Reimagining Holy Week
How was Easter for you this year?
For me, it was weird.
Holy Week has come and gone and I am feeling unexpectedly disconnected with the highest of holy days. Having moved away from some of the theological beliefs that undergird Holy Week, I feel unmoored. Without the rituals of celebrating with my children at my parents' house, I felt adrift. Nobody to color Easter eggs with, no one to buy chocolate bunnies for.
New this year, I felt a measure of disappointment (from myself or from others, I’m not sure) for failing to meet the external expectations around Holy Week, about what I should be doing as an ordained priest, even though I'm not that kind of priest that does all the liturgies all week long. While I'm still processing all of this, I'm surprised at how much resistance has surfaced around these events, but I'm pretty sure it has nothing to do with the lack of marshmallow peeps!
Having rejected the whole “the blood of Jesus on the crucifix covering my sinfulness” concept (aka substitutionary atonement theory) to explain why Jesus had to die, I’ve been struggling to find a new, helpful way to engage in Holy Week.
Seeing the death of Jesus and his resurrection through the lens of the always and everywhere present cycle of life is a good place to start: birth is always followed by death, which is followed by resurrection and rebirth, and the cycle repeats. This cycle of transformation is true with humans and all of creation.
According to Gary Alan Taylor from the Holy Heretics podcast, “we can understand Jesus' death as an archetypal pathway of transformation. When we say ‘Jesus died for us,’ we don’t mean it as some substitutionary atonement theory or heavenly transaction, but rather from the perspective that Jesus died in solidarity with all our human suffering, transforming our pain in the process. Seen from this perspective, the death and resurrection of Jesus isn’t simply a one-time historical event, but rather the eternal invitation to join Him in the needful process of dying and rising.”
Why is the process of dying and rising “needful?”
If I think about death metaphorically, I can see that there are many things, ideas, ways of being that need to die in order to follow Jesus more nearly - things like pride, judgmental attitudes, my critical spirit and other egoic identities which are obstacles to the birth of my true self, my most loving self.
Our literal death comes into this consideration, as well.
I just finished reading “4000 Weeks: Time Management for Mortals” by Oliver Burkeman. Why 4000 hours? That’s about how much time each of us has been given in this life. Doesn’t that feel ridiculously short?
Burkeman urges us to use our 4000 weeks (or what’s left of it) doing what really matters to us, rather than chasing after some unattainable metric of perfection and control. Burkeman’s premise is essentially this: Our time here is limited. Our control over our time is limited. Facing those facts is actually liberating because it frees us to stop fighting against our illusions of control and embrace what it is we can do, which is to get busy doing what matters to us, and don’t get distracted by what everyone else tells you matters.
What does this have to do with Good Friday, Easter Sunday, and the cycle of birth, death and resurrection?
Faced with the reality of our limited time here, Burkeman encourages readers to embrace their limits. Once you do that, you can let die “the fear-driven, control-chasing, ego-dominated version of you - the one who cares intensely about what others think of you, about not disappointing anyone or stepping too far out of line, in case the people in charge find some way to punish you for it later.” Then, the “you” that remains “is more alive than before. More ready for action, but also more joyful because it turns out that when you’re open enough to confront how things really are, you’re open enough to let all the good things in more fully, too, on their own terms, instead of trying to use them to bolster your need to know that everything will turn out fine.”
So perhaps, after I allow the people-pleasing-perfectionist parts of me to die, I can resurrect as one who is focused on doing what I am uniquely able to do here and now for a world that needs what I have to offer. That feels like a spacious and expansive place to land.
One final piece in this Holy Week consternation is my awareness of how much I need rituals. I’m reframing this as a grand opportunity: when the passage of time or other changes of circumstances sweep away your rituals, you are free to create new ones! But only bring in rituals that are life-giving and soul-nourishing. Maybe next Easter, I’ll bring onto my home altar signs of springtime resurrection, like daffodils cut from my garden. Maybe I’ll sup on BLTs, but I’ll skip the peeps. I never did like them anyway.