One of the phenomena I have observed during the drastically increasing amount of time I spend indoors with my housemates nowadays is the way in which each of us prefers to give and receive love. Personally, given my druthers, I would prefer to just completely isolate and wall myself off from the love and affection of everyone,
but apparently that’s a no-go, so instead I’ve been seeing up close the way that people care for one another. Fr. Roush seems to be big on quality time.
Fr. Feist uses words of affirmation often enough to make me prickly and defensive. I am doubling down on acts of service like resetting the chapel for Fr. Roush for his private Mass. All the while we watch for signs of cabin fever and the slow creep of insanity. With that as the backdrop of my day to day life, I have been reflecting on the meaning of love, especially loving our family and friends in moments
of difficulty.
 
Particularly in my holy hours these last few days I have been reflecting on the agony of the Cross and what a powerful sign of love it remains to this day
and until the end of time. Beyond the overwhelming physical pain and sacrifice it represents, there is something deeper that makes the Cross the truest sign of God’s love for us. First, because by His Holy Cross, Christ has redeemed the world. The fruit of sin is death, and the fruit of the Cross is life, and that in abundance. Second, the love shown through the Cross was and is completely and totally undeserved. God showed His love for us in that He died for us while we were still sinners. We had no hope, no options, and were truly pitiful. But God enters into the weakness and frailty of His own volition, and raises up our nature to being united to the divine.
 
That is the mystery that we celebrate this Palm Sunday. We can look around the world in crisis right now and see an immense outpouring of love and solidarity, and we can look elsewhere and see such deep selfishness and lack of concern. But in the Cross we see Jesus Christ choosing to offer Himself for our sins, and continuing to choose at each moment of suffering to endure this. Because He loves me. Because He loves you. Because He loves us.

Take a moment away from this strange epoch through which we are living to meditate on that. That while Christ suffered in the garden and on the Cross, He chose to do so for you and everyone else that He loves. He is present to you in His Passion. In prayer, be present to Him.
 
Prayers always,
Fr. McC