The Cross

Note:  Today's slice features guest writer, Sister Aemiliana Lohr, O.S.B. a German nun who wrote about the liturgy and died in 1972.

The Church's life is a life of he cross, a continual dying. Yet her speech is joyful; her liturgy is the festival of life. She suffers death, but she already lives the Resurrection, for her food is the meat of immortality; she has part in the risen Christ, and cannot perish.  Rather, as she shows us today, when she keeps only the prayer for the people and the Holy communion from the Mass of Holy Thursday, she remains alone in the world's decline, daily suffering death, daily awakened to life, praying for her murderers and making petitions, in the song of the joyful cross, for the tortured world.  With her hands outstretched in prayer, wholly one with her Lord, she is herself the cross, of which it should be said until the end of time, "Through the cross joy entered the entire world."
Sister Aemiliana Lohr