One of the soldiers pierced his side with a spear,and forthwith came there out blood and water.
The liturgical calendar can be confusing for children. Friends who have always been Catholic have told me of their puzzlement when, just a couple of months after Christmas, Lent rolled round, and they were encouraged by parents or catechists to give up sweets or try harder to say their prayers in some kind of solidarity with Jesus in his temptations. Baffling indeed: he’d only been born a few weeks ago; how could a baby do battle with Satan in the wilderness?
The distress of parting from those we love takes many different forms, ranging from the misery of temporary but still painful physical absence – parting may be such sweet sorrow, but it is sorrow nonetheless – to the anguish of estrangement, misunderstanding or betrayal, where the continued physical presence of the beloved feels like a wound and a mockery, to death itself, coldly shocking even when prepared for. But any of us – which I’m guessing is all of us – who have experienced any form of leave taking from those for whom we care will know, I suspect, a curious phenomenon common to all such circumstances. Seemingly inevitably, the last conversations we shared with the friends who are lost to us, or whom we fear lost to us, take on a heightened significance. We hoard up our words and theirs, and drag them out for frequent inspection, sometimes almost obsessively, investing them with a significance that we would never think of bestowing on our, or their more everyday utterances. And, frankly, at least at its most extreme, in this practice, madness sometimes lies. “And then I said…and then he said, and then I said”: we can drive ourselves to distraction this way, tearing great gashes out of our peace of mind as we examine the minutiae of our motives, and those of our friends in an attempt to reassure ourselves that all will in the end be well. And of course, we are doomed to frequent disappointment, because no human words, ultimately, can bear that kind of weight.
Sr Marie Kasparova [A visiting sister from the Czech Republic)]A talk given for the Women's World day of Prayer
Thank you for inviting me to celebrate the World day of prayer with you. I would like to share some of my thoughts about the central biblical text chosen as a motto which I find very inspiring.‘Come, everything is ready’. It is a generous invitation. What can we imagine behind the word "everything"? Some of us maybe will think about a future life with God, others about their future partners, vocations, jobs, families... Some people might be more suspicious and may object that this "everything" does not mean just positive things. There can be some illnesses, catastrophes or accidents in our lives — nothing to look forward. But whatever we think it is always in terms of the future.
