What is your passion?

It is common for people to express their intense interests as something they are “passionate about.” Someone can be passionate about golf or food or the Oklahoma City Thunder or exercise. For each of these passions, there is something deep within us that moves us to action. 

Oftentimes, a passion moves us to act in a measure that seems extreme or out of proportion. I suppose I would have to admit that I have become passionate about the Camino de Santiago, having walked portions of it five times! Perhaps your experience is similar: your passion moves you to act with such an intense focus that your friends or family look at you quizzically and think, “Why do they spend so much time doing that?!” 

The answer, of course, lies in the very nature of passion. The word itself implies being “out of control.” Someone with a passion is passive, and it is the passion that acts through him or her. Passion, then, implies a suffering: for the passion that moves one to such intense activity takes its toll. 

The final two weeks of Lent are called “Passiontide” for this very reason. God’s passion is for us! It is expressed by Jesus in the Gospel through the familiar verse, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life” (John 3:16). 

The result of God’s passionate love for us is the gift of the Son, not only in the incarnation, but especially in the crucifixion, for Saint Paul reminds us: “He who did not spare his own Son but handed him over for us all, how will he not also give us everything else along with him?” (Rom 8:32). 

The passionate love of God for the world, for you and for me, points ultimately to one thing – the Cross. Thus, the Cross ought to find a special place in our worship and in our lives during these final two weeks of Lent. 

Saint John Paul II speaks of the necessity of the Cross in his apostolic letter on the “Christian Meaning of Human Suffering” (Salvifici Doloris), “Christ goes toward his Passion and death with full awareness of the mission that he has to fulfill precisely in this way. … Precisely by means of his Cross he must strike at the roots of evil, planted in the history of man and in human souls. Precisely by means of his Cross he must accomplish the work of salvation. This work, in the plan of eternal love, has a redemptive character” (16). 

The traditional practice of covering or veiling the images of our Lord and the saints during the final weeks of Lent comes from John 12:36, “When he had finished speaking, Jesus left and hid himself from them.” When Good Friday arrives, the image of the Cross stands alone as the sign of the passionate love of God for us. 

How are we to respond to the passionate love of God? 

We are invited to allow Christ’s passion to be our own by uniting our passions and sufferings to his. The observance of Passiontide is not merely about going to Church on Palm Sunday to pick up our palms and walk in procession. Passiontide is not merely about going to kiss the wood of the Cross on Good Friday. These liturgical rites move us to ponder, “Who and what am I passionate about because I see God is passionate for me?” 

Our earthly passions can become the palms that hail the coming of the King of Glory rather than an expression of self-seeking pride. Our earthly sufferings become the splinters from the Tree of Life that affirm our hope in the Resurrection. 

We unite our passion to God’s passion, our suffering to Christ’s suffering, and then the words of Saint John Paul II ring clear in our hearts, “The eloquence of the Cross and death is completed by the eloquence of the Resurrection” (Salvifici Doloris, 20). 

Be passionate about your Catholic faith! Seize the opportunity to participate in the liturgical services of Passiontide this year in your parish. Palm Sunday, Holy Thursday and Good Friday all have their places along the path to Easter Sunday.