Preparing for Holy Week

Preparing for Holy Week

By Tammy Townsend Denny, TI Executive Director

As we approach Holy Week, I am at a loss for words. What can I add to all that has been written through the millennia about a horrendous, torturous death and a miraculous resurrection? Are there any other words to add? Is there anything more to say?

When my words aren’t there, I turn to others, like Catholic author Brian Doyle, to say things better than I ever could. In his essay “The Terrible Brilliance,” he writes of his wife, “an art teacher for kids who are really really sick.” One day, he finds that his wife is “sad to the bottom of her bones” about a little girl who is “being crucified… Everything they do to her hurts. All those needles are nails… She gets crucified every day.”

Doyle’s essay brings to mind questions that theologians and believers have grappled with, prayed about, and screamed to the heavens about for centuries. How do we make sense of our loved ones’ suffering, of the most vulnerable among us hurting, of all the illnesses, untimely deaths, and violence around us? Where is God in all of that?

Perhaps among the suffering is where we find “the haunting human genius in the marrow of Catholicism” to use Doyle’s words again. He explains:

“A mother watched her son be tortured and crucified and she held him in her arms and there are no words for what she felt. A mother watched her daughter be tortured and crucified and she held her in her arms and there are no words for what she felt. It happens all day every day everywhere… The terrible brilliance of our faith is that there isn’t one Christ, there are billions, and each one suffers for and saves the rest, in ways that we will never understand.”

Among our Theresian sisters are those who have recently lost children and spouses. Others are journeying with gravely ill loved ones. You won’t read about them in our Wednesday Prayer Requests. You may not even hear their stories in your community meetings because the grief and suffering they carry are too personal, too big, too mystifying to put into words.

As we begin Holy Week, let’s hold this suffering that exists beyond words in our hearts and prayers. And let us trust in the redemptive hope of the Great Mystery.

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