Morning Devotions

THE FXBG ADVANCE FRIDAY 8/7/26 MORNING READ

By Dewey Turner, ADVANCE ANSWER PERSON

Nathan Dumlao/Unsplash

Hey Dewey,

What are the 14 Stations of the Cross? I mean for regular people who aren’t necessarily religious?

Been Meaning to Ask

Dear Been,

First, don’t let your totally understandable antipathy for those odious Christian nationalists wrecking what’s left of America cloud your vision. Most Christians are regular people, too, and if they find prayerful meditation over the Stations of the Cross helpful then I’m all for it. You don’t have to be a believer to appreciate the sacrifice—and the moments of kindness—in the Passion story, and to know that there can be solace and comfort—sometimes deep, centering solace and comfort—in ritual. And how can we not be empathetic when contemplating the stages of Jesus’, or anybody’s, final journey:

(1) Condemned. (2) Forced to bear the cross. (3) Falling (4) Seeing His mom. (5) Relinquishing the cross to Simon of Cyrene, who’s ordered to carry it for Him. (6) Encountering Veronica, a bystander, who wipes His face with her veil. (7) Falling a second time. (8) Hearing the women of Jerusalem crying at His suffering. (9) Falling a third time. (10) Stripped of His clothes. (11) Nailed to the cross. (12) Dying on the cross. (13) Taken down. (14) Interred and left alone in the sepulcher.

It’s different, of course, for us other regular folks, the secularists, but we can have our Stations of the Cross, too, in a way—anything ritualistic that provides opportunity for centering, for mindfulness, and for gratitude. Mine starts first thing in the morning, hours before anyone else is awake, when I crawl out of bed. It may sound blasphemous to devout Christians, but I don’t mean for it to. Thich Nhat Hanh says everything in life is sacred, or ought to be, and I feel that way, too.

My Stations of the Cross

(1) Stumble to the bathroom, thankful that my apparently shrinking bladder only woke me twice during the night.

(2) Turn on the coffee maker and take miracle pills.

(3) Open curtains to the backyard and gaze in wonder at the moon or what’s left of it in the fading night sky.

(4) Let out the dog and hope he doesn’t wake the neighbors by barking his fool head off at deer and foxes and groundhogs and squirrels and snakes and god knows what else has managed to survive in the small wooded area beyond the backyard fence in our aggressively suburban subdivision.

(5) Turn off the night light we always leave on as if there might be lost ships somewhere out there that need help navigating their way into port.

(6) Fill the dog’s dish and let him back in to have at it, marveling at how he knows from all the way outside as soon as I open the cupboard and scoop out his food because he can hear sounds four times farther away than a mere human like me, and his sense of smell is as much as 100,000 times stronger.

(7) Doctor my coffee and take a first, blissful sip, knowing that no other sip the rest of the cup, or any other cups the rest of the day, will be as sublime.

(8) Turn on the computer and read the local paper, Washington Post, New York Times, and Heather Cox Richardson’s “Letter from an American,” thankful for the Fourth Estate and in agreement with Thomas Jefferson: “[W]ere it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”

(9) Check social media and read emails. Practice electronic Swedish death cleaning. Enjoy the fleeting satisfaction of an uncluttered inbox.

(10) Check the hourly weather and 10-day prediction on Weather.com to prepare for what’s to come—and then promptly forget so the future remains a mystery.

(11) Do the New York Times Spelling Bee and cheat if necessary to win Queen Bee honor.

(12) Perform daily ablutions and other bathroom business.

(13) Clean CPAP tubing, headgear, nasal pillow, and water chamber, and give thanks for forced air.

(14) Let the dog out again and hope he doesn’t bark his fool head off and wake the neighbors, though perhaps they’re up by then as well, and going through their own Stations of the Cross.

***

Dewey Turner spent much of his childhood in Polk County, Florida. He reports—with some consternation but no real surprise—that a great number of the kids he knew when he was a boy grew up to become Florida Man. If you’d like to get in touch with Dewey for questions or anything else, you can email him at deweyturnerdsm@gmail.com.