by Pavel Chichikov
TRAVELER, STOP HERE
Traveler, stop here to rest
And of your soul your pride divest,
Before you travel on, your Lent
Requires that your knee be bent
To praise and glorify the Cross,
Our gain of life, of His the loss,
To praise adoringly the gift
Of loving Christ, His royal thrift,
That God should love so much that He
Discarded vast eternity
For sinners made of meager dust,
Of greed and gluttony and lust,
Conceited, envious, disloyal
Around whose souls those demons coil –
So then we cast our robes of night
Upon the ground, and travel light
Along the self-denying way,
For who can pilgrimage so weighed?
And since the hill of Christ is steep,
As high as heaven, none can leap
From here to there, but step by step
Each vow of self-denial kept
Will bring us upward to re-birth
As we throw off our clothes of earth
—For Mysteries and Stations in the Manner of Ignatius, see here.
