One of my friends from college is a writer for television. I have followed her work closely over the years. It’s always amazing, but every once in a while, I will feel a bit like I’m losing my bearings. I will be watching a show, absorbed in the plot as it unfolds, when suddenly I will recognize something; some small expression or mannerism she has written into a character, something that reminds me of the time when my friend and I saw each other every day. Some prop or insight that was floating around in the air when our group of friends knew every small detail of one another’s lives.
At that moment, the character on screen will fade away, and I will be transported back to a coffee shop or a library or dormitory or wherever it was that we were laughing or crying or kibbitzing together. The moment might be small, and flash on the screen for just a second, but it pulls me into a powerful and important point of connection in my life. During that second, I am completely present to the memory.
On a much larger scale, Holy Week is that sort of disruption in our faith. For one week out of the fifty-two in the liturgical year, the readings and the liturgies pull us out of the ordinary and into the heart of Jesus’s story; a love story where we are the flawed and undeserving objects. Retelling the events of Holy Week invites us to relive God’s act of love for us—a boundless gift, both caught in space and time, and eternal. The yearly commemorations that begin on Palm Sunday calls us from the normal unfolding of our lives into a new reality as ancient as our collective memory: the presence of the ultimate power and unconditional love of God.
I hope you will join our Holy Week and Easter services online, as we gather to experience Christ’s passion and resurrection again, and anew.
