Come to Me, All of You Stations of the Cross in the Voice of Christ

Stations of the Cross are often predictable, but in these fourteen encounters, Amy Ekeh places us face-to-face, heart-to-heart with the suffering Christ. We listen to Jesus 'with the ear of the heart' and then respond to him in heartfelt prayer. Each station becomes a transforming dialogue, moving to a contemplative gazing through the bold and tender linocuts of Gabrielle Rowell. Enhance your Friday devotion by accompanying Jesus and becoming personal participants along his way of compassionate love.

What a beautiful, deeply moving book Amy Ekeh’s Come to Me, All of You is, and how profoundly original in its approach to the Stations of the Cross! In straightforward, direct language (not clichéd, sentimental, or “churchy”) Ekeh imagines what Christ might have been thinking at each station, inviting readers not simply to marvel at his holiness, but to place themselves in the scene and claim kinship through the circumstances of their own suffering and faith journeys. Gabrielle Rowell’s black and white linocut images—at once stark and full of evocative details—complement this approach with inspiration for further visio divina prayer and meditation, as do the evocative “Come to me, all of you” invocations in each station—each one naming a situation, fear, or hope with which readers will be able to identify. This is a book to cherish, one that will richly repay rereading season after season, year after year.

Amy Ekeh’s deep meditations on each step of Jesus’s painful journey to the Cross, accompanied by Gabrielle Rowell’s startlingly beautiful linocuts, transform the familiar practice of praying the Stations into something fresh, new, and surprisingly revelatory. I highly recommend this lovely book.

Amy Ekeh invites us to enter into the Stations of the Cross with, as St. Paul would put it, 'the same mind as Christ.' Imagine, she says, what Christ might have been thinking as he walked that difficult path to Calvary and beyond. What Scripture passages would have brought him consolation? Ekeh helps the words of Scripture take flesh in our own lives. In the times when we are faced with suffering and in the moments when we collapse under the weight of the crosses we bear, we can turn to these words as well. These meditations reminded me to think like Christ not just in his passion but in my day-to-day life. Gabriella Rowell's intense and powerful black and white linotypes brought me to my knees at the start of each station, drawing me wordlessly in to stand with and before Jesus in his passion. Together the graceful text and images brought me more deeply into the familiar story of the passion.