To your stations

My faith journey picked up during my adolescence.....go figure. As a youth, Good Friday was a time to be somber and reflective, don the black clothes and attend a service of worship.  Normally, it was a Tenebrae service in the evening.....which made sense as the name itself suggests darkness. 

Being protestant we didn't do the Stations of the Cross.  When I lived and worked in Erie, I involved myself with the Benedictine Community.  The times spent with those Sisters, the Bennies, was a spiritual spark and strengthening that serves me still and onward.  During one Lenten Season, I was invited to participate as a reader in the community's annual Good Friday Peace Pilgrimage through the streets of Erie.  

The set-up was a modern day Stations of the Cross with stops planned to raise awareness to the suffering of God's children in these days. As we walked the seven mile pilgrimage (cars were also provided to make certain all who wanted could participate). The stops of reading and reflection, prayer and stirs to act with love and justice were:

• the armory to lament the blood and treasury continued to be afforded to support the USA's military-industrial complex; 
• a "girlie bar" known around the city as a place that objectified women; 
• the space at a location where a person was murdered for his sexual orientation; 
• a kids park whose swings and slides were adorned with graffiti and messages not fit for the eyes of children nor for that matter anyone. 
• a food pantry to reflect on the many weighed down by poverty;
• there was the reading and reflection at the understood-by-all line that lead into what locals still called the "colored part" of the city; 
• an overlook of Lake Erie where the shoreline was littered with trash.

Where we to participate in a Stations of the Cross pilgrimage for these days and times in which we live where would you have us stop and pray, lament, and repent for a life change to be more just?