In Remembrance

“This day shall be for you a memorial day, and you shall keep it as a feast to the Lord.”

Exodus 12:14

The Exodus story is one of the Bible’s most vivid and dramatic narratives.  The wickedness of Pharaoh, the steadfast courage of Moses, the horrors of the plagues, the spectacle of the the Red Sea’s high waves, frozen in place—they almost seem, to us to demand a screenplay.  There have been plenty of Exodus movies, from Cecil DeMille’s great 1956 epic The Ten Commandments, to the animated Prince of Egypt, a favorite in our household.  Earlier this week, I asked my sons if they knew about the ten plagues, and was very impressed when they could reel off all ten of them.  “Did you cover that in Sunday School?” I asked.  “No dad,” came the response—"it’s in the movie.”

I didn’t ask them if they had been reading about the Exodus directly from the Bible. But if they had tried, they would have found a story paced quite differently from any film I’ve seen.[1]  It’s not that the filmmakers need to invent lots of episodes.  All the powerful stuff comes right off the pages.  It’s that they usually leave out much of what the Book of Exodus actually says. 

Praying the Passion with St. Bridget: Call to Mind

We know that our old self was crucified with him so that the sinful body might be destroyed, and we might no longer be enslaved to sin.  Romans 6:6

In my last meditation, I spoke about the way in which Bridget’s passion prayers carefully turn us away from the danger of viewing Christ’s passion and death as a purely human story.  They also, quite carefully steer us away from the accompanying danger of seeing the Cross as an event that belongs only to the past, something that happened on a lonely hill in Palestine long ago and remains there, an interesting story in someone else’s life.

Instead Bridget believes that Christ’s passion and death are a reality with deep significance for the present moment, and that Christian discipleship is deeply bound up in responding to Christ’s call, described in one of the prayers as “enduring in the way of the Cross.”