“So they took Jesus; and carrying the cross by himself, he went out to what is called The Place of the Skull, which in Hebrew is called Golgotha.”
As a child, I gathered with my entire grammar school in our parish church every Friday from the beginning of Lent through Good Friday. We were there for the Stations of the Cross, the devotion that involves 14 images depicting moments from the day of Jesus’ death, from Jesus being condemned to being laid in the tomb. They were hung at regular intervals on our church’s brick walls.
As I remember it, a priest would work his way around the church’s perimeter aisles, joined by acolytes with cross and candles. At each of the 14 stations we stopped, prayed, and sang a verse of the “Stabat Mater,” a 13th-century hymn to Mary that tells the Passion story from the perspective of the Sorrowful Mother of Jesus. We joined in Mary’s lament. Eight years of participating in this Lenten practice left the melody of that mournful song seared in my memory.
