For Javier Jimenez, Good Friday is more than just an annual Christian tradition commemorating Jesus Christ’s death and crucifixion.
It’s a reminder, he said, of the day he was inspired to start living a more prayerful life after attending the Via Crucis, a live Stations of the Cross procession reenacting Christ’s journey to the cross.
On Friday morning, Jimenez, 55, returned to the Santiago Retreat Center in Silverado for the Via Crucis just as he has for the past seven years, to contemplate his own faith journey and Christ’s final hours in a peaceful, tranquil environment.
“I didn’t know anything about God back then,” said Jimenez, a parishioner at La Purisima Catholic Church in Orange. “But when they invited me here for the first time it transformed me. My life was a disaster, but here I saw that God touched my heart and since that day my life has changed.”
Jimenez was among 1,500 to 2,000 people who were expected to celebrate Good Friday at the retreat center in various ways this year, from participating in individual and group tours, to learning more about the Shroud of Turin – believed by some to be the burial garment of Jesus Christ – in an on-site exhibit.
The center opens its grounds to the public for free on Good Friday, said Mark McElrath, executive director, as a way to provide people with a quiet place to pray away from the hustle and bustle of everyday life.
“It’s a different experience,” he said. “At parishes across the world, people are in churches doing the Stations of the Cross or veneration of the cross or having Good Friday services. It’s a very interior experience. What’s going on out here is in God’s natural creation.”
Friday’s group tours kicked off with the Via Crucis in Spanish at 9 a.m., followed by a Way of the Cross Hike in English at 1 p.m.
Jimenez joined a few hundred participants of all ages in completing the Via Crucis, walking uphill for more than an hour in the morning sun while…
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