We’re t-minus what feels like 20 minutes until Holy Week, and I am ready. Maybe not exactly ready, ready — there is still a good deal of work to be done — but emotionally ready. For Christians, Holy Week is the most important time of the Christian year: the time of pathos and passion, of resurrection and renewal.
Holy Week is the time when things in the life of Jesus and his community turned on a dime. Playful and risk-y statement making in the face of an oppressive empire and a complicit national government, and the warmth of a meal bathed in sacred history and shared with beloved friends. And then danger, fear, betrayal, injustice, death. The narrative reflects the range of my moods in recent months: fury and horror at pervasive injustice, delight in and love for our community and particularly marginalized families and individuals, despair at climate news, and hope in my high schooler’s rants about transphobia in the media with her friends. The glory of planning and making music for our worship together, the buoyancy of my spirit, lifted by the centuries of tradition and our practices this year.
The subject of time has come up time and again in recent days: from one experiencing with renewed intensity the hurts of a decade ago; from someone passionate about everything except never being late. Many things are more important than being on time. We tried to remember as a ministerial staff when a member had died in a staff meeting the other day: Covid has blended so many things together, but I knew it must have been after September 2020, because I had already joined you. We had only begun to pray for Becky Guinagh following her cancer diagnosis, and then she was in hospice and not a moment later she was gone. Time is a mystery even as it is the most mundane, ordinary of things.
Time is, of course, experienced differently by different people, and understood differently in different cultures. The Christian tradition delineates two kinds of time: chronos, linear time, and kairos, holy or eternal or timeless time. Holy Week, with its different observances marking each day, reflects the intersection of the two. A story of a particular, long-ago week, with still-unfolding resonance. An ancient story that speaks to the highs and lows of our own stories, individual and collective yet today.
A friend posted this line from Barbara Brown Taylor the other day: If all of life is holy, then anything that sustains life has holy dimensions. In times of fear and mourning, our community and relationships sustain us; in times of joy, our traditions may give us language to celebrate.
In each moment of the coming week, whether you are rushed or relaxing, “standing at the foot of the cross,” mired in grief, desperate for resurrection, or empowered by hope — may you feel the holy dimensions of this life and the love of this community.
Grace and Peace,
Bromleigh