Spy Wednesday.

Holy Thursday.

Good Friday

Silent Saturday.

God’s work amongst us.

God’s Salvation for us.

God’s gift to us.

Each lenten season – within the catacombs of these 40 days – we have the opportunity to listen to God speak to our hearts as His life, death and resurrection are re-presented.  And we have the beautiful opportunity to receive the great gift of discovering His individual message to us – as He fashions our heart ‘with desire’ – in the hope that we will choose to embrace this great act of love, poured out for us.

 

My own lenten journey(s), as with most others,  are always changing, always evolving, as my God continues to mold me.

There are years He has drawn me into the crowded Caravan of people to walk with those who followed along with Him, on His way to Jerusalem.  There have been years I have been alone in the dry desert feeling abandoned and hopeless of ever being saved from the enemies who sought to defeat love – until God had brought me the Water necessary to quench my thirsty soul.  There have been those times when all He has shown me reminds me of the Salvation He offers us, by the wounds of His stripes.

This year God has taken me on (another) new path.  Again, unexpected….but a path I know He designed just for me.  

A path that had me walking with Mary, His mother.

God showed me through the writings of a beautiful book,  A Walk in Her Sandals,  the heavy  burden which was Mary’s to carry… emotionally, physically, and spiritually. Not only in the hours of the Passion, but throughout His life on earth – with every step they made…together.

I have always had a strong affection toward Our Blessed Mother and admire her great faith in God’s will for her; however, I recognized on this path with her – there are so many tender details of her immense strength, I’d neglected to see.

The moments spent beside her, walking the path with her, especially during the Triduum has been unexpectedly powerful.   And I have found what has stayed with me the most – what has impacted my heart the deepest – was the hours spent with her during Silent Saturday.

Somehow I’d missed – all these years – the deafening Silence which must have existed in her heart that day.

His mission was completed.  The moment for which He was born, for which she carried Him in her womb had ended.  Before her eyes – the same eyes which had watched Him be born into this world, breathing His first breath of life, were the same eyes that had seen His death, had watched His last breath released.  

And now He laid in an empty tomb – and for the very first time, she was no longer walking beside Him.

 

What was to be next?

The depth of sorrow could only  be contained in one word…

deafening.

And then the wait. 

Today, we know the Resurrection follows!

We know that New life comes from His death.

But Mary….what did she know of this Saturday moment?

Did she pondered all of this (too) in her heart, just as she did as she waited for His birth? Knowing New life would be enveloped in both? Did she believe, unreservedly, that all He spoke of; during the many walks He’d taken with those He loved beside Him, was about to be fulfilled?

Perhaps today, you too will find a moment to ponder in your own heart, “What do I hear in the Silence of today?”  Will you hear His mother’s sorrow?  Will you hear her pain?  Or will she speak to you of faith, hope and trust, that the New Life Her son spoke of, is about to be revealed?

 

I know she is praying that you will hear what her little boy has to say.

Song by JJ Heller.

 

hugs & blessings as we ponder all these things in our heart!