Dear Friends,
So it begins! Holy Week is here and, this year, we will be able to celebrate with more music and a few more people in church than last year. Commemorating the events of the Lord’s passion, death, and Resurrection is a tradition of the Church stretching back to the earliest of days with Christians re-telling the story of Jesus to one another and to converts. When Constantine recognized the Christian Faith, his mother the Empress Helena, travelled to the Holy land between 326-328 and visited some of the sites revered as Holy by Christians, particularly in Bethlehem, Nazareth, and Jerusalem. The oldest churches built as Christian churches date from that time.
Celebrating Holy Week is like being on pilgrimage to the Holy Land and I am pleased to tell you that the parish pilgrimage with the Living Church and Bishop John Bauerschmidt that had to be postponed a year ago has been re-booked for October6-16. Further details will be available after Easter.
Like our Jewish ancestors, we use ritual and symbol to help us recall the salvation history of our past. Many aspects of the Passover celebration are still present in our Christian liturgy but especially so at the Great Vigil of Easter. Holy Week allows us to enter deeply into the story of our salvation.
The theologian Kenneth Leech once famously said, “The cross is not a problem to be understood, but a mystery into which we enter.” That is what we do when we make pilgrimage; that is what we do when we celebrate the liturgy. We do it through song and by engaging with all the senses. Let us truly enter into this Holy Week of the Lord in order to experience the joy of his Resurrection.
