How to Do Holy Week

Holy Week is a solemn week of extra prayer and fasting. It involves the Triduum: Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and the Easter Vigil. During those three days we recall—and through our prayer participate in—Jesus’ Last Supper with his disciples, his arrest, trial, and execution, the long day of silence (Holy Saturday) while his body rested in the grave, and his Resurrection on Easter. The many readings of Scripture surrounding the Passion, Death, and Resurrection of Christ give us a lot of material for reflection and prayer.
Unfortunately, the rest of the world does not stop or slow down to give us extra time for all this liturgy and church attendance. How to “do” Holy Week, especially if we will not be participating in all the special church liturgies at this time?
Here are just a few suggestions. I hope you’re helped by at least one or two of them.

• Spend a little time each day listening to music that helps you slow down. It doesn’t matter what kind of music—hymns, jazz, folksong, symphony pieces, songs with meaningful words, or pieces that are instrumental only—as long as the listening helps you breathe more slowly and go to a place deeper in your spirit.
• Prepare at least one meal with special care for the people in your home (or, if you live alone, for you and a guest or two), and make certain all of you sit down together to eat it. Today, I did some “butter sculpting” and carved an “Easter Lamb” for our traditional Polish breakfast on Easter morning. Now I need a recipe for “plazak."
• Choose one of the Passion narratives—from any of the four Gospels—and read it aloud to yourself over the course of the week. Don’t try to learn anything new or have a profound experience; simply read the story, asking God to help this story live in you better this year than it ever has before.
• While you’re sitting—maybe at the end of the day, trying to unwind in front of the IPad or in a favorite chair—try drawing aspects of Holy Week. Use whatever paper and pen(cil) is available and express something about symbols that are meaningful to you: cross, lily, bread, chalice, table, garden, hands, faces, a road…

Finally, you are invited to attend your parish Holy Week services. The choir members are rehearsing, the sacristans are designing the floral sanctuary and poor father is racking his brain to come up with a “profound Easter message” that will make people glad they came to Easter services. Wherever you are, you can go on a spiritual pilgrimage with Jesus.

Lord, I pray for all my Sonshine Friends that as we journey with Jesus in our moments of darkness He will take us by the hand and lift us all to the Light of His Resurrection.

What Darkness Tastes Like For You

In the Mel Gibson’s movie, The Passion of the Christ, TIME magazine ran a cover story on the question of why Jesus died. The piece was well researched and included the opinion of a variety of scholars, but it also delved into the feelings of ordinary people around this question.
One person who expressed her feelings was a young woman who, as a child, had witnessed her mother being murdered by a jealous boyfriend. Looking back on her mother’s death, she senses, without being able to put it into words, that somehow her mother’s blood is connected to the blood that Jesus shed on Good Friday and that his death, also unfair, somehow gives dignity to her mother’s death.
Her hunch is right. There is a connection, even if we lack the words to explain it, between what Jesus tasted on Good Friday and what any person who is unfairly victimized tastes. We have our own Good Fridays and they are not unconnected to what happened on Calvary two thousand years ago. Indeed, what Jesus underwent on Good Friday is, as this woman says, what gives us dignity when we taste the blood of humiliation, loneliness, helplessness, and death. What did Jesus undergo on Good Friday?
Interestingly, the gospels do not focus on his physical sufferings. What they highlight instead is his emotional suffering and his humiliation. He is presented as lonely, betrayed, alone, helpless to explain himself, a victim of jealousy, morally isolated, mocked, misunderstood, stripped naked so as to have to feel embarrassment and shame, and yet, inside of all this, as clinging to warmth, goodness, and forgiveness. Good Friday, in Luke’s words, is when darkness has its hour. What does that taste like?

Whenever we find ourselves outside the circle of health, on a sick bed alone, with the sure knowledge that, despite the love and support of family and friends, in the end it is us, by ourselves, who face disability and disfigurement, who have to lose a breast or an organ to surgery, who face chemotherapy and maybe death, when we are alone inside of that, alone inside of fear, we are feeling what Jesus felt on Good Friday.

Whenever we are misunderstood and because of that are made to look weak, bad, wrong, when we have to live with a misunderstanding that makes us look bad in the eyes of others, we are feeling what Jesus felt on Good Friday.

Whenever we find ourselves alone and lost, before aging, before the loss of health, before the loss of sexual attractiveness and our former place in life, and before the loss of life itself, we are feeling the loneliness of dying and we are feeling what Jesus felt on Good Friday.

When we taste that bitterness there is little else to say other than what Jesus said when he was arrested in the Garden of Gethsemane and led away to humiliation and death: “But this is your hour—the triumph of darkness.”

We know what that means. All of us have moments when our world falls apart and when, as the Book of Lamentations says, all we can do is put our mouths to the dust and wait. Wait for what? Wait for darkness and death to have their hour, wait for (as Matthew says in his Passion account) the curtain of the temple to be torn from top to bottom, and the earth to shake, and the rocks to split open, and the graves to open and to show themselves to be empty.

Lord, I pray for all my Sonshine Friends who have tasted darkness in their life. Give them the strength of patience and perseverance until the darkness passes and they rise with Our Savior who came to free us all from this darkness of sin and death.

A Beauiful Life

 

I just received a phone call that my dear spiritual director went to heaven at 4:41 this morning. Let me say that this man is a saint so let me share a story about our last visit together.

Last Saturday, by the grace of God when I went to visit my dearest friend, Walt was back. Thankfully, he was alert and verbal and you could see him reflecting on what he wanted to say before he spoke. I asked him what he was thinking about at this time in his life. With hands folded, he looked up to heaven and with tears in his eyes said: “Why me? Why me Lord?”

Please understand, these were not words of self-pity because he had suffered for many years. Rather, they were words of profound gratitude that God had chosen him to be his friend. That was the question he had been asking God for many weeks and then suddenly Walt got his answer: “Thy will be Done.” 

One of the great themes of Christian spirituality is self-knowledge. God is constantly trying to help us know ourselves more intimately: our strengths and weaknesses, faults, flaws, failings, defects, abilities, desires, yearnings. He's put all this stuff within us as clues about the journey he wants us to walk.

And so, the vocation you have embarked on in this life is not something you choose, it's something you discover. And it might sound like a little thing, but it is not a little thing, especially when you look at how our culture might interpret the concept of success or happiness. Our culture might interpret many things like, "I get to choose who I am." Or, "I get to choose what aspects of me are most important or least important." Or, "I get to choose what I'm going to be."

Christian spirituality doesn't look at it that way. As Christians, we see it as a discovery. We see it as, OK, God has already placed all this stuff within us. He's created us, now he wants us to discover who we truly are. He wants us to discover that best-version-of-ourselves. And of course, we discover that best-version-of-ourselves by discovering more and more about him. We learn more about ourselves when we enter into a friendship with God.

Walt in his spiritual journey understood that God had created him as an extraordinary professor in the physical sciences who could take each student and help that young person discover the best version of themselves through nature.

Walter had planned his funeral and he expects his colleagues, students and Neumann friends to follow his wishes. It is to be a celebration of faith and gratitude to God for a life that helped his students discover God in nature. Like St. Francis of Assisi, my dear spiritual guide taught me to love God and all the beauty he has placed on this earth.

Lord, I pray for all my Sonshine Friends and especially, my spiritual mentor, who taught all his students to love one another as God loves each of us. May the Blessed Lord welcome our dear professor into His Heavenly Kingdom greeted by his parents and all his colleagues. Blessings and peace my friend. I miss you very much.