Entering into the Jerusalems and Gethsemanes of our lives

As Holy Week begins, the Church through her liturgy will guide the faithful on a journey that recalls vividly the passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ.  There are, to be sure, multivalent levels of participating in these deep days of prayer, worship and reflection, the simplest of which would be to look at it from a non-involved and sterile distance, as if one were a member of an audience at a very prolonged opera.  This would assure that one makes that false divide between faith and life as clear as possible, without seeing any need to make any connection between the life of Christ and one’s own life. 

If Liturgy ends up with the faithful doing this, it would have failed to be what Liturgy is meant to be.  Liturgy is meant to draw one closer and closer to the life of Christ as one becomes absorbed by the mystery that one participates in.  Properly celebrated and conscious of the words of the Celebrant ‘ite, Missa est’ (Go, the Church has been sent) are proclaimed, each participant whose sense of Christian mission has been heightened by deep participation at the Liturgy becomes aware of the pressing need to live the life of Christ in a real and dynamic way. 

Holy Week brings this reality to the fore.  We see Jesus entering Jerusalem for the last time and we also see the dark reality of sin and evil.  But it is not just sin and evil, pain and suffering that we see as in abstract.  We are made aware of how real this darkness is in our own lives, and how we struggle and cope with this constant fight because there is also a very real side of our lives that also wants to live for Christ and holiness and goodness.

Each of us has Jerusalems and Gethsemanes that we inevitably have to face with a certain dimension of aloneness.  In most of our sufferings, we generally have the community’s support, shared faith, and prayers.  I have personally benefitted, and still am benefitting, from the many who have been with me in prayer as I live with my illness.  But I have also come to realize that like wanting to be with a friend who is going on an overseas flight at the airport departure terminal, there is a point at which he or she needs to go beyond a certain point alone.  These are the Jerusalems and Gethsemanes that I am referring to.  It is not that the prayers of loved ones are ineffective.  They will always be sources of strength and moral support.  But just as Jesus was so aware of his being alone with no one else but the Father in the Garden of Gethsemane even though his beloved friends were just a ‘stone’s throw’ from him, so too do we sometimes find ourselves in life.  We can sympathise with sufferers of all sorts of pains and life-struggles all we want, but there will always be dimensions of their suffering and darkness that will always be something that they alone can experience, and they alone have to live through. 

But it is what these experiences end up doing for them that also forms (or deforms) them.  Jesus did not let his aloneness make him an embittered, angry and resentful man.  He commended his Spirit to the Father as his final gift of his complete self.  But he had to go through his Passion to get to that point.  What this means for us is that one cannot make short-cuts one’s journey to that surrender point, as much as we would want to.  It is that portion of life between the Jerusalem’s entry and that final surrender that forms us.  And it will only happen if we allow it to form us. 

As I begin Holy Week I will be going back to the hospital for my second round of intensive chemotherapy, I will also take this reflection with me.  It will be the most interesting Holy Week since my ordination thirteen years ago.  Though there will be no Liturgy that I can participate in, I will be participating in another kind of mystery altogether, and I take with me as my companions all those who are suffering in small and large ways, and with you, I too, look forward to the Resurrection with eyes that look toward the wonders of Easter joy.