Over the last three years, I have learned that Lent is not meant to be traveled alone. In 2019, six friends and I decided to journey together through the weeks leading up to Easter. We would meet one evening a week for seven weeks, taking turns hosting the group in our homes. At the start of the pandemic, we moved our meetings to Zoom, because our experience that first year was so fruitful that none of us could imagine journeying through Lent without this sort of community. Our Lenten experience during the pandemic has been different, but the goal is the same: accompaniment. That first Lent together taught us the importance of companionship during this holy season, and the understandings we came to during those gatherings have been the model for every year since.
During our first year, we felt our group would benefit from a name, and we decided on The Lenten Adventurers. I felt I was ready for anything, but then one woman suggested, “Let’s do the Stations of the Cross.” I scowled. Grade-school memories of praying the Stations on Friday afternoons during Lent popped into my mind, along with feelings of boredom and of fighting drowsiness. I heard again the whine of 400 uniformed students standing, genuflecting, praying aloud in unison as the priest and two acolytes moved from one station to the next—endlessly, it seemed.
But what sort of adventurer would I be if I gave up at the first sign of a challenge? The format would be simple enough: seven weeks of Lent, seven Lenten adventurers, 14 stations. Each of us would facilitate one evening, two stations at a time. What began as a desire to explore Lent as a faith community turned out to be a transformative faith journey.
Today’s 14 Stations of the Cross are meant to be visited and stood before in prayer, one by one, as if making a miniature pilgrimage.
Since we were to spend Lent with the Stations, we began our sessions by recalling the history of this devotional practice—the Via Dolorosa or Way of Sorrows—following Jesus Christ on the day of his crucifixion from trial to entombment. Though pilgrims have visited the Holy Land since the fourth century, the Way of the Cross, as a devotion with its designated stations, began with the Franciscans in the 14th century, when the pope named them guardians of the Christian sites in Palestine. Today’s 14 stations, often represented by images made of plaster, wood or stone, and painted or engraved, are found on the walls of a church or along paths in the garden of a monastery, for instance. They are meant to be visited and stood before in prayer, one by one, as if making a miniature pilgrimage.
Each week, we began our time together with a check-in, asking: How is grace at work in your life now? What is supporting your journey this Lent? We reflected on the evening’s stations, and shared our thoughts. By the time my week came—the fifth and sixth stations—we had begun asking ourselves how we were living the stations in our own lives. That evening I focused with the group on Simon helping Jesus to carry the cross. I could tell the others that the history of the encounter could be found in three Gospel passages:
As they were coming out, they found a man of Cyrene named Simon, whom they compelled to carry his cross. (Mt 27:32)
A man named Simon of Cyrene, the father of Alexander and Rufus, was coming in from the country, and they pressed him into service to carry the cross. (Mk 15:21)
As they led him away, they laid hold of one Simon the Cyrenian who was coming in from the country, they put upon him the cross to carry behind Jesus. (Lk 23:26)
I asked questions. Would Simon, the man pulled from the crowd and ordered to help carry the cross, have come to Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover? At that time, many Jews lived outside of Palestine. Cyrene, located in modern Libya on the north coast of Africa, was a Greek city, with a community of 100,000 Judean Jews, a 32-day walking journey from Jerusalem. Many in Cyrene sent offerings to the Temple in Jerusalem; some attended the great feasts in the Holy City. What did it mean to say that “He was coming in from the country?”
I distributed an image of Nicholas Mynheer’s sculpture of Simon and Jesus and a poem by Jonathan Stockland, “Nick Mynheer’s Simon and Jesus,” the poet’s reflection on seeing the impressive limestone carving. Because art invites us to gaze, and deeply, I recommended we stay a while with Mynheer’s image, the two men bent, almost as one, under the crossbeam.
We could learn, too, from Saint Clare’s Second Letter to Agnes of Prague, written in 1235, in which she teaches the young woman four steps of her pathway of prayer while meditating on an image of the Crucified Christ: “Gaze Upon,” the surface, she wrote; “Consider,” that is, go deeper, think about what you see; “Contemplate Him,” with your heart; and finally “Imitate Him.” We shared our reflections and discovered after really looking led us to a see the loving accompaniment of Simon with Jesus.
We had begun asking ourselves how we were living the stations in our own lives.
On seeing the carving, Stockland had written, “The sculpture’s pathos and simplicity made an instant deep impression on me.” He wrote: “They do not stand apart, those two;/ like conjoint twins,/ one leans to the other.”
In the tradition of Lectio divina prayer, the savoring of a sacred text, we read the entire poem slowly three times and shared a word or phrase that spoke to us, then the feeling the words evoked. Finally, we spoke of whether the reading inspired an invitation to some action or attitude.
By the last week of traveling together during Lent, we had discovered the Stations anew. “It’s about ‘accompaniment,’” one adventurer said. “Jesus attending others on the road to his crucifixion, and being accompanied by others. We’re called to do the same.”
We reflected on the last station—the body of Jesus being laid in the tomb. Another adventurer shared his recent experience of lying next to his father for the three days prior to his father’s death, to comfort him. “In the end,” he said, “I think my father stayed alive those days to comfort me.” We discovered that accompaniment works both ways.
The demands of the Zoom technology that we must depend upon now due to Covid-19 have turned out to be a blessing in a way, causing us to focus even more deliberately on listening and on our appreciation for one another. Together we felt we had reclaimed a Lenten religious tradition, making it relevant and vibrant for our contemporary lives, helping us to engage with one another as a small faith community more deeply and to find ways to accompany others.
Our annual journey, we “adventurers” have found, allows us to honor Lent as a season of conversion in new ways. We recall the words of Pope Francis to journalists aboard the papal plane returning to Rome from Romania in June 2019: “Tradition is the guarantee of the future, not the container of the ashes,” the pope said. “Tradition is like the roots [of a tree], which give us nutrition to grow. You will not become like the roots. You will flower, grow, and bear fruit.... The tradition of the church is always in motion.”
