In the Steps of Holy Week

This week, my Dearly Beloved and I have journeyed through a profoundly spiritual series of services associated with Holy Week.

On Wednesday evening, we walked the Labyrinth. This is a sequence of short prayers and meditations structured around Gospel accounts of the Passion, utilising the layout of a labyrinth to take participants on a journey into the significance and meaning of Easter. In particular, the participant is required to reflect on their own place within the event of the Cross, on how the acts and omissions of the various participants in Christ's crucifixion reflect the reality of their own spiritual condition.

The especial power of the Labyrinth resides in the fact that it is an intensely interior space, a time and place in which the individual is required to focus on the state of their own spirituality, and how that relates to the message of the Gospels, to their faith, and to their life as a whole. Through the use of text, space, physical props, and audio accompaniment, the participant experiences a multi-layered exploration of meaning that enables them both to reflect on their being, and look forward to the future.

Inevitably, you always leave the Labyrinth feeling both deeply humble and profoundly refreshed.

Last night, my Dearly Beloved and I lead a tenebrae service to mark Maundy Thursday, assisted and guided by our local minister. Tenebrae is a form of service in which utilises a Jewish menorah, and in which a series of readings trace the events between the Last Supper and Christ being handed over for crucifixion. At the end of each reading, one of the candles on the menorah is extinguished. The church, having began in shadows, is left in darkness.

One of the special aspects of the service was that, at the suggestion of our minister, the reading about the Last Supper was broken into just as Christ had shared the bread and wine with the disciples; at this point, the congregation were invited to live out the story of the Last Supper and participate in communion. This was a profoundly beautiful moment, enabling the congregation to experience the richness of the reading through participation, and not just the narrative of the text. At the end of the service, when the church was in darkness, we processed out in silence, amid an atmosphere replete with reflection, humility, sorrow, and - paradoxically - deep peace.

Finally, this morning, we attended the Good Friday service at our local Uniting Church. It was a rich, textured experience in which readings, performance, and multi-media were successfully employed to deliver a meaningful and moving account of Christ's death on the Cross. Of especial significance was the performance of the text, in which members of the congregation represented various people who had been present at the time of the Crucifixion - Simon of Cyrene, Barabbas, the Roman Centurion, etc - in which they all articulated the various ways in which they had failed Christ in his hour of need; an articulation that spoke to our own failings, and the manifold ways in which Christ's death supersedes these failings.

The second telling moment in the service was the minister's sermon, in which he drew upon the words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer who, writing from his prison cell, reminded us that Easter enables us to think beyond the events themselves to the greater issues of being: life, death, faith, existential purpose. It was a sermon that reminded us of the transcendence that lies at the heart of the Easter event: that beyond the suffering of Christ, the failings of the people around him, and our own broken humanity, lies the endless and boundless grace of God, which we can never earn, but which is never withdrawn - and through which we are brought to salvation.

Talk to you soon,

BB

Quote for the Day: Lead, kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom; lead thou me on. (Cardinal Newman)