Dear All,
Here we are on the brink of Holy Week & tomorrow is Palm Sunday.
We have included something Cardinal Hume wrote about Palm Sunday leading into Holy Week. We also have a sonnet for Palm Sunday by Malcolm Guite.
It has often struck me as significant that in our Dutch-speaking communities in Belgium, & and in Holland, they don’t use the word ‘Holy’ for Holy Week but the word ‘Good’ so ‘Good Week’. With this in mind, we have included an interesting piece, ‘’What ‘Good’ is this?’’ by Stephen Brown.
We hope these reflections will be helpful to you as you launch into the coming dramatic week.
We will end an Irish blessing from ‘Sacred Weave’: let us pray it for each other.
With our love & prayer
Approaching Holy Week.
Today, Palm Sunday, we remember how the crowds went out to meet Christ calling out, ‘Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord’. This week we are to set out to meet Christ in his passion, in those last days of his suffering. We go out to meet him first on Palm Sunday with the crowds in order to follow him. We don’t just meet him when everyone is waving palm branches & singing ‘Hosanna’. He said to us, ‘If anyone wants to be my disciple, they must deny themselves, take up their cross & follow me’. So in what we read in the gospel story & from our own experience of life & what is going on in the world close to home & far away, the experience of the world’s suffering is taken by Christ in order to sanctify it, to give it meaning & significance. This week, almost hour by hour we can follow Christ in those moments of his passion taking with us our own suffering & that of our world.
It is good then to decide that this is indeed going to be a Holy Week, a different week, a week when we meet Christ in his passion, in order that when the Resurrection is celebrated we can follow him more closely & witness to him – Christ who was greeted joyously as he went into Jerusalem, who suffered, died but who then rose from the dead.
Cardinal Hume.
A Sonnet for Palm Sunday
Malcolm Guite
Now to the gate of my Jerusalem,
The seething holy city of my heart,
The saviour comes. But will I welcome him?
Oh crowds of easy feelings make a start;
They raise their hands, get caught up in the singing,
And think the battle won. Too soon they’ll find
The challenge, the reversal he is bringing
Changes their tune. I know what lies behind
The surface flourish that so quickly fades;
Self-interest, and fearful guardedness,
The hardness of the heart, its barricades,
And at the core, the dreadful emptiness
Of a perverted temple. Jesus come
Break my resistance and make me your home.
What ‘Good’ is this?
Stephen Brown
Living Lord,
Was this the lifting high?
Humiliation seems complete:
forsaken by God;
deserted by friends;
mocked by many.
And in our ‘Holy Week’
We call this ‘Good’!
What ‘Good’ is this?
Loving Lord,
You bore our shame:
in truth our names
inscribe the gallows wood.
And in our ‘Holy Week’
We call this ‘Good’!
What ‘Good’ is this?
Good for us:
your isolation for our community;
your capture for our freedom;
your life for our sin.
And in this ‘Holy Week’
we call this ‘Good’
but not to gloss
the pain endured
as if your loss
was somehow spared.