The potency of the Holy Week Liturgies

Time disappears when someone we love is dying.  Day cedes to night without much notice.  Activities we have promised to do we discard instead, like the sweater we doff on a slowly warming afternoon.  Routines we never break cease.  Something else has taken our attention, is sitting in our brain, has bound our legs and lowered our head.  Nothing else is important but this person who gave meaning to our life and whose threatened passing wicks away the confidence that hitherto steadied our days.  Yet no death completely surprises, and each one bestows a deeper understanding of the meaning of life.

Holy Week invites the entire Church into the emotional experience of loss, fear, and redemption.  We remember the One who died for us.  We accompany his waning days, attentive to his final words and actions, discovering anew our love for one who is lost – and the joy of one who returns.

The risen Christ abides in the hearts of believers born generations after his days in Jerusalem.  These same believers reconnect with him in the rituals of Holy Week.  By their fecund endurance these rites have performed many services.  They proclaim the gospel as Jesus commanded.  They reawaken the faith of believers.  They frame these beliefs in the context that human beings most crave: narrative.  The liturgies of Holy Week are not reenactments of the passion and resurrection of Christ.  Rather, they are means by which the faithful enter these mysteries.  Each participant will ultimately experience not just the death of a loved one but death itself.  Through Holy Week, each believer prepares for the day of the body’s destiny and the soul's soaring freedom.

(From the preface of "Glory in the Cross", by Fr Paul Turner)