Station of the Cross Ten 2023

Allie Senyard and Larisa Shaterian, Seminarians
Holy Apostles Episcopal Church, Good Friday 2023

The Stations of the Cross

The Tenth Station: Jesus is Stripped. 

Station One | Two | Three | Four | Five | Six | Seven | Eight | Nine | Ten | Eleven | Twelve | Thirteen | Fourteen

The Tenth Station: Jesus is Stripped.                                                                       

Jesus breathed in.

Breathe in.

Breathe out.

Part of the indignity is to be crucified naked. Jesus is completely stripped of any pride.  The wounds on his back are torn open again. He experiences the ultimate vulnerability of the defenseless. No shield or security protects him. As they stare at him, his eyes turn to heaven.

I feel like I notice that I’m breathing fairly often like it’s something I’m aware of. Like, I use my breathing a lot, like, I’ll notice—like if I notice I’m anxious, I’ll consciously breathe slower on purpose. And I notice my breathing when my breathing hurts: when I’m anxious or sad. In my chest sometimes it’s like a hollow, carved-out space in my breastbone it feels like, and sometimes it’s like these two points of prickly, angry pain, like on either side at like the bottom of my rib-cage.

Well, as I doula I definitely notice other people’s breathing. laughs Breathing is important during birth. chuckles I feel like it’s like what I always tell my clients: if I’m doing a good job of holding the space for them, to be really present and to be in the right hormonal and mental and emotional space, then I don’t have to babysit their breathing at all. I don’t have to suggest they breathe slower or suggest they breathe deeper or like tell them, you know how to do it or how to shift it, I can just like observe and kinda have the sense of where they are in the process and what’s going on with them based on observing it and I really only have to step in and make a suggestion if they’re—if I can tell that something’s throwing them off, if they’re stuck or they’re scared or sometimes it’s just a nurse came in to take their temperature and it got them out of the groove, and it’s like, “Oh, you were doing so well a few minutes ago, let’s go, let’s try to go back to that, it’s kinda, you know, like this.”

I mean, if you don’t already know, your respiration rate and particularly like, your inhale and your exhale are distinctly linked to your fight or flight and your rest and digest response. So if your exhale is longer than your inhale, you are activating your rest and digest response, you’re turning off fight or flight. So it’s this really handy little switch to move you out of that fear space and that adrenaline space into calm space from which you can think and use your thinky-brain—technical terms. 

Breathe in.

Breathe out.

Jesus breathed out.

Station One | Two | Three | Four | Five | Six | Seven | Eight | Nine | Ten | Eleven | Twelve | Thirteen | Fourteen