Inspirit

This week the Church marked both the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross and the Memorial of Our Lady of Sorrows. And while this pairing has always felt natural, I’d never paused to consider, before, the more-than-surface relationship between them. This week, however, the readings from Monday’s feast and Tuesday’s memorial have stuck with me, and I’m beginning to realize that together they offer an invitation to a deeper identity with Christ. Monday’s first reading presents salvation history in microcosm. The Israelites complain against the Lord, a plague of serpents infests their camp, they repent, and God instructs Moses to lift up a bronze serpent in the desert. Anyone suffering the venomous snakebite can look at this bronze figure – the sign of their punishment transformed to a terrible mystery of mercy – and live. In the Gospel that follows, Christ references this story in explicit connection to being lifted up, Himself, “so that everyone who believes in [the Son of Man] may have eternal life” (John 3:14-15). Together, these readings draw our gaze to the Cross, the sign of our guilt and our salvation by the grace of God. They ask us to acknowledge our own sins and fix our eyes on our Savior, recognizing that salvation history continues to work itself out in our lives and in the sacramental life of the Church, the Body of Christ. But with Tuesday’s Memorial of Our Lady of Sorrows, the Body of Christ comes into focus even more explicitly, with St. Paul stating: “As a body is one though it has many parts, and all the parts of the body, though many, are one body, so also Christ… you are Christ’s body, and individually parts of it” (1 Cor 12:12, 27). Always before, I saw Our Lady of Sorrows primarily as an onlooker, however...