Passion

The fifth Sunday in Lent is Passion Sunday in the Protestant Church. Jesus in Galilee completing his ministry knowing that the end is near. Suffering is salvation.

I think he would have known from the time he went into the desert how it would end, the desert changes even the people who live with it just there at the edge of their vision, the heat, the endless sand that gets into everything, clothes, food, scours the skin. Unremitting heat and sand. The almost hallucinatory shimmer in the air. Sensory deprivation. To know inside yourself what will be and to accept that fate.

There are small moments for all of us, it's not everyone's fate to change the world, but we do define ourselves everytime we accept or reject the challenges of our own lives.

Socrates accepting to drink the cup of hemlock, he didn't need to, he had the choice to leave Athens but then every question he had posed to try to get the youth of Athens to think, to open their minds, would have meant nothing. That's what we are shown by his pupil Plato.

In Battlestar Galactica, Starbuck, sweating and unsure, hand hovering over her gun as she goes to carry out Adama's order to kill the Commander of another Battlestar. The human race would benefit. What? You think one fiction is worth more or less than another? Every life is just a story once it has been lived.

This week on 'Bones', Temperance Brennan said this, it struck me so forcefully that I wrote it down immediately,
'Nothing happens just once in the universe, infinity goes in both directions, there is no singular moment, no unique event.'

Does that moment come for all of us? Does it come over and over again? Is it depicted for us so that we can step up and face our demons? Does every situation keep repeating itself so that we can try many ways of resolution?

We choose our heros, we choose our fate. We may not choose the hand that life deals us but how we play that hand is up to us.

Suffering is salvation. Work makes us free. Action gives us existence. We think, we choose, we act. We save ourselves and maybe we save others. Water always finds the easiest way to flow, but human beings are not water, our minds, our very consciousness changes things, but our actions can change things more. We have a heavy responsibility, but backing off from taking the difficult path, from taking that responsibility, lessens us. And it invalidates the really big sacrifices.
Like giving your life so that others might be free.