On Palm Sunday we heard the Passion narrative once more: the sacred history of our salvation; of the betrayal of Christ, of his trial, of his Passion, of his death on the Cross — those “ancient words, newly spoken”; a tale so familiar to us and yet in which we always seem to be struck anew by the tragedy, the violence, the pity, the love… We may notice something that has never struck us before, or hear the passage that always seems to strike at our heart year after year. We will hear the Passion several times over in the next few days, in the liturgy, or in other places. St Philip, we are told, would constantly be reading the accounts of it, and a very profitable thing for us to do in this Holy Week would be to find a quiet place, switch off our telephones, take up a New Testament, and read the account of what God did for us in the Passion, as we find it in the Gospels: to read one the Passion narratives slowly, and to think on it.

We do all seem to have one passage or another which strikes us more than others. The Servant of God Jacques Fesch wrote as he was preparing for his own execution: “Nothing about the apostles does as much for my faith as their incredulity, their rationalism, their weakness, their boasting, and their pride. ‘Who is the greatest amongst us?’ said Simon Peter. And his denial, who does not almost rejoice in it, seeing it as a reflection of one’s own weakness? But how sweet the response is, and how consoling are these words: ‘Jesus having gone out, turned around and looked at Peter’. Who has not felt the gaze of Jesus fall upon themselves, full of love and forgiveness, and who has not wept like Peter?” It is certainly true that those words of the Gospels really do seem to speak directly to us sometimes: of our own lives, our sins, our struggles, and our redemption too.

One phrase from the Gospel which seems especially piercing is that from St Matthew, when Christ, having prayed in the Garden, beholds the rabble come to arrest him. Our Lord casts his eyes upon Judas, who comes to kiss him, to greet him, not in love, but as a sign to the soldiers, as a seal on his betrayal of his Friend. Our Lord beholds him and speaks: “O Friend, on what errand hast thou come?” Naturally there are other translations, but the point is the same. O Friend — underlining the full tragedy of the betrayal, but yet, even then, mercy is offered to Judas. Despite our sins, our betrayal of Christ, still his friendship is on offer to us. The door is not closed as long as we have life in us. Peter would betray him too of course — but Peter in his tears, in his realisation of what he had done to his Friend, he knew there was mercy for him. When Peter heard Our Lord had risen from the dead, he did not flee fearing retribution for his betrayal, but Peter ran, and rejoiced, met the Lord and was restored. How different our sacred history might have been if Peter in his tears had met Judas in his despair. If Judas on his way to destroy himself had met Peter and heard the promise of mercy and of forgiveness, the reassurance that Christ gave to every one of us, that even if after a lifetime of sin if we turn to him, acknowledge our Friend with a contrite heart, well then, even after all that, we can be with him in Paradise…

“On what errand hast thou come?” Our Lord asks this of us all. Every situation, every meeting, every time we go down on our knees to pray to him — what have we come for? He will ask it of each of us when we come to live his Passion with him over the Triduum. O Friend, on what errand have you come? O Friend, why have you come? Let us come acknowledging that often we are Judas, but praying always to be Peter — for seeing the greatness of God’s love displayed for us in all its reality over this Holy Week, we cannot fail to see and to know that there is always mercy, always forgiveness, always a chance to turn to him and begin anew, for there is always his love on offer to us, always our God wanting us to be his friend. Sometimes we need to be reminded of that. Always we need to pray for the grace to accept it.

“The painter’s brush touched the inchoate face by ends of nimble bristles and, with that blush of first colour, rendered her lifeless cheek living.” So run the first lines of a relatively unknown poem. But there is truth in these words — by daubs of paint, even the most naive movement, emotion and life can be conjured. We’ve been thinking a lot about this as the layers of modern paint in our church’s sanctuary have been peeled away by the extraordinary skill of the team from Cliveden Conservation. Some came away easily, some by the painstaking application of a scalpel. Some cracks needed filling and re-colouring, some gilding needed a new touch of gold leaf and one whole section had to be repainted from fragmentary evidence. It was a labour of love, a slow and at times anxious process. The results speak for themselves.

Four roundels are framed by scrolling leaves and gilt flowers, each telling the story of a scene from our patron saint’s life. His first Holy Communion at the hands of St Charles Borromeo, the renunciation of his father’s wealth, his profession in the Society of Jesus and finally his all too early death. He is not alone in these scenes, those others — saints, parents, confreres — who played their part on Aloysius’ journey to sanctity are depicted too. There is an elegance and a simplicity to Gabriel Pippet’s work in the forms and shapes and the colours he chose. A fitting tribute to a life lived for God and others.

It makes one think. If my life were to be depicted in four or so scenes, either in the mind of others or on a church wall, which would be the defining moments? Perhaps we cannot choose, perhaps there are some which would make us blush to remember them, perhaps others are painful and challenging. We are all on a path to sainthood. In the last analysis our life will be weighed in that balance that only God, the just judge of our life, has an eye on. In the present we, by his grace, have the chance to form those crucial scenes. The choices we make now are always formative.

“You are God’s work of art,” St Paul writes to the Ephesians. We are a work in progress, perfected and helped along by the love and the mercy of our God who takes a keen and loving interest in our life. There is a process of restoration going on in us too — sometimes easy, sometimes by the painstaking application of a scalpel of repentance. Elsewhere, St Paul exhorts his readers to fill their minds with that which is “true, whatever is honourable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise.” St Aloysius, in his short life, sought these things with an intrepid and uncompromising zeal and put them to the service of others. This was his path to conversion, fulfilled in that final scene of our murals in which he spoke of going to heaven, “as if it were a walk out to Tivoli.” The time to seek heaven is now.

Conversion has been much on the minds of many of us during Lent. By our prayers and our sacrifices we seek to draw closer to the Lord, to rely more on him, to seek his help more. As we move into Passiontide, the reality of his sacrifice of love should dawn a little more clearly on our minds. That loveable saviour was cruelly treated, disfigured, beaten and killed on account of our sins, but the love that was at the heart of his sacrifice was also on account of our sins since he knows his love saves us from them. Our image may at times resemble him in his disfigured state, but as we dispose our selves more and more to the action of his grace, we will resemble him more and more in his risen glory. That heavenly glory has to be the guiding inspiration behind all the scenes that form the artwork of our lives.