Good Friday

Brevity reigns in the gospels when one examines Jesus’ walk to His death. His suffering--his falls, the assistance given to him by Simon--these details are given more clearly and passionately when Catholics throughout the world reflect upon that journey through the tradition of the Stations of the Cross.

My roommates and I were invited to join in this ritual in downtown Kingston with a Catholic order of brothers known as “Missionaries of the Poor.” As a third world order, the brothers are in Uganda, Haiti, India, and the Philippines—but their headquarters and their founder are in Jamaica. The MOPs have shelters throughout the Kingston area where they not only evangelize, but care for the destitute, the sick, and the physically and mentally handicapped. We have worked in these shelters before, but the Stations began at one we had not yet visited—Bethlehem House.

We arrived a few minutes early, and one of the brothers ushered us into the shelter for a brief tour, explaining that Bethlehem’s mission is to care for extremely handicapped children. During our past few months as volunteers, we have seen individuals with serious ailments, but the deformities I witnessed at Bethlehem surpassed all others. The sight of so many children with distorted and bowed bodies brought me to tears, and I barely had time to wipe them away before the service of the stations began.

The brothers that were to read the Stations of the Cross stood in the bed of a truck with microphones. Some brothers stood waiting to help the handicapped residents of the shelters to walk the stations, and still others stood waiting to take their turn to carry a wooden cross and wear a crown of thorns.

The first station was read, and we joined the procession of dozens of men, women, and children—either handicapped shelter residents or able-bodied community members—down the streets of Kingston.

My experience in Jamaica thus far has been in rural areas. Mount Friendship is a small village that is stunted by poverty, but its sorrows are tempered by cool mountain breezes and a natural tropical beauty. Downtown Kingston, however, looks as if it has been bombed, burned, and left to rot. It is stiflingly hot, dusty, and smelly. Shanties with zinc roofs are piled on top of each other, gang leaders known as “dons” mark their territories with violence and threats, and half-naked children scurry through the streets. There is no development and no industry on these mean streets, making Kingston the embodiment of third-world urban poverty.

And it was in this very setting that we began to walk. We sang simple hymns as we walked down unmarked streets lined with "tenement yards" and graffiti-filled zinc fences. And fourteen times, the brothers stopped, the crowd knelt, and the station was read. We went through the condemnation, the bearing of the cross, Jesus' three falls, the crucifixion...each station becoming more poignant with each step.

We walked these streets of the ghetto of one of the world’s poorest and most violent cities, in the noontime heat. We smelled the muck of the gutters, saw the grit of the streets cake onto our legs, and felt the sweat drip down our backs. Despite this, people were drawn to the procession. The sound of the hymns, the sight of the brothers dragging the cross, and the image of the faithful trudging through the ghetto made the procession swell from several dozen worshippers to almost two hundred.

Our walk was so very different from that one two thousand year ago, but like Christ’s, it was filled with suffering. The images of poverty: the zinc fences, the barbed wire, the filth, the crumbling buildings, and the haunted faces watching us reminded me that Jesus’ pain is always with us. I watched the brothers, Kingston’s poor, and the handicapped shelter residents sing of their love for Jesus and kneel on the blisteringly hot pavement. And, for the second time that day, I wept.

John, chapter 19 reads, "So they took Jesus, and carrying the cross himself, he went out to what is called the Place of the Skull, in Hebrew, Golgotha. There they crucified him." The Stations of the Cross give us a chance not only to recreate, but to relive Jesus’ suffering for ourselves. I was granted an unbelievable opportunity to walk the Stations with God’s people: the least of our brothers and sisters. I walked with the broken, the beaten, the sick, and the deformed. And their faith put mine to shame. Walking Jesus’ fourteen stops allows us to experience the range of human suffering, whether it be in the broken bodies in Bethlehem house, in the filth of a third-world city, or in our own hearts. Have a blessed and beautiful Easter.