This post is a further extract from Caryll Houselander's book 'The Stations of the Cross'
The Sixth Station: Veronica wipes the Face of Jesus
Now, while Simon labours under the Cross with Jesus,
while Mary, his Mother follows behind him in the crowd, someone – a woman-- forces
her way through the rabble, even through the guard of Roman soldiers
surrounding him, and comes face to face with Christ. She is driven by compassion.
The face that the Lord turns to her is terrible to
look on; it is difficult to believe that it is the face of the Son of God. It is difficult even for those who have once
seen his face shining with the brilliance of a fire of snow upon Tabor, to
believe in him now. Two of them have fled from him, just as those others have
done, though they have seen him command the wind and the waves and raise the
dead.
Now that face of infinite majesty and compelling
beauty is unrecognisable. The eyes which could see into the secret places of
men’s souls are blinded, swollen from the long sleepless nights of trials and
judgement, and filled with sweat and blood.
The cheeks are bruised and dirty; the mouth swollen; the hair “like ripe
corn” is tangled by the crown of thorns and matted with blood.
Certainly, there is no sign now of the beauty that
could win a man’s heart by a single glance, or of the power that can rule the
tempests and give life to the dead.
On the contrary, here is a man who is the very
personification of humiliation, who is ugly with wounds and suffering, who is
in the hands of other men who have bound him and are leading him out to die,
and who is not even able to carry his own Cross alone.
It is all this, from which his close friends have fled,
which drives this woman to him. It is
the ugliness and the helplessness which frightened those whom he called his “own”
away, that draws her to him; it is her compassion that gives her the courage to
come close to him.
She comes with a veil in her hands, a cloth on which to
wipe the poor, disfigured face.
She kneels, as we kneel to wipe the tears from the
faces of little children. Gratefully,
the head bowing over her sinks into the clean linen cloth, and for a moment is
covered by it.
Then he raises his head, and she, kneeling there, her
own face lifted, sees the face of Christ looking down at her, and behind it the
great beam of the Cross. The two are together within the shadow of the Cross on
the street, Veronica, and Christ.
She sees the majesty that was hidden, for now she has
wiped away what she can of the blood and sweat and tears; she sees that they
hid a face that is serene in its suffering, calm, majestic, infinitely
tender. The swollen mouth smiles, the exhausted
eyes are full of gentleness; the expression, after all, is not one of defeat
and despair, but of triumph and joy.
The power of Christ is able to control fiercer storms
than those of the wind and sea. It is
able to still the torrents of evil of the whole world in the stillness of his
own heart. It is the power which enables
him to command the floods of all the sorrow in the world and hold them within
his peace. It is the power which can not
only give life back to the dead but can change death itself to life. It is the
power of divine love.
So, for a moment, a vision more wonderful than that of
Tabor is granted to the woman whose compassion drove her to discover Christ in
a suffering man. Then Christ passes on, on the way of sorrows, leaving her with
the veil in her hands and on it the imprint of that face of suffering that hid the
beauty of God.
In Christ burying his face in that woman’s veil on the
Via Crucis, we are looking at the many children of today whom war has twisted
and tortured out of the pattern of childhood, who are already seared and
vitiated by fear, persecution, homelessness and hunger.
We see grown-up people who have been maimed or disfigured,
those whom chronic illness or infirmity has embittered. We see, too, those most tragic ones among old
people, those who are not loved and are not wanted by their own, those in whom
the ugliness, not the beauty, of old age is visible. We see the tragic ones who are cut off from
all but the very few, the Veronicas of the world, by mental illness. We see, too, many who are dying, who with
Christ are coming to the end of their Via Crucis, yet sometimes without
realising that Christ is suffering for and in them.
Suffering is not something to sentimentalise. It can obliterate even the beauty of
childhood. It can ennoble but it can also degrade; it can enlarge a man’s
heart, but it can also contract and shrink it.
To the sufferer who does not know that he is indwelt by Christ, his pain
of mind and body, his humiliation and loneliness, are baffling. He can see no purpose in it; he is embittered
by it, and his bitterness sets up a barrier between himself and others,
imprisoning him in his own loneliness.
Outwardly, he shows only the ugliness of the world’s sorrow, suffering
and all the effects of sin.
It is the Veronicas of today who wipe away his
ugliness from the face of Christ living on in man. The Veronicas of today are all those in whom
compassion overcomes fear and repulsion, all those who seek and find the lost
and the forsaken, the downtrodden and the lonely. Those who seek the maladjusted, broken
children of our wars and our slums, who go on their knees to wipe the tears
from their eyes.
They are the nurses who comfort the dying in
hospitals, who wipe the sweat of death from their faces. They are the Sisters of
Mercy who go into the homes of the sick and poor to serve them. They are all those who befriend the
friendless in our mental hospitals. They
are those who, in their own families, tend and comfort the old and infirm in
their last days.
They are, too, those priests who minister to the dying,
and who go into the prisons to absolve the prisoners and restore Christ in
their souls; those priests who follow men to the scaffold, cleansing them with
the spiritual waters of absolution.
It is not only the physical wounds that the Veronicas of
today tend and cleanse; it is, by that same act of tender compassion, the
mental and spiritual wounds, the emotional wounds that corrode and fester in
the spirit, almost obliterating the image and likeness of Christ. It is not
only the sweat that blinds the eyes of the dying that they wipe away, but that
which blinds the soul. Ignorance of
Christ, ignorance of their own supreme destiny of being “other Christs”,
misunderstanding of suffering and its ugliness, that ugliness so resented by
those who cannot see beneath it.
Until someone comes to reveal the secret of Christ
indwelling the sufferer’s soul to him, he cannot see any purpose in his pain. There
is only one way to reveal Christ living on in the human heart to those who are
ignorant concerning it. That is Veronica’s
way, through showing Christ’s love. When
one comes, maybe a stranger, maybe one close at home but whose compassion was
not guessed before, and reveals Christ’s own pity in themselves, the hard crust
that has contracted the sufferer’s heart melts away and, looking into the
gentle face of this Veronica of today, the sufferer looks, as it were, into a
mirror in which he sees the beauty of Christ reflected at last from his own
soul.
Until Veronica came to him on his way to Calvary,
Christ was blinded by blood and sweat and tears. The merciful hands of Veronica
wiped the blindness from his eyes; looking into her face, he saw his own beauty
reflected in it. He saw his own eyes
looking back at him from hers. She had
done this thing in the power in which alone she could do it, the power
of Christ’s own love.
In the compassion on her lifted face, Christ saw, in
the hour of his extreme dereliction, the triumph of his own love for men. He saw his love, radiant, triumphant in her,
and in all the Veronicas to come through all time – in them and in those
sufferers in whom his own divine beauty would be restored by their compassion.
Prayer
Saviour of the World,
take my heart
which shrinks
from the stark realism
and ugliness of suffering,
and expand it with your love.
Open it wide
with the fire of your love,
as a rose is opened
by the heat of the sun.
Drive me by the strength
of your tenderness
to come close to human pain.
Give me hands
that are hardened
by pity,
that will dip into any water
and bathe any wound
in mercy.
Give me your hands,
hands that heal the blind
by their touch,
hands that raise the dead
and are nailed to the Cross;
Give me your hands
to tend the wounds of the body
and the wounds of the mind.
Give me your eyes
to discern the beauty of your face
hidden under the world’s sorrow.
Give me the grace
to be a Veronica,
to wipe away
the ugliness of sin
from the human face,
and to see
your smile on the mouth of pain,
your majesty on the face of dereliction,
and, in the bound and helpless,
the power of your infinite love.
Lord, take my heart
and give me yours.
