The theme of our week has been set: we are about meditation on the Lord’s Passion. It would be fitting for this meditation to extend throughout all of the coming week.
Whether one is able to attend the parish Triduum services or not, this week is an opportunity to delve into the Passion. It is an occasion to imagine its scenes and to relive these ancient events anew.
For my own part, every year I like to choose a different character in the story and spend Holy Week trying to experience things as they would have experienced them. I have found it a very fruitful practice to choose a character who speaks directly to me at this time in this particular year.
Maybe you want to spend some time as Mary, with all her special qualities as the mother of Jesus. Perhaps you’ve been asked to do something you really don’t want to do, and so you identify with Simon of Cyrene in the Fifth Station. Or maybe you’re struggling in your faith, and Peter appeals to you. Perhaps you feel like G.K. Chesterton, who wrote a famous poem from the point of view of the donkey that Jesus rode into Jerusalem. Or maybe a name that you have never before given any attention caught your attention during the reading of the Passion this year: Joseph of Arimathea or Nicodemus or Barabbas or Mary Magdalene or Veronica or Salome or the Good Thief.
Wherever you feel drawn, try to imagine what Jesus looked like to that person, and how they felt, and what they might have been thinking. If we engage in that kind of meditation on the Passion, this week has the potential to be truly “Holy.”
