CPTnet
27 April 2006

MEXICO/U.S. BORDERLANDS REFLECTION: A Good Friday experience

by Brother Denis Murphy

This past Good Friday I experienced on a CPT delegation the Stations of the
Cross in a new way. The Stations are a traditional Catholic practice of
recalling moments of Christ's passion, death, and resurrection from Holy
Thursday to Easter Sunday.

In the past, most Stations I have attended have been in the early evening
with fifty to one hundred people in a church where we recalled the
sufferings of Christ and our own sinfulness. This year, the stations took
place outside in Douglas, Arizona along the wall separating the U.S. border
from Mexico at 3:00 a.m. The stations were the experience of only seven
people, three CPT members, the two delegation members and two staff from
Frontera de Cristo, which co-sponsored of the action.

We assembled fifteen crosses, painting them white. At each station we would
spray-paint scriptural quotations on the wall. We began our walk over a two
and a half mile area, and we took turns pounding a cross into the ground and
reading the scripture and reflection for each station. We carried a large,
heavy cross from station to station. Scriptures about Christ's suffering and
death combined with reflections on how the migrants are experiencing
suffering and death as they cross through a desert in both Mexico and the
U.S., and as they attempt to escape detection in the U.S.

Having lived at Su Casa Catholic Worker when Central American refugees
seeking political asylum came to us, I found that the ritual reminded me of
the stories refugees shared about the hardships of passing through Mexico. I
became silently overwhelmed by the thought of the thousands of migrants who
had crossed the border and their suffering over the years. And while here
had been many desert deaths, countless resurrections also happened in the
successful crossing of so many.