Nothing much in the Franciscan Tradition has deeper roots than the Stations of the
Cross. When Francis returned from his pilgrimage to the Middle East, he wanted to share some of that experience with those who would never be able to make the journey to the actual places where the life, the ministry, the Passion, Death, and Resurrection of Christ happened. In his ever generous and creative way, Francis hit upon the idea of representations of those places, which could be erected where the people were. If people could not go to those holy places, Francis was determined to bring the holy sites to them.

Franciscans have been setting up these reminders of Christ’s “journey of sorrows,”
the Via Delarosa, these Stations of the Cross, for eight hundred years. Within a relatively short time (by Church standards) the Stations became a fixture in most Catholic Churches. It is hard to find a Catholic Church without them. As their popularity grew, the Stations became a real, local presentation of Christ’s Passion, as artists depicted in the Stations the people who looked like the people whom the
artists knew would be praying with them. Here in the Southwest, that happened over and over again.

While the old Our Lady of Guadalupe Church stood in Pena Blanca, Fray Angelico Chavez famously included local people in the mural like Stations that he painted on the interior of the Church. (Inadvertently, Fray Angelico also contributed to the failure of the adobe walls in the Church by the use of paints that would not
allow moisture to vent from the walls, so that they weakened and collapsed, destroying the paintings. Fray Angelico was also rumored to have used people he did not like as models for the less than desirable roles in the Passion story!)

Charlie Carrillo, one of the best known living New Mexican santeros was commissioned by Minister Provincial Larry Dunham to create Stations to hang in Casa Guadalupe Friary, as well as images of the Resurrection and to balance the image of the Resurrection in the space where the Stations hung in the friary, an
image of Francis with Mary and Joseph in adoration of the newborn Christ Child in a setting that is pure northern New Mexico, complete with adobe houses and an horno in view outside the window. The pictures here are of two of the Stations which seem most appropriate to our times. The first picture is of the fifth Station – Simon of Cyrene helps Jesus to carry his cross. 

We are in a time of pandemic. We do not know how long the pandemic will last. Under “stay safe in place” orders and with limited contact with each other, we may feel as if we are on a journey to nowhere. In the midst of that sense of frustration, it is all the more important to be there for each other in whatever way that we
can, to offer to lift each other’s burdens. The second picture is of the eighth Station – Jesus meets the women of Jerusalem. During this pandemic we encounter people suffering in every sort of way, from illness itself, from grief, from the loss of jobs and economic despair, from anxiety and from fear. Let us all try our best to greet them with the compassion of Christ, even as we are also suffering.