Palm Sunday last year I was stood on Calvary listening to this Gospel In I think Italian. It didn’t matter the story was so familiar I could follow in my head and just waited for the pause after the words “but Jesus crying out in a loud voice yielded up His spirit” we knelt on the very ground that had absorbed His precious blood.
That has to change you. To kneel there at the very foot of the cross, place your hand in the hole that held it upright and receive His body and blood in the space it was given up, it has to make you somehow different. In those moments and in a few moments since, I am aware of an invitation to step closer to the veil that separates us. To go through it is maybe for another season, perhaps not even in this life.
To step too close Is to accept the spiritual realm as a true reality, without any hesitancy or doubt changes everything, the impossible becomes possible for both good and evil. I live and breathe for God but am I ready for that? This move from an assured faith to a full knowing that takes away my freedom to choose. To step backwards and forwards according to my comfort level.
Am I ready to live knowing there may really be evil plots and secret protectors ? Perhaps holy people given great tasks that would have before been considered fanciful or a product of an unbalanced mind. It also becomes feasible there are people given over to an intentional evil rather than an ignorant stumbling into great wounding and destructive acts.
To hold on to rationality in such moments of awakening is difficult, where much of our intuition and gut feelings would have previously been explained away they suddenly take on the urgency of truth and the right therefore to be attended to. Whether they are truth or not has to be carefully discerned while the soul is still held by its earthly experience, its nature and it’s wounds.
Our experience of encounter before this is looking through this thick veil which leaves so little visible that We can easily safely remain in a place of doubtful, ineffective mediocrity yet it respects our God given Free will.The moving shadows behind it still allow us enough vision to grow in faith and desire even if for no other reason than a human need for hope.
As we move closer to the veil, and the outlines become distinct, we can identify features that before we had only heard or read about, someone others experience that may or not be true. It now becoming our own vision.
This change is a fruit of faith that still needs the strength of belief to trust what appears to be before our very eyes. A revelation that what we hoped for, all we placed our faith in, is in fact a reality.
While we still have the veil it permits us the freedom to dismiss and turn away or choose to postpone the day and the grace to seek the rip and step through knowing there is no way back. Today we hear how Jesus tears that veil for us, He doesn’t rip the veil down but He gifts us an entry beyond it For when we come close enough to fumble our fingers through its folds. It’s only then, when we pull back the veil can we clearly see the face of our bridegroom.
