Via Crucis Quotes

This is the true via crucis: the cross destroys the self-justifying ego, putting it to death.

Quella ciocca di capelli restò l'A del mio alfabeto, il primo mistero della mia Via Crucis, la prima reliquia della mia felicità; la prima parola scritta insomma della mia vita; varia com'essa, e quasi inesplicabile come quella di tutti.

Ele chorou um pouco. Era um belo homem, com barba por fazer e abatidíssimo. Via-se que havia fracassado. Como todos nós. Ele me perguntou se podia ler para mim um poema. Eu disse que queria ouvir. Ele abriu uma sacola, tirou de dentro um caderno grosso, pôs-se a rir, ao abrir as folhas. Então leu o poema. Era simplesmente uma beleza. Misturava palavrões com as maiores delicadezas. Oh Cláudio, tinha eu vontade de gritar – nós todos somos fracassados, nós todos vamos morrer um dia! Quem? mas quem pode dizer com sinceridade que se realizou na vida? O sucesso é uma mentira

You do not make your own cross, although unbelief is a master carpenter at cross-making; neither are you permitted to choose your own cross, although self-will wants to be lord and master. But your cross is prepared and appointed for you by divine love, and you must cheerfully accept it; you are to take up the cross as your chosen badge and burden, and not to stand complaining. This night Jesus bids you submit your shoulder to His easy yoke. Do not kick at it in petulance, or trample on it in pride, or fall under it in despair, or run away from it in fear, but take it up like a true follower of Jesus. Jesus was a cross-bearer; He leads the way in the path of sorrow. Surely you could not desire a better guide! And if He carried a cross, what nobler burden would you desire? The Via Crucis is the way of safety; fear not to tread its thorny paths. Beloved, the cross is not made of feathers or lined with velvet; it is heavy and galling to disobedient shoulders; but it is not an iron cross, though your fears have painted it with iron colors; it is a wooden cross, and a man can carry it, for the Man of Sorrows tried the load. Take up your cross, and by the power of the Spirit of God you will soon be so in love with it that like Moses you would not exchange the reproach of Christ for all the treasures of Egypt. Remember that Jesus carried it; remember that it will soon be followed by the crown, and the thought of the coming weight of glory will greatly lighten the present heaviness of trouble. May the Lord help you bow your spirit in submission to the divine will before you fall asleep tonight, so that waking with tomorrow’s sun, you may go forth to the day’s cross with the holy and submissive spirit that is fitting for a follower of the Crucified.

Se li immaginò, il commissario, i due vecchiareddri camminare nella notte, nello scuro, davanti a qualcuno che li teneva sotto punterìa. Certamente avevano truppicàto sulle pietre, erano caduti e si erano fatti male, ma sempre avevano dovuto rialzarsi e ripigliare la strata, macari con l'aiuto di qualche càvucio dei boia. E, di sicuro, non si erano ribellati, non avevano fatto voci, non avevano supplicato, muti, aggelati dalla consapevolezza della morte imminente. Un'agonia interminabile, una vera e propria via crucis, quella trentina di metri. Era questa spietata esecuzione la linea da non oltrepassare della quale gli aveva parlato Balduccio Sinagra? La crudele ammazzatina a sangue freddo di due vecchiareddri tremanti e indifesi? Ma no, via, non poteva essere questo il limite, non da questo duplice omicidio Balduccio voleva chiamarsi fuori. Loro avevano fatto ben altro, avevano incaprettato, torturato vecchi e picciotti, avevano persino strangolato e poi disciolto nell'acido un picciliddro di dieci anni, colpevole solo di essere nato in una certa famiglia. Quindi quello che vedeva, per loro, ancora rientrava dentro la linea. L'orrore, al momento invisibile, stava perciò tanticchia più in là. Ebbe come una leggera vertigine, si appoggiò al braccio di Mimì. «Ti senti bene, Salvo?». «È che questa mascherina mi dà tanticchia d'accùpa». No, il peso sul petto, la mancanza di respiro, il retrogusto di una sconfinata malinconia, l'accùpa insomma, non gliela stava provocando la mascherina. Si calò in avanti per taliare meglio i due cadaveri. E fu allora che poté notare una cosa che finì di sconvolgerlo. Sotto la fanghiglia si vedevano a rilievo il braccio destro di lei e quello mancino di lui. Le due braccia erano stese dritte, si toccavano. Si calò in avanti ancora di più per taliare meglio, stringendo sempre il braccio di Mimì. E vide le mani dei due morti: le dita della mano dritta di lei erano intrecciate a quelle della mano mancina di lui. Erano morti tenendosi per mano. Nella notte, nel terrore, avendo davanti lo scuro più scuro della morte, si erano cercati, si erano trovati, si erano dati l'un l'altra conforto come tante altre volte avevano sicuramente fatto nel corso della loro vita. La pena, la pietà l'assugliarono improvvise con due cazzotti al petto.

I write these last lines on Sauvie's Island - the Wappatto of the Indians - sitting upon the bank of the river, beneath the gnarled and ancient cottonwood that still marks the spot where the old Columbia trail led up from the water to the interior of the island. Stately and beautiful are the far snow-peaks and the sweeping forest. The woods are rich in the colors of an Oregon autumn. The white wappatto blooms along the marshes, its roots ungathered, the dusky hands that once reaped the harvest long crumbled into dust. Blue and majestic in the sunlight flows the Columbia, river of many names -- the Wauna and the Wemath of the Indians, the St. Roque of the Spaniards, the Oregon of poetry -- always vast and grand, always flowing placidly to the sea. Steamboats of the present; batteaux of the fur traders; ships, Grey's and Vancouver's, of discovery; Indian canoes of the old unknown time -- the stately river has seen them all come and go, and yet holds its way past forest and promontory, still beautiful and unchanging. Generation after generation, daring hunter, ardent discoverer, silent Indian -- all the shadowy peoples of the past have sailed its waters as we sail them, have lived perplexed and haunted by mystery as we live, have gone out into the Great Darkness with hearts full of wistful doubt and questioning, as we go; and still the river holds its course, bright, beautiful, inscrutable. It stays; we go. It there anything beyond the darkness into which generation follows generation and race follows race? Surely there is an after-life, where light and peace shall come to all who, however defeated, have tried to be true and loyal; where the burden shall be lifted and the heartache shall cease; where all the love and hope that slipped away from us here shall be given back to us again, and given back forever Via crucis, via lucis.

Sustained perhaps by the thought of an end to his ordeal, the General tackled this via crucis with scarcely a groan. Helped by Manoli and me when he stumbled and then by the guerrillas that shimmered like ghosts out of the vacancy, he moved across the landscape in a sort of trance. But, tormenting as our journey was, the dazzle of the moon and, when it set, of a blaze of stars that was nearly as bright, undermined this commotion of rock and then, by a planetary device in collusion with the optical tricks of which, at some moments, Crete seems to be composed — involving manipulated reflection and focus, levitation, geometrical shifts and a dissolving of solids balanced by a solidification of shadow — filled the hollow, then porous and finally transparent island under foot with lunar and stellar properties and, while hoisting it several leagues in the air, simultaneously, with moves as quiet as an opening gambit followed by those advances of knights and bishops, fast and stealthy as grandmother’s steps, which lead to penultimate castling and a sudden luminous checkmate, regrouped all the mountain tops of Crete within touching distance. The valleys and foothills had dropped away from this floe of triangles; they drifted in the windless cold starlight with the pallor, varying with their distance, of ice or ivory.