Way of the Cross

There in Him we are watching ourselves today. There is the young man or woman taken by surprise by the violence of the first sudden onslaught of the temptations of grown-up life. There is the one who a little while ago, from the dream world of adolescence, welcomed the hardships and struggles of economic life in a spirit of adventure, tripped up by the first stumbling block of the materialism of the real world. There is that one who imagined that natural love alone could sustain a marriage on a meager wage, flung down by the first impact of grinding poverty for himself and his bride. There, too, is that most brokenhearted one who in a land of martyrs believed he could accept suffering and dreamed of martyrdom for himself, but at the first shock of the terrible reality, the first hard, rough crushing of the cross on his own back, has fallen—an ordinary man, persecuted by the supermen of the ideologies, derided and mocked by his own disillusioned fellow countrymen.