Every Friday during Lent, parishes around the country – maybe around the world? – offer one of the most enduring devotions of our faith: the Stations of the Cross. We retrace the route to Calvary, praying at each station. We sing – “At the cross, her station keeping / stood the mournful mother weeping…” and we kneel and we reflect, for a few moments on the torturous climb that took a beaten and whipped man to the top of a rocky hill, and his death.

Since this Lent began, I’ve been thinking of my friend Jim, who is taking his own climb up another difficult hill.

Jim is a deacon for the Diocese of Brooklyn; he was ordained with me last May. A burly bear of a man, he’s retired from the NYPD and now works in security at the Empire State Building. He also loves Disney World. He went there on his honeymoon, and has been going back ever since. A couple summers ago, his family and mine found ourselves in Orlando at the same time, and made arrangements to get together and share a cruise to watch the fireworks at Epcot. It was a memorable, magical evening.

A couple weeks ago, I got an e-mail from his wife, Kathleen: Jim was taken to the ER with what they thought was a heart attack. A day later, tests revealed that it was something else: stage four cancer of the colon and liver. He’s been in ICU ever since, drifting in and out of consciousness. He had a tracheotomy a few days back, to help his breathing, and he’s unable to speak. His wife, Kathleen, doesn’t think he realizes what, exactly, is wrong with him, only that it is serious. Jim will sometimes respond with a flicker of his eyes, or a faint squeeze of his hand. Sometimes Kathleen will see a tear roll down his cheek, and wipe it away.

The hill is steep. This is the road to Calvary, in 2008.

Anyone who has been through something like this knows what it is like. The long hours in an antiseptic room around strange machines and nameless people in white coats who come in to take readings, lower the shades or turn up the TV. They smile and take notes and they leave and you are alone with the faint sound of a loved one breathing and machines whirring.

Prayer can be difficult. Words won’t come. But the other day I pulled down from my shelf a little book that has given me a world of comfort: “The Way of the Cross in Times of Illness” by a Benedictine Oblate, Elizabeth Thecla Mauro. (I was asked to blurb the book four years ago when it was first published, and I hadn’t given it much thought until Jim got sick, and we started praying the Stations at my church, and I realized this version might be helpful to my prayer life. It was — and it is.) The book was honored by the Catholic Press Association a few years back, and deservedly so: it is a work of simplicity, sensitivity, holiness and eloquence that manages to find — even in the deepest despair — hope.

At each station, Mauro addresses Jesus – plaintively, sometimes poignantly.

When Jesus takes his cross at the second station, she writes:

As I face heavier burdens, heavier fears, the seemingly insurmountable weight of my own cross, I know you are with me. Having walked this path before, you will guide me, if only I keep my eyes on you. Grant that I, too, may bring dignity, bravery and strength to what I bear. With the help of your grace, perhaps I can surprise and astonish those who think of me as too weak, too fearful, to go forward. I will go forward, with you, to further glorify your name. Christ, help me carry this.

This slender volume is helping me to pray over the burdens that Jim and his family are carrying. It’s a meaningful new way of looking at one of our oldest Lenten devotions – and I think it will speak to many people, in many circumstances of life. For some, I suspect, “The Way of the Cross in Times of Illness” can be like Simon at the 5th Station – helping to bear the cross of sickness, even the heaviest cross of death. (I’ve seen a few copies at Catholic bookstores, but the best place to find it, I suspect, is at the Amazon link.)

I remember a moment in the TV movie “Brian’s Song,” about the death of football legend Brian Piccolo from leukemia. When his teammate Gayle Sayers receives an award, he chokes up and tells a national audience, “When you hit your knees tonight, remember Brian Piccolo.”

When you hit your knees tonight, please remember Deacon Jim.

And pray that God remembers him, too.