The paramedics arrived within minutes, but even that immediacy was too slow. Gregory, a former student of mine, had fallen from a skateboard at high speed, a tumble that left him on life support. He died a year ago today, during the dark hours of Palm Sunday, two months before his high school graduation.
At a crowded Mass that March morning, I spent the hour meditating on Christ's crucifixion. I tried, in the spirit of Ignatian contemplation, to place myself in the scene. To sit with Jesus in Gethsemane, to hear his fitful breathing, his utterings of agony, the footprints of the approaching guards. I ran my hand over my frayed strip of palm, hoping to merge the grief of Greg’s family into the narrative of the Passion. But imagining Jesus scourged and mocked was like imagining the battles of the Civil War. It was academic, emptied of spiritual return.
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