The one enduring truth that I have come to know over the course of my life is that everybody has a cross to bear. You might never know what that cross may be in someone else’s life: they may keep it private and hidden, or they may come to reveal an aspect of their experience that you had never suspected. There was a beloved twin sister who died from a tragic accident in her 20s. There was a son who took his own life, and the parent blames himself. There was an alcoholic mother who needed a daughter’s care, and the situation dominated the best years of the young woman’s life. There was a series of almost unbearable depressions. There is an autistic child. Or an apparently normal teenager develops schizophrenia and – in a case I have known – knifes his own father and sister to death, leaving the rest of the family devastated by grief. There is the affliction of addiction. There is the couple who seem dedicated to living an agreeable life, having fun and travelling, and then it emerges that they once had an adored only child who died. There is a hidden criminal record from a youthful fall from grace which has blighted an individual’s employment prospects, and ruined a job offer in America. There is the jovial young man who seems to have the world before him, but he has an intimate health malfunction which he feels he can never disclose to others. Some crosses seem minor to others, but they loom large in the person’s life: a crucial exam was flunked because the student carelessly didn’t turn over the page and answer the second half of the paper – and his chance to become a classical scholar was missed for life. While some crosses are very great: witnesses to terrible suffering in war and in famines; experiences of terrible cruelty or abuse. There are marriages and relationships which turn sour, faithless, or violent. There are the ordinary disappointments of life felt so keenly – “all those little dreams that never did come true”, as an old song puts it. There are the bitter, rueful regrets of wrong-doing, or of failure to show love when it was most needed, or of wishing so profoundly we could turn the clock back and do so many things differently, or tell our dead parents that their advice was so right, when at the time we scorned their counsel contemptuously. Yes, everyone has a cross to bear, which is one of the reasons why Holy Week matters, and why the Stations of the Cross also trace such a narrative of our own lives. And why the hope of redemption in Easter matters so much as well.