Friday, March 25, 2005

4:20 PM The latest entry in the Crosswalk weblog is called Miracle in the Making. 11:07 AM If you would like to be blessed on this Good Friday, read the poem The Sacrifice, written in 1633 by George Herbert. The music to “O Sacred Head Now Wounded” plays in the background. Read and let your heart revisit Skull Hill where Christ gave himself for us. Here are the first two stanzas:

Oh all ye, who passe by, whose eyes and minde To worldly things are sharp, but to me blinde; To me, who took eyes that I might you finde: Was ever grief like mine? The Princes of my people make a head Against their Maker: they do wish me dead, Who cannot wish, except I give them bread; Was ever grief like mine?

The following stanzas take you through the betrayal, arrest, trials, and our Lord’s suffering on the cross. The poem ends this way:

Nay, after death their spite shall further go; For they will pierce my side, I full well know; That as sinne came, so Sacraments might flow: Was ever grief like mine? But now I die; now all is finished. My wo, mans weal: and now I bow my head. Onely let others say, when I am dead, Never was grief like mine.

8:09 AM John Podhoretz does of an excellent job of explaining the collision of two profoundly different worldviews in the Terri Schiavo case. Here is the opening paragraph. I encourage you to read the entire article:

The looming death by starva tion of Terri Schiavo has ex posed yet again the key fault line in American culture. Those who have sided with her parents in seeking the reinsertion of her feeding tube have a view of life that is profoundly different from those who have sided with her husband’s quest to have her die.

8:03 AM Click here for a gut-wreching description of what it’s like to die of thirst. 7:54 AM If you are in the Chicago area, please join us for one of our two Good Friday services at 6 & 8 PM. Both services will end with those present being invited to come forward with a signed card and to personally nail their card to a large wooden cross. It’s a symbolic way of saying, “Jesus took my sins on himself when he died on the cross for me.” It is profoundly moving to see whole families coming forward and to watch parents helping their children nail their cards to the cross. It will be a solemn, intimate, and very personal way to commemorate the death of Christ. Bring your family and friends with you to this special service. 7:50 AM Lucette Lagnado explains why we should care about Terri Schiavo:

In the wake of the Terri Schiavo ordeal, we are now treated to published accounts of children recalling how they denied their own parents nutrition. “Defining deviancy down” was the phrase coined by Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan to describe a society that had lost its moral compass and lowered its capacity for outrage. The phrase seems perfect to describe the middle- and upper-middle-class children who have surfaced to boast of how they ended their parents’ lives—as if it had been somehow an act of valor. It is also a chillingly apt description of a society that, in the name of the law, forces a young woman to die of thirst and to starve even as we watch.

7:49 AM Brett Stephens explains why America needs Simon Cowell.