“This is our Pearl Harbor, our 9/11”
Surgeon General of the USA, 4/5/2020
This is also our Holy Week, and there is always an Easter morning. It may not come when we want it, or in the ways we’d like it and we may be tired and angry and afraid when it finds us. But it will be there. Begun in a garden, with only a few to observe. The Resurrection, the Creation unleashed anew, in ways we can see and touch and know for ourselves.
Perhaps like few other Holy Weeks in my lifetime, we have a sense of suffering, death and fear like the apostles might have felt. Dinner with beloved friends turns into a nightmare of unimaginable proportions. Painful death of the innocent. People in hiding, waiting, waiting with little hope and much fear. Anxiety and fear causing acting out, denials, fights among friends and family. The process of saying goodbye, processing grief, coming to terms with practicalities that we never thought would be needed so soon. A story of then or now? Could be either.
It may be hard, but please take the time this Holy Week to walk the journey. Through that fateful last supper, the arrest, the injustice, the beating, the suffering, the death. Through the pause on Saturday, suspended in fear and grief. To Sunday morning, the joy and celebration that, in fact, He Lives!
I see this as a time to process so much of what is going on in our own lives, the universality of these feelings and the unity of a people going through this together despite physical separation. Stay close to your church community online or by phone or mail, and find a place to walk alongside (safely) others. Say an extra prayer for your pastors, their families, your musicians and tech crews – they have been working overtime to help bring this Holy Week to you. We are all still learning and growing!
I pray wherever you are, however you feel limited or enclosed – that you experience the fullness and the spiritual expansiveness of the entirety of Holy Week. I pray you find a perennial Easter, that is always offered and always there and speaks deeply into our current moment.
Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again!
Alleluia and Amen!
Sarah