Dear Parishioner,

 Triumph of the Cross Sunday, 14th September 2025 

There is a powerful Afro-American Spiritual hymn from the 19th-century erupting out of the American slave experience of suffering and hope of an enslaved people connecting Jesus’s suffering to their own. Passed down orally initially with variations, and first published in 1899

It is a hymn for Good Friday, but also to be sung during Lent and especially during the Stations of the Cross.  I find it wonderful.  It never ceases to be overpowering and full of raw deep felt emotion.  Singing it, you cannot but become engrossed and caught up in the great profundity and overwhelming awesomeness of the meaning of the Cross

I first heard it as a boy growing up in Rathgar, my home Parish in Dublin.  My Parish Priest loved singing it and so did parishioners.  It cannot but move the soul. I defy you to say otherwise.

Each verse is just a simple stark question repeated: “Were you there…. ?” A simple question perfect for prayer and contemplation. “Were you there when they crucified my Lord;  … when they nailed him to a tree; and when the sun refused to shine”  but climaxing in the final verse “were you there when he rose from out the tomb?”  But its the Chorus that just cuts right through you. It expresses the shear raw emotion of that day, of Good Friday, its consequences, its starkness and its meaning.

Today we celebrate, we stand in awe and continue to contemplate this incredible mystery, when the Saviour of the World, the Son of God, Christ Jesus took all our sins on his shoulders and carried them, carried us. And by those very wounds he saved us, he healed us and redeemed us!  “Oh sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble.  Were you there when they crucified my Lord”

Dom Ambrose McCambridge OSB PP