make an example of dissidents in order to quell rebellion (e.g. recall the fate of many followers of Spartacus, Seneca’s accounts of the crucifixon of slaves, etc.). When I look at the cross of Jesus, I think about the long history of advocates for peace, anti-imperialism, anti-racism, queer belonging/being, indigenous sovereignty, etc. who were killed by state and various forms of phobic violence. There is a cost to standing up against regimes, and stations of the cross encourages participants to think about what the human cost of spiritual/epistemic reform and standing for love in the face of evil looks like. It looks like a Palestinian, Jewish man being killed in front of his mother, students, and other workers/believers. It looks like Rachel weeping for her children because they are no more. It looks like feeling as though advocating for a more just, merciful world is a hopeless pursuit.
And this is where Stations of the Cross leaves us. Jesus remains in the tomb at the end of the service. Staying briefly in such an uncomfortable, painful space reminds us that death, silence, and the tomb don’t cancel out the coming joy of resurrection, although the despair we may experience as we contemplate Jesus’s death is all too real. I’m reminded here of one of the collects that may be said during Morning Prayer on Fridays: Almighty God, whose most dear Son went not up to joy but first he suffered pain, and entered not into glory before he was crucified: Mercifully grant that we, walking in the way of the cross, may find it none other than the way of life and peace; through the same thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
May it be so.
Africana Anglo-Catholic 