We are in Holy Week and about to begin the Holy Triduum: days we relive, in memory: the Passion, Death and Resurrection of the Lord - and Palm Sunday, which was my birthday! So this past weekend I had two reasons to do something that I really recommend we all try to do: find space and time to take a good while to look at your life. Where are you now?
Look back at this past year since last Easter.
I went to my favorite beach on Cape Cod, a place that has a lot of memories and took a long hike with Jesus. Looking deeply at my life now: joys, challenges, unknowns, graces…pondering our world now. Getting a heart to heart with Jesus…and with Our Lady. Please take some time like this too, both in quiet with the Lord and also, if you can, with your spouse and invite your children to try it. As we do so, we find grace and blessings, and also hard things and contradictions. Do this with Jesus! It is a Holy Week prayer.
We also reflect during Holy Week on the journey that Jesus took and the ultimate victory when He conquered sin and death.
It did not always look like a victory, as we know. As Jesus goes to the Garden of Gethsemane to pray, He asks His friends to pray with Him. In the Garden, He is in agony as He takes upon Himself all of human history, all of our sin and suffering.
The Cross is God’s very concrete answer to human suffering. He takes it all on, atones for it, redeems it, and transforms it into resurrected life.
He asks us, each of us and all of us, to bring our part of this history to Him this week. Ours is not an easy epoch in History. It is a crucial one. If we find it hard, we have good reason. Yet this Holy Week is above all, our reason to hope: to know the truth of our Hope. The true Hope for all Humanity!
In Lent we have tried to do penance and discipline ourselves. But now, how do we enter into the spirit of Holy Week? Bring all you are, all you have been living to Him. Look at your life honestly, don’t be afraid… Give it to Him… Look at Him taking it all…
Please give Him time as a family these coming days… Let it not be "business as usual." Go to Church. There are plenty of Holy Week films to help the kids understand.
Stay by Him, at the foot of the Cross with Our Mother Mary. Understand how, by His Cross and Resurrection, He makes all things new!
