Jesus is Risen! Indeed He is Risen!

????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????Easter Sunday 2016

Jesus, Seed sown-down / risen-up fruit-full

Arise and sing Alleluia!

Jesus!  Wheat-grain harvested whole / hallowed

Arise and sing Alleluia!

Jesus! Bread-broken giving Life forever

Arise and sing Alleluia!

Jesus!  Wrathful grape pressed into purpled joy

Arise and sing Alleluia!

Jesus!   Dead and dread become dancing-dawn

Arise and sing Alleluia!

Jesus! Light piercing / penetrating /

‘luminating / prism-ing closed-minds and hearts

Arise and sing Alleluia!

Jesus!  Centering silence become

Stillpoint for healed / whole / holy souls

Arise and sing Alleluia!

Jesus!  Soul-thrilling / spine-tingling sound of music

trumpeting Easter triumph

for all God’s people

Arise and sing Alleluia!

Jesus! Love of my life!

Joy of my heart!

Song of my soul!

Source of my own New Life!

I never cease to thank and praise you

and Arise and sing forever

Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia!!!

Now I offer you your own way to praise our Lord along with a mighty chorus singing the Halleluiah Chorus from Handel’s Messiah  ending with an even mightier Great Amen!  Click Here.

Be sure to turn up your speakers and be sure to enter full screen.

Here are  the readings for Easter Sunday Mass. Click here.

Happy Easter, Everyone!

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                                                    Poem © Copyright Bob Traupman 2010. All rights reserved.
                                                                               Permission granted for private sharing.

With lots of love,

Bob Traupman

Contemplative writer

 

What Wondrous Love is This?

 

calvary

Jesus the Lover

Like a sapling he grew in front of us,                                                                                       Like a root in arid ground…                                                                                                         a thing despised and rejected by men,                                                                                     a man of sorrows and familiar with suffering                                                                       …. And yet ours were the sufferings he bore,                                                                         ours ~ the sorrows he carried.                                                                                                   But we thought of him as someone punished,                                                           struck by God, and brought low.

Yet in him lies a punishment that brings in peace                                                               and through his wound we were healed – excerpted from Isaiah 53

What wondrous love is this, O my soul, O my soul?                                                           What wondrous love is this, O my soul?

GOOD FRIDAY 2016

Editor’s note: I wrote this piece in 1981, one of earliest writings.  I still consider it one of my best pieces of prose.
It’s long, but I hope you enjoy it. You might wish to print it out and save it for bedtime.  All the best, Bob.

Jesus is the one who is our tremendous Lover.

He came to live among us to reveal to us, his sisters and brothers, that we have a Father-God who loves us with a Love that is once a passionate, unconditional love and yet gentle, always inviting, never coercing.  Jesus came among us to be our Love, to show the human race how to use the supreme power which God could give us:  the intimate, infinite Love which is ours, if only we would claim it and model our lives after Jesus, who is Love itself.

Jesus was to be for us the model of Love because he was willing to experience in his heart the depths of human emotion.  He risked time and again to embrace the sorrow, the agony, the need of those who came  to him to be healed.  He risked being burdened by the needs of others.  He risked being disheartened by those who would take from him and not even say thanks.  He risked being misunderstood and rejected  by the authorities of the day and even his neighbors in his hometown.  He risked the pain of realizing that even his closest disciples and friends had narrowed vision and missed the main point of his message.

He risked all, and realized that, in spite of pain and sorrow, in his heart, the soft Voice of the Father within him was asking him to keep going, to risk even more.  To go deeper into his heart and to carve out still more and more places for those he would touch and heal, until one day there would be room in his heart for the whole world.

I doubt that Jesus ever forgot a single individual that he encountered, not even those who oppressed him.  He kept them all in his great heart, remembering them, praying for them, hoping that they would open their hearts to the One who Loved them with a passionate Love — the Father-God of all.  He must have realized how important it was to see and feel the tragedy of the corruption he witnessed among the religious and political leaders of the day, to keep even these things in his heart.   As painful as it was, he hoped that by keeping them there, the great evil he saw would be disarmed and tamed.

That’s all he could do, after all — absorb the tragedy, the struggle, the sin, the failures in Love of the human race in his great, great heart.  Yes, he healed a few sick and gave the gift of sight to some, but most of all he Loved:  He let people into his heart (that’s the definition of Love, after all:  to let someone into one’s heart)  there to be comforted, if just for a moment. For one brief moment in the heart of the Lord Jesus is enough for any of us.

He had room for young John and impetuous Peter.  And for Judas.  He had room for the outcasts of his day, Zaccheus and Matthew and Mary Magdalen.  And he brought the outcasts in and had them seated at table with the aristocrats. He had room for beggars and lepers and blind people.  And he had room for the Pharisees who broke his heart by their refusal to see and understand.

We remember that he was capable of deep emotion.  He wept profoundly when he saw in prophecy what would happen to Jerusalem because of the hardness of the people’s hearts.  And yet, even the gift of his tears and the greatness of his Love would not stop the destruction that would come because of Israel’s hardness of heart and lack of vigilance.

In the end, he wept in the garden.  I like to believe that his agony was not focused on the trauma he personally was about to endure but because the Father permitted him, in that moment, to experience to the depths the reality of evil and tragedy in the world.  He must have experienced some of the pain and loss that many of us feel when we encounter hardness of heart and misunderstanding.

Jesus embodied the compassion of God — the mercy, the tenderness, the Hesed of God  (to use the wonderful Hebrew word).  God wanted to be known as the Merciful One.  And we, likewise, are instructed to “Be compassionate as our heavenly Father is compassionate.” Pope Francis this year has given us this extraordinary Jubilee Year of Mercy so that everyone can experience God’s wonderful mercy. Francis keeps saying it’s Mercy upon mercy upon mercy!

Jesus became for us the “Man of Sorrows familiar with suffering”  ~ the suffering Servant of Yahweh.  He bore the weight of the world’s refusal to Love and even worse its refusal to be Loved  by the God of Love.  He allowed that evil, that senseless tragedy of the human race, to be absorbed, and thereby redeemed and purified, with his own blood.  In his own bloodstream the cosmic battle between the forces of Love and Hate was waged.  And “his sweat fell to the ground like great drops of blood.”  In him the great cosmic battle was focused.  Our great compassionate God sent his Son to bear within his soul the brunt of that cosmic storm.

We are filled with awe at such overwhelming Love.  And so we honor  his great, great heart.  But most importantly we should realize that he has become for us Love itself so that we will also might become Love.

The one essential ingredient of the Christian religion is to Love as Jesus has Loved us.  We are to become compassionate as Jesus is compassionate.  We, like Jesus, are called not to be afraid to embrace the suffering, the tragedy, the sin of the world, so that in Love we will join our hearts to his and, as St. Paul says, “to make up what is lacking in the sufferings of Christ.”

Perhaps we can say, therefore, that there are two kinds of people in the world — those who are willing to accept their own share of suffering in the world (and a bit more for Jesus’ sake) and those who cannot or will not bear even the suffering caused by their own failures and sins.  The compassionate ones do what they do out of Love, a seemingly foolish Love.  Some Love because they have been opened up to a mystical awareness that they, like Jesus, are making their own soul and body available as an arena for the cosmic drama of interaction between the forces of light and the forces of darkness.

I do not pity those who suffer.  I rather pity those who are afraid to suffer Out of suffering comes understanding — a larger perspective of the world and with it a practical wisdom that tempers Law and Life with Mercy.  Out of suffering comes the ability to see the face of Christ in even a hardened criminal or a seemingly pitiful alcoholic.

The ability to see, to understand, the inner workings of people’s lives is a gift far greater than the suffering one must endure to attain it.  To-suffer-unto-understanding (a definition of compassion) is to be able to look upon the world as Jesus does and as he invites us to do in the Beatitudes.   (Of course, a person can suffer without  understanding — especially when we are angry about  and refuse to accept our lot of suffering.  But if we pray faithfully while we suffer, God will most assuredly gift us with  his own very special kind of understanding.)

Understanding is the goal of suffering for those who have eyes to see.  Understanding which sees through the eyes of Jesus.  Understanding allows us the courage to be with Jesus hanging on the Cross and to see what he saw from that perspective.  Understanding allows us the courage to go with Jesus into the bowels of the earth and descend into hell and to see what Jesus saw.  Then, too, understanding allows us to feel what Jesus felt when he was lifted from the grave.

I have always had an inner sense that the fastest, most efficient way to handle a crisis was to face it head on — not to avoid it.  And so, I invite you to “go with” the suffering.  Explore it.  Allow yourself to experience the feelings, as painful and confused and frightening as they may be.  The more you fight it, the more you will suffer.  Ask Jesus the Light to lead you through the darkness.  Then have faith and confidence that he will.  (After all, the worst you will experience is what Jesus experienced, as long as you follow the will of God.  (Other people have suffered more cruel deaths than Jesus.)  And if you truly want  to follow the will of God and are praying daily, then be assured that God is  leading you.  Take his hand in the darkness and follow — even if you can barely see the ground in front of you!

The easiest way through suffering is to stretch out our arms and allow ourselves to be nailed to our cross.  Don’t fight it.  Surrender to the will of God.  Jesus in his agony on Thursday night saw through the nails in his hands and the crown of thorns on his head to the Resurrection.  He didn’t ignore the Cross; he saw it and the horizon beyond it. Jesus didn’t focus on the pain.  The pain of the Cross was only a brief moment (which he knew he had the strength to endure) in the history of his lordship presiding over the business of the universe.  So you, too, should not focus on the painful aspects of our life.  Look instead for the cause of the pain.  Look for the reality — the truth!  And remember that Jesus said “the truth shall make you free!”   See as Jesus sees; that is, see and accept the truth.  And leap from your cross as a butterfly leaps from the cocoon and as Jesus leapt from the grave.

“Impossible!” you may say, especially if you have been suffering for years.

“Not so!” says Jesus and the whole company of prophets and martyrs and confessors and virgins.

Ask for strength and you will receive strength.

Ask for guidance and you will be led through the darkness to a point you will recognize.

Ask to understand and Jesus will let you see yourself through his eyes.

But remember! Don’t focus on the pain.  All those gory pictures of Jesus in agony and bloody crucifixes of the past generation, are, hopefully, gone for good.

Don’t forget to look at the horizon beyond the Cross.  The sky on that first Good Friday afternoon undoubtedly was an awesome sight to behold.

Suffering in life is only a means to greater life.   It is not our final lot.  Resurrection is.  Glory is.  Triumph is, though the paradox is that we must accept our cross totally to be through with it.  We are invited to surrender to our Father in complete abandonment as Jesus did, as if we were to leap off a cliff and know that we will land in the Loving arms of our great God.

And so, the question that we ponder this Good Friday, once again, is:

What wondrous love is this, O my soul, O my soul? What wondrous love is this, O my soul?

And the answer is:

The great, great Love of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ,

who Loved us so much that he stretched out his arms in the most loving,

 the most-nonviolent act, the world has ever seen.

He stretched out his arms in the face of his enemies and said from his Cross:

“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

Come, then, adore the Lord, the tremendous Lover.

Renew your Love for him and know even more than ever before.

It is by the holy Cross that we have been redeemed.

What wondrous love is this, O my soul? What wondrous love is this?

And now, before you go, listen to this orchestral arrangement of  What Wondrous Love sung by Steve Green. Click here.   Be sure to turn up your speakers and enter full screen.  

 

With love,

Bob Traupman

Contemplative Writer

The Sorrowful Mothers of the World

pieta-a1

While I was on my retreat during Lent some years ago,  one of my prayer assignments was to sit before a statue of the sorrowful mother.  I have always had a devotion to Mary, the mother of the Lord,  and on that balmy afternoon against the background of the cypress swamp I reflected on all the mothers I had tried to console throughout the years of my priesthood.  I record for you now  the prayer that was in my journal entry for my retreat master the next day.  Several of those women mentioned in the prayer are still in my life today.  I dedicate this blog to all sorrowful mothers. May we all remember them with love. Perhaps you might call to mind the sorrowful mothers in your life.  If you are one of them, I pray for you as I write.

Be sure to read the commentary about the 24-year-old Michelangelo and his first sculpture which follows.  He chiseled his understanding of human grief, tap by tap,  for two years.  It is a magnificent meditation.  Ponder it for yourself. Why not unite your own prayer to our Lady to his.  There is also a very different image of grief below that I photographed from a book.

Dearest Lady,
mother of Jesus, whose tender love
brought Love Itself into our world,
may those who have never known
the tender embrace
of their own mother’s love
receive the same tender care and  love you wish for each of them. . .
for each of us . . .
as you offered the stern, yet tender love of a Jewish mother 
upon Jesus, the Son of God
who was nourished at your tender breasts,
cradled in your arms,
bounced upon your knee;
whose booboo was kissed by your lovely mouth,
whose dead body you received come down from the Cross:
You were the one from whom
Jesus learned the joys of human love.

Dearest Lady,
Simeon said ~ holding your little Child in his arms ~
that a sword would pierce your soul.

Did you have any idea what he meant?
Did you follow Jesus throughout his ministry?
Where you among the women who took care of him
and the others?
If so, where did you stay?
Or did you stay at home in Nazareth?
Did you go out to visit him when you could?
To listen to him preach?

Were you in the midst of the crowds
who pressed around him?
Did you have a chance to be alone with him for a while?
Did you give him any motherly advice?
Did you wash his clothes,
fix his favorite meal when he was on the road?

Did you gain a sense of foreboding as you listened
to the murmurings of hostility beginning to grow toward him?
What did you do with that concern?

I think perhaps you knew.

You could see where this was going to end,
because you kept all those forebodings Simeon told you
in your heart.
Sorrow and sadness must have entered your heart
long before that fateful Friday.
But probably not much worry or anxiety because
I think you must have said over and over:
Be it done unto me according to Your word.
Be it done.
. . . Thy will be done.                                                   

A mother can never be prepared to lose her son.   

And so, dearest Lady, I think of mothers I have known who’ve watched their children die.

My cousin, Lynda, whose beautiful child Robbie who bore her father’s and my name died in a fire at age three.
I don’t think his mother ever got over that sadness.

I think of Marie whose paralyzed son was in prison who couldn’t find a priest to console her after his wrongful death.

I think, dear Lady, that you unite yourself with other mothers
who suffer at the bedside of a sick child.

With all those mothers who’ve had to flee their homeland torn by war and violence or trapped in violent countries without means of escape, living in fear, day in day out, seemingly without hope.

And I think of my friend Monica whose son Andrew died of AIDS; 

Rosemarie, whose very popular high school senior John died heroically of a brain tumor;

Fran, whose son Jimmy died at the hands of a drunk driver; 

Chris who loved two children within her belly and wrote a book to work out her grief;

Florence, the mother of my best priest-buddy Phil who died suddenly at age 47. “What a dirty trick!” she wailed at God.

The woman whose name I have long forgot whose surfer-son drowned in a storm in my first week of priestly ministry;                                                                                            

mothers I know whose sons who cannot escape from addiction;    

Monique whose son despaired and ended his life, leaving his children.

And I think of all the mothers of the world who are condemned to watch their children die of malnutrition.

How can any of us really know what a mother must feel who must outlive her child?

Dearest Lady,                                                                                                                                                                                                                         I have loved you since I was a boy.                                                                                                                                                               I brought you flowers in springtime to express my devotion.                                                                                                                            I still do.
Today, I contemplated the sorrowful image
a sculptor captured in white marble.
When I gazed into the eyes of that chiseled image
for just a moment, I knew what you must have felt,
what my friends must have felt.
And that moment was gift.
A gift I will always remember.

Dearest Lady,
as you yourself shared in Jesus’ passion,
I ask you to be with all those whose hearts are
broken in sorrow.

Receive today all of Jesus’ brothers and sisters                                                                                                                                                    on this planet,

born and unborn.
Draw us all into that one great mystery of divine/human love
which is the glory of our Christian faith:
the birth and life, suffering, death and resurrection
of the son of a young beautiful woman,
Son of God,
our Brother,
our Redeemer.
our Friend,
Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ!

+ + + + + + +
From: ‘Guide to Saint Peter’s Basilica ‘
This is probably the world’s most famous sculpture of a religious subject. Michelangelo carved it when he was 24 years old, and it is the only one he ever signed. The beauty of its lines and expression leaves a lasting impression on everyone.

With this magnificent statue Michelangelo has given us a highly spiritual and Christian view of human suffering. Artists before and after Michelangelo always depicted the Virgin with the dead Christ in her arms as grief-stricken, almost on the verge of desperation. Michelangelo, on the other hand, created a highly supernatural feeling.

As she holds Jesus’ lifeless body on her lap, the Virgin’s face emanates sweetness, serenity and a majestic acceptance of this immense sorrow, combined with her faith in the Redeemer. It seems almost as if Jesus is about to reawaken from a tranquil sleep and that after so much suffering and thorns, the rose of resurrection is about to bloom. As we contemplate the Pieta which conveys peace and tranquility, we can feel that the great sufferings of life and its pain can be mitigated.

Here, many Christians recall the price of their redemption and pray in silence. The words may be those of the “Salve Regina” or “Sub tuum presidium” or another prayer. After Peter’s Tomb, the Pieta Chapel is the most frequently visited and silent place in the entire basilica.

It is said that Michelangelo had been criticized for having portrayed the Virgin Mary as too young since she actually must have been around 45-50 years old when Jesus died. He answered that he did so deliberately because the effects of time could not mar the virginal features of this, the most blessed of women. He also said that he was thinking of his own mother’s face, he was only five when she died: the mother’s face is a symbol of eternal youth.

Before you go, here’s the Stabat Mater,  the traditional mourning song to Our Lady. Click here. Be sure to enter full screen and turn up your speakers. The translation of some of the verses follows.

At the Cross her station keeping,
stood the mournful Mother weeping,
close to her Son to the last.

Through her heart, His sorrow sharing,
all His bitter anguish bearing,
now at length the sword has passed.

O how sad and sore distressed
was that Mother, highly blest,
of the sole-begotten One.

Christ above in torment hangs,
she beneath beholds the pangs
of her dying glorious Son.

Is there one who would not weep,
whelmed in miseries so deep,
Christ’s dear Mother to behold?

Can the human heart refrain
from partaking in her pain,
in that Mother’s pain untold?

For the sins of His own nation,
She saw Jesus wracked with torment,
All with scourges rent:

She beheld her tender Child,
Saw Him hang in desolation,
Till His spirit forth He sent.

O thou Mother! fount of love!
Touch my spirit from above,
make my heart with thine accord:

Make me feel as thou hast felt;
make my soul to glow and melt
with the love of Christ my Lord. 

With Love, 

Bob Traupman

contemplative writer

Jesus, Mary and some expensive oil

Monday of Holy Week ~ March 21, 2016

Six days before the Passover Jesus came to Bethany, the home of Lazarus, whom he had raised from the dead. There they gave a dinner for him. Martha served, and Lazarus was one of those at the table with him. Mary took a pound of costly perfume made of pure nard, anointed Jesus’ feet, and wiped them with her hair. The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume. ~  (John 12:1-3)

Yesterday we found Jesus mobbed but probably exhilarated by the crowds as he made his entry into the great city to the shouts of “Hosanna to the Son of David!”

This day, Monday, weary from all the excitement and eager once again to be welcomed by his beloved friends Martha, Mary and Lazarus, he makes the short trip to Bethany with his disciples.

Apparently he was expected; a dinner party had been arranged and Jesus was to have quite an intimate surprise ~ right there in front of God and everybody. Mary loved Jesus in a special way; Martha seemed to be jealous of her. She got down, washed Jesus dusty, tired, weary bare feet and massaged, soothed, and caressed them.

Suddenly she got up, went to a nearby shelf and got a beautiful alabaster bottle filled with the finest aromatic spikenard.   She broke it open! and the whole house was instantly transformed by its wonderful aroma.

She poured it liberally over the Master’s feet. (And as we know Judas objected strenuously ~ but let’s not bother with that.)

(Permit me this Ignatian-style reflection ~ a bit R-rated.)

3482180199_d2fc3fe367_sA sensual woman caresses a 33-year old man with perfumed oil. The oil squishes down between his toes; it soothes his weary feet. She rubs it in circular motions around the ankles.

Then Mary teases him dripping some, drop / drop on his shins, watching the glistening oil slither down his feet.

She leans back on her haunches and waits to get his reaction.

He grins, and raises his eyeballs toward the ceiling.

Then she pounces on him and rubs his feet firmly and furiously and backs away again, then just looks at him and smiles.

He returns the gaze, obviously, very pleased, very delighted, very relaxed.

Then she leans forward and begins to dry his feet with her hair!

This process takes a long time.

Oil takes a long to come out, just being dried by hair, as lovely as Mary’s is.

Now, dear friends, you can’t get more sensuous than that!

I wonder.

I wonder what were the thoughts and feelings of the Lord of the universe’s during this most intimate of male ~ female encounters. Perhaps this most unusual, very creative experience might be even as intimate, as soul-connecting as intercourse itself.

I wouldn’t even dare to imagine. I would simply let him have his own thoughts and feelings

The sacred text doesn’t say, but we can intimate from what we already know that Jesus is already very comfortable with Mary who used to sit gaga-eyed at Jesus’ feet (Luke 10:38-42.)

Was it sexual? No. But it sure as h- was sensual!

Did he enjoy the experience?

I’m quite sure he did.

Jesus was a whole, integrated man.

Was he embarrassed to have that happen in front of the others? Quite sure not.

He was with people with whom he could “let this hair down,” although Mary probably got a good talkin’ to by her sister in the bedroom later! Jesus, unlike many of us, was not afraid to be himself in any and all circumstances.

That Monday of that of Holy Week two Millennia ago was a day of relaxation for our Lord. He was able to make a sacrament of the present moment as he put aside concern about the events that lie ahead.

Lord Jesus,

help us, too, to make our present moments a sacrament.  

Help us to fully give ourselves to the moment we are in,

embracing it, with eyes and ears wide open to it,

putting all other concerns aside.  

For that moment is where life happens.

We may not get another.

And now before you go, here’s the beautiful hymn, Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence” Click here. 

And here are today’s Mass readings: Click here.

With love, 

Bob Traupman

Contemplative Writer