Holy Week Blessings By: Mary Beth Rice
“Do not abandon yourselves to despair. We are the Easter people and hallelujah is our song.” -Pope St. John Paul II
The week prior to Easter is the holiest week of the year! I am challenged in figuring out how to keep my usual Catholic rituals in my heart throughout the week. The mass, the incense, the prayers, the hymns I love, the palm branches, the blessings and Jesus in the Eucharist. It is all I have ever known—my favorite week. There is so much emotion; hope, light and joy colliding on Easter Sunday with the Resurrection. All of this has been shuttered, and we are left to our own imaginations in how to honor the sacredness of it all.
During every Lent, I ponder this meditation and it resonates, especially this year. I have no source to attribute it to but want to share it with you: What our spiritual Lent tells us about the times of trouble and sorrow in our lives is 1) To endure them prayerfully; 2) To pay attention to the way trials change us, because they have the potential to change us for the better, to be a means of our conversion; and 3) To look beyond circumstance, even beyond this world, to the Resurrection, as well as to the earthly resurrections that often redeem our earthly Lents.
Emily Dickinson wrote that “the soul should always stand ajar, ready to welcome the ecstatic experience.” How do we keep our souls ajar for opportunities to be still, to be inspired, to celebrate? I am intentionally changing things up. Instead of attending mass I am going to witness as many sunrises and sunsets as I am able. Instead of the incense I am going to quietly slip into an empty church and light a candle. Instead of attending Easter mass, perhaps we will watch a live version on Facebook while sitting on our back porch, wrapped in blankets, with the backyard Cardinals as our choir.
Though we won’t be gathering for our annual Easter Egg Hunt, I will bake kolaches and thumbprint cookies (see Joymaking) and deliver them to the neighbors. On Sunday, we will create a feast, breaking bread with those we can, and creating plates to deliver to family we love who are staying safe, alone and apart from us. We will celebrate just like Jesus did on that holiest of Thursdays, before all hell broke loose and pain and joy mixed up into a storm cloud, followed by sunshine. It will be holy. It will be sacred. It will be love.
