Fr Robert Hendrickson

Dear Friends in Christ,

Palm Sunday is such a disruptive day. It begins with this raucous, joyful procession and quickly turns. Too quickly the “Hosannas” become “crucify him.” It must have felt just as strangely, shatteringly abrupt to the disciples.

We are invited into some measure of their joy and disconsolation—into their anticipation and their despair.

All liturgies are the enacted remembrance of a thing we, as a whole body, know without knowing and remember without remembering. The call out of our deepest shared self a time when we walked with Christ and wept for him too.

The liturgies of this week demand something of us. They are long, intense, and challenging. They are full of meaning, purpose, and promise.

In a culture always eager to get to the end and get to the good stuff, not many churches observe the week in the way we do. There’s just not much consumer demand for the complexity of the week.

People are ready for the bonnets and the madras and the seersucker. Who can blame them? Nobody wants to wear sackcloth any longer than they have to!

But the rush to the end robs it of something. Like anything worth doing, Holy Week is worth doing in its fullness and on its own terms, not ours. It offers us the chance to not consume but to be consumed—to find ourselves bound again to the living memory of these short millennia.

I challenge myself each year to do this week as fully as possible and as prayerfully as I can. I never want to cheat myself of a chance to go deeper into these holy mysteries. To rush toward Easter Day cheats us of something more—of the chance to make our way toward that day not as tourists but as pilgrims, not as admirers but as disciples.

Let us keep the week with the longing only to be present, only to find ourselves challenged again to walk this royal way with Christ.

Fr Robert