THE CHRISTMAS CAROL O Holy Night calls the world weary. Some people will nod quietly in understanding. The world is displaying a particularly deep weariness of late; there seems to be a great open and festering wound.
Jesus knows. The night of his Last Supper he prayed in the orchard where olive trees grow. He realized and bore all of the world's bitter rejection of God - the world's distaste for God displayed over the millennia. It crushed Jesus," And His sweat became like drops of blood which fell to the ground," Luke 22:44. Christ's passion began in that garden; his blood soaking our weary, wounded world. The next day this burden would be carried in his hands, feet and side.
The wounds of Jesus are forever. He bore them in his Resurrection appearances. But now these wounds shine like rubies, Father Jim Janda wrote in his poem Russian Easter. Jesus forever carries these marks of identification with the world of wounds that are personal, global, economic, cultural, psychological, physical, spiritual, relational, moral. Often the world's wounds are tear-washed.
In the hands of Jesus, the left and right hands of God reach into the world of wounds. In the feet of Jesus, God walks among the world of wounds. In the open side of Jesus there is new access to the heart of God.
I asked a hermit nun once, "What does a hermit do all day?" She answered, "A hermit reads the New York Times in the morning and then goes to pray." When I've shared her statement with others, some have looked askance; "Well, I don't know about that," one priest said. I would disagree.
I'd go so far as to suggest that the new prayer book is the newspaper and the screen-bearing global news. Before the creation of the Internet, one Anglican friend kept a scrap book of news clippings that she'd cut and save as places for her prayer. But the prayer isn't a prayer of words - as if to tell God what to do about it all - but rather, simply this: a heart, silent and awake to the wounds of the already God-embraced world.
I'd go so far as to suggest that the new prayer book is the newspaper and the screen-bearing global news. Before the creation of the Internet, one Anglican friend kept a scrap book of news clippings that she'd cut and save as places for her prayer. But the prayer isn't a prayer of words - as if to tell God what to do about it all - but rather, simply this: a heart, silent and awake to the wounds of the already God-embraced world.
I'm struck by the number of people I meet who tell me they don't read or hear any news. I don't understand this. "But it's all bad news anyway," someone said. What kind of luxury is that?
I'm suggesting a new prayer of the heart. Blessed are the pure of heart, Jesus teaches. Perhaps this pure heart is the heart that is cleaned out, purged of all the petty, selfish distractions and the entitlements that keep life so cluttered there's no inner space left to know the wounded world beyond my own tiny life-orbit.
The wounds of Jesus are a kind of cosmic shrine or sanctuary from which issues the torrent, the rushing flood of God's abundant, gift-given kindness. The divine largess, says the preface for the Mass of the Sacred Heart.
My prayer then is to ponder these things - to hold these things before the image shared at the top of this post. But we might hold off approaching this image of Jesus until we have first encountered the other images of newspaper, Internet and television screen. Could I suggest that some news stations are corporate enterprises doubling as entertainment or are full of contentious, politicized, hateful voices that only want to win an argument. Those sources cause us to lose our peace, thwarting a centered prayer.
Prayer of the heart is a pondering - like Mary who turned over in her heart the mysterious gifts of suffering and death left by the magi.
