September 12, 2021 (24th Sunday in Ordinary Time)

by Fr. Bob Glynn, S.J.

[This text is an edited version of an automatically generated transcript.]

I am very much an avid reader. But I also get quite bored easily when I’m reading so I have to have something that’s, well, fun. Fun is the … It’s the word of my life, I must admit. So I need something that’s fun and I found something very fun, if slightly bizarre, this summer. It’s a book called The Five Wounds (w-o-u-n-d-s: wounds). And it takes place in a fictitious town in in northern New Mexico, just north of Santa Fe, a place called Las Peñas, which I believe translates as “the wounds” or “the sufferings.” And the book begins on Good Friday with the son of the family. His name is Amadeo. And Amadeo is playing Christ in the Good Friday Way of the Cross. And he’s only gotten this role because his uncle runs the society and insists Amadeo do it because Amadeo is a classic screw-up. He’s 33 years old, and everything that he has done has failed in his life, mostly because he’s made it fail. And so he has now decided, despite being an alcoholic and a drug addict and everything, he’s going to clear up his life, and he is going to play Christ in the passion. And by doing this, he is going to feel Christ’s suffering, and he will have redeemed himself by doing this. So, whereas in previous years, the penitentes, the people who carried the cross, have had themselves tied to the cross Amadeo insists upon having his hands nailed to the cross that he’s carrying, which apparently is less pleasant than he thought it was going to be. So he goes through the whole thing. He doesn’t feel anything about it except angry, and he ends up at the emergency room in Española, because he’s got an infection in both of his hands. So while he’s thinking about how this has been a miserable, another miserable loss, yet he has walked in the way of Christ and he has carried his cross, he heads home from the emergency room and there at the house, he finds his 15-year-old daughter.

Now, Amadeo is 33. And the daughter is on the front steps of the house. She is eight months pregnant. And Amadeo basically deserted his mother and his wife and the daughter after the daughter was born and she has always lived with the mother in Española. So, she says, “I’ve come to move in. I’ve had a fight with mom and I’m not going home.” And he says “You can’t move in.” And she says, “Oh, yes, I can. And grandma already said I can.” So in she charges to upset Amadeo’s otherwise wreck of a life. And meanwhile—so that’s Angel, the daughter—meanwhile, the mother, Yolanda, who is probably 50-something, is in Las Vegas with her boyfriend on a wild weekend, except that she has these horrible headaches and all of a sudden she passes out in the casino. And then she comes to and she decides she better take herself to the emergency room, which she does, where she is diagnosed with having an inoperable brain tumor. So even without even telling the boyfriend, she rents a car and off she drives home to New Mexico. But she can’t tell Amadeo, and she can’t tell Angel, because basically, Yolanda is the great enabler. She has helped them have screwed- up lives by always fixing everything, by cleaning up after them, by giving them money, by doing something where she makes them feel OK about themselves and they go on to their next disaster. So the story goes on merrily, but I won’t—I’m not going to tell you the whole story. But Angel goes to this school. She’s going to get her GED while she’s pregnant, so that she can kind of move on with her life. And she’s with all these pregnant girls and their teacher, Brianna, she adores, and everything that comes from Brianna’s lips is brilliant, and she keeps spouting them at home. And she’s the one hero that Angel has in her life. So what does Amadeo do? He starts to have an affair with the teacher.

And of course the daughter finds out and all hell breaks loose and whatever. So everybody is miserable. And we have a child on the way. And Yolanda has kept the secret even though she’s vomiting periodically, she’s fainting. They don’t really think much of it because they’re so selfish. They’re basically thinking about themselves the entire time. And just two weeks before she dies, she has an episode where it’s very clear that nothing can be done and that she is dying. Angel, to her credit stays home and helps Yolanda where in the meantime Amadeo races off, because it's too much for him to handle. He’s a sensitive soul, and he can’t see his mother dying. And of course, Yolanda dies, never having really sorted them out, because she’d spent her whole … her life making them as they were. At the end of it—it’s not a happy ending, because that would be utterly ridiculous—but the ending I found quite touching. They’re kind of there, there’s another, another member of the family and they’re all there. And they can’t make it work. But they, they kind of come to the idea of what we might try harder not to be quite so selfish. And so the story ends with Amadeo attending the next Good Friday Way of the Cross with someone else who is strapped by a rope to the cross. And he looks at it and he comes to this realization. I’m going to read the words of the author, because they’re much better than I could come up with: “The Good Friday procession is not about punishment or shame. It is about needing to take on the pain of those you would love. But to take on that pain, first you have to see it. And you also have to see how you may inflict it.”

Now I found this quite important, because I think that we can become very confused about take up this cross business, just like Amadeo did. Amadeo didn’t understand it was his cross he was supposed to take up. He thought it was Jesus’s cross. And sometimes we can think that. How could we carry Jesus’s cross, for heaven’s sake? How could we be Jesus? Amadeo only got a hand infection out of it. We’re not supposed to be Jesus, and we’re not supposed to carry his cross. But we are supposed to carry our cross. Now, a lot of times as Catholics, we think of that cross as yet another moment of victimhood: “Somebody has done something else to me, yes, I will carry the cross in that noble, heroic way that I have, someone else has done it to me again.” That’s not carrying the cross. That’s just attention-seeking. Carrying the cross, I think, is what Amadeo thought it was, that it’s the moment that we come to realize that I have my own cross. And much of that cross I have made for myself. But the cross has great power to it. I can inflict pain on other people. But I can carry that cross in love. I can try, I can try to actually see that I, believe it or not, I have caused other people pain, that I am not the victim all the time. That in fact, my actions and my choices have really caused a burden for others as well as myself. And when I come to see that, the cross becomes a real burden of love, and becomes something where I think “I don’t want other people to carry this pain. I want to help free other people.” That’s what Jesus does, isn’t it? His cross is liberation because of love. If he were angry and shamed and punished, that cross would mean nothing. The cross is always about love. And that’s what we call ourselves to realize when Jesus says, “Take up your cross and follow me. Take up the reality of your life. Look around you the suffering that occurs, the suffering that happens to you and the suffering that you cause to others, and realize that my grace alone would change that, would change your heart and make the cross finally not to be a burden, but a sign of victory.”