Giving Ourselves to Holy Week

Dear Friend,

This Sunday, Palm Sunday of the Lord’s Passion, begins Holy Week, which features the richest liturgies of the entire year. Reflecting on Holy Week some years ago, the late great Jesuit scholar, Walter Burghardt, offered this challenge: “I am not asking for wailing and weeping, or balloons and guitars…I am asking you…to live day after day the dying-rising that Holy Week symbolizes…The liturgy expresses ritually what goes on in the rest of our lives; the liturgical journey ritualizes the human journey. But does it?”

Good question! We began the liturgical year in Advent and since then war, environmental devastation, poverty and mass migration have continued to plunge the human family into peril, tragedy and disturbances of “the unknown”. At the same time we have witnessed heroism, creativity, and new signs of life.

Holy Week - more than any other week on our Roman Catholic calendar - raises questions about the connection between how we live and how we practice our sacred ritual prayer. On Sunday we will proclaim the full account of Jesus’s passion and death (this year according to Luke). Thursday brings us the ritual washing of the feet; Friday, the veneration of the Cross. At the Vigil Saturday night we will solemnly recall our baptism with the initiation of new members of the Christian community.  

To paraphrase a popular saying: Our lives and our rituals are God’s gift to us; what we make of them is our gift to God and to one another at this sacred time of our sacred lives. In the Mission church this week we’ll see beautiful images, hear words and music that touch our soul. We’ll smell the incense, feel the water, and touch the wood of the Cross. Let’s give ourselves to Holy Week, and through it, let Jesus shape our lives.  

Gratefully,

Fr. Dan ofm, Pastor