Entering Holy Week

With an announcement and gratitude for each of you

The Chapel at the Society of St. John the Evangelist (SSJE), Cambridge, MA

Please remember that Contemplative Chapel will not meet via Zoom on Wednesday, March 27 (I will be in the monastery of SSJE in Cambridge, MA). We will resume our weekly gatherings on Wednesday, April 3.

“The Poet Thinks About the Donkey,” by Mary Oliver

On the outskirts of Jerusalem
the donkey waited.
Not especially brave, or filled with understanding,
he stood and waited.

How horses, turned out into the meadow,
   leap with delight!
How doves, released from their cages,
   clatter away, splashed with sunlight.

But the donkey, tied to a tree as usual, waited.
Then he let himself be led away.
Then he let the stranger mount.

Never had he seen such crowds!
And I wonder if he at all imagined what was to happen.
Still, he was what he had always been: small, dark, obedient.

I hope, finally, he felt brave.
I hope, finally, he loved the man who rode so lightly upon him,
as he lifted one dusty hoof and stepped, as he had to, forward.

______________________

As we enter Holy Week, some of us know the feeling.  Just waiting.

Many of us often do not feel especially brave. In fact, more than we admit, we can feel anxious, sometimes afraid. And understanding?  Rarely. 

Tied to the same tree, the same thoughts, the same worries, and the same circumstances, just waiting. But there have been moments when we have sensed, especially in solitude, that we are not alone. And the longer we have lingered in those moments, the more we have sensed the rope being untied from the tree.

And if we linger even longer, we realize that we were never tied to a tree, or to anything, in the first place. We realize that we have always been and always will be free, but our minds have kept us running in tight circles, leaving us with a feeling of being bound and unavailable to the larger mystery and wonder of our lives, not to mention unaware of a divine Presence and a mysterious beckoning.

Fortunately, a strange thing happens in this year’s church calendar. Easter comes early this year, so that the Feast of the Annunciation (March 25) oddly falls in Holy Week, the day after Palm Sunday. March 25 is exactly nine months before the birth of Jesus; it’s the day when the Angel Gabriel visits the Virgin Mary to bring her some extraordinary news.

But the news is not only for Mary.  The Annunciation is an archetypal story, which means that it is a story about something that is still happening to each of us. As one writer put it, “The archetype evoked in the Annunciation is that of an encounter with something otherworldly or spiritual that is life-altering and sets in motion a journey that is filled with the unknown” (David Heaney, “Encounters: Annunciation”). We all know something about that – an encounter we do not fully understand but that sets in motion a spiritual journey.

Pondering the Annunciation could be a key to deepening our experience of Holy Week. The Annunciation is about a mysterious encounter that doesn’t lead to an “Aha!” experience, but to a question, “How can this be?” It’s about pondering intimations of the eternal – something breaking through to us at the deathbed of a loved one, the experience of surviving a divorce, or the way a perfect stranger shows unusual (almost otherworldly) kindness.

In the language of the archetype, it is about an angel visiting you to say, “Greetings, favored one. You are full of grace. The Lord is with you. New life is on the way, awakening and growing within you.”  At first, like Mary, we can only reply, “How can this be?”

Meister Eckhart (c.1260 – c.1328) put the mystery this way:

We are all meant to be mothers of God. What good is it to me if this eternal birth of the divine Son takes place unceasingly, but does not take place within myself?  And, what good it is to me if Mary is full of grace if I am not also full of grace? What good is it to me for the Creator to give birth to his Son if I do not also give birth to him in my time and culture? This, then, is the fullness of time: When the Son of Man is begotten in us.

In Holy Week, we see not only the powerlessness, the ineptitude, and the ugliness we are capable of displaying; we also see the healing, the love, the grace, and the forgiveness that God repeatedly insists we receive.  From the annunciation of the Angel Gabriel, “Greetings, favored one, full of grace, the Lord is with you,” to the enunciation from the cross, “Father, forgive them; they just don’t know what they’re doing,” it’s all about grace, forgiveness, and new life, over and over again.

The effect of it all just might be that, like Mary, we too will be moved to a posture of surrender to something that we will never understand, “Let it be to me according to your word.”

The Chapel altar at SSJE