“Contempt is a hard thing to bear.”



“But being struck and mocked by soldiers and taunted by strangers...  must have been difficult to bear...”

Father James Martin, Jesus, A Pilgrimage, as we reach the end of Jesus' life.


To my sense, the whole thing, the story of Jesus the Lord Christ, is ingrained so deeply within the human story, our own stories, it is the great archetype coming down to meet us where we live, to flesh out our own experiences with a tale that gives our lives shape and meaning.   We are never far from any of it, the Christian life.  We are never far away from the insights that nourish our mind, feed our creativity, our art, our will to live.

And we are, as well, never far from the rejections of the society people are wedded to as they survive.

We remember the torments, we bear them in our DNA, the sufferings, those of the Master himself, along with all the good things, the potential of people to listen and learn and receive the things of wisdom.

And to me, among the many vibrant colors and parts and pieces of the story, quietly crucial, are the women in it, being their part of the Christian story.  There is good and bad.  The station of Jesus speaking to the women of Jerusalem as he bears his cross, as well as the anointing...

When women have contempt for us, we sense it, the denial, the betrayal, the judgment, the crucifixion itself;  we sense the great habitual blindness of society when presented with the insight, the sensitivity of sacred holy truth... the great condemnation of the innocent man of Jesus Christ...

But also, there is the potential to be the witness of the divine Easter truth even unto the Apostles...

This, to my eye, is held within the beauty of the woman Mary of Magdala, who comes to the tomb early in the morning...  a complete learning, a final acceptance, an alignment with the just.

You can never be very far away from any of that, the memories of Christ's life, embedded down within your very being...


If there is good, causes seemingly for friendly happy moods, all of that will change, and dramatically.  This too we learn, from inside, from experience, from the realities of the everyday...