Passion Sunday

When you entered Church today, did you gasp?

You should have. You looked at all your beloved statues and found them buried in purple shrouds. It left you with an eerie discomfort. A palpable absence was found. Something premonitory is afoot. 

All of this is quite intentional. Holy Church is speaking once more through the potent vehicle of symbols. Human communication is most eloquent when it eschews words and relies upon symbols. Nothing is quite so piercing. If you were to receive an explanatory pamphlet as you entered the Church this morning, it would not be as gripping as those veiled statues. Symbols seize the soul like a thief grabbing his innocent victim in a dark alleyway. First the symbol pounds us. Then it bids us rest in its layers of meaning. Sweet satisfaction rushes in, the satisfaction of truth.

What could be the truth of veiled statues? It is the Church trumpeting the nearness of Christ’s immolation of Good Friday. Lent is a series of strippings. On Ash Wednesday we are stripped of our vanity. Then we are stripped of our pleasures: fastings, abstinence, and acts of self-denial. Added to this is the stripping of self-love in the performance of acts of charity and increased prayer. 

Alongside this, Holy Church gradually strips her Sacred Liturgy. Flowers disappear. Gone are the joyous vestments of green and white, only to be replaced by dark purple, the color of loss. Joy finds no place in the Holy Masses of Lent. The Glorias fall silent and Holy Church suppresses the organ except for the most minimal functions. Beginning on Holy Thursday she proclaims a solemn ban on the very sound of the organ altogether. Only the sound of unaccompanied voices are tolerated, and those merely intoning the mournful chants of sorrow for sin and lamentations of our Crucified Savior. In the pre-1970 Roman Liturgy, beginning on Palm Sunday, even the various Gloria Patri’s were suppressed. 

The shrouded statues are part of that solemn stripping – of our souls and of the Holy Liturgy. Now we are even without the comfort of the images of our most loved saints. Nothing is to distract us from the all-consuming raison d’etre of this holy time – Our Lord’s Passion and Death on Calvary. It is as if even the saints of Heaven, along with its Queen, are summoning us to silence and contrition. Mother Church wants us to be alone, profoundly alone, with the price of our Redemption. 

All of these written words do nothing in moving a man as much as those veiled statues. They join with all the other symbols of Lent’s stripping to teach us one more lesson. Our sins have caused this loss. Each empurpled silenced statue is a finger pointed at me. Me and you. Our sins have killed the Good Jesus.

He asks you and me only for love. Instead, we give His executioners nails. He hands on the Cross. 

And even Heaven gasps.