On Friday night I joined the Via Crucis from the Inmaculada Concepcion

. I do know that it was a profound and moving experience.

On Friday night I joined the Via Crucis from the Inmaculada Concepcion. This most solemn penitential act of Lent was hailed as ecumenical and so it was, but in the event that label seemed so irrelevant. I went partly as a costalero of the Cofradia “La Oracion en el Huerto de Olivos”, also as a member of the congregation of Inmaculada, but again that seemed triflingly unimportant. I knew about Via Crucis and the “Way of the Cross” and its significance but I had never taken part in one so I don’t know if this one was typical. I do know that it was a profound and moving experience.

In essence the Via Crucis consists of a group of costleros carrying a large crucifix. In this case the pageant was led by Don Manuel Rocamora and followed by ministers from several other denominations and by other priests. It is accompanied by a large crowd of several hundred people. The procession stops fourteen times to coincide with the traditional stations of the cross. At each a bible passage is read and prayers are said. On the way hymns are sung, very quietly.

The mood becomes progressively darker and more foreboding as the Way continues through scorn, whipping, crowning with thorns and stumbling falling until the death of Christ on Calvary and his burial in the tomb at Golgotha. There is no Easter joy in this. This is the lowest point of the Christian Calendar. The thoughts and feelings of each penitent traveller along this short journey are unknowable but there is a sense of deeper and deeper introversion, a searching into the very depths to find an adequate response to all of this. And this is not a carnival, a fiesta, a celebration, something for the visitors but a profound longing to come closer to a mysterious tragedy which will somehow through re-enactment and meditation lead to reconciliation. It is a religious experience in the truest sense.

You only have to watch your companions. Through re-enacting that awful journey to Calvary they become part of the most important and revolutionary event in the history of mankind.

Brian Heard

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