Bairbre Cahill
It is the change in the light that tells me – spring is here. Early in the morning and now in the evening there is a golden glow to the world, different from the more subdued light of winter. I love this season, with our berry bushes beginning to bud, rhubarb growing so quickly you could nearly stand and watch it, and blasts of colour around the garden where daffodils and crocuses are putting on a display.
But I love this season for deeper reasons too, because here amongst these heralds of new life we encounter Holy Week and Easter. I find myself invited into these profound and holy days.
The liturgy engages my heart – Word, music, incense, cross, tomb, light in the darkness. Our liturgical year works in a spiral. Every year we are brought back again to this point where we face the powerful, painful image of Jesus on the cross, the loneliness of grief and the deep joy of Easter morning.
I have heard people say, “I go to Mass twice a year and I don’t know why but they keep telling the same stories”.
Yes, we do keep telling the same stories, because we need to hear them again. We need to remember, not just at a head level but down deep in our gut. The stories, of Incarnation and Resurrection may remain the same but we are changed. What we bring to the celebration this year is different from where we were last year. So we need to listen again to those familiar stories so that they may speak to us anew.
On Good Friday every year, late in the evening, my parish has a Taizé prayer around the cross by candlelight. It is a quiet and reflective time. The cross stands on the sanctuary and in front of it a large rock, symbolising for us the tomb.
Before the evening ends we are invited to come forward to touch that rock, to bring to the tomb all that is within us which is hurting, angry and broken. It is a ritual that never fails to move me. I bring my own hurts or worries to the tomb but even more powerful is watching others from my parish and further afield coming slowly to the rock, reaching out tentatively to touch the rough stone – and I wonder what pain and struggles they are bringing to the tomb. There is a deep sense of solidarity in that candlelit church.
The tomb
Somehow we have to know the reality of what it means to hurt, to suffer, to know what the tomb looks like from the inside, if we are ever to truly experience the joy of the resurrection.
Acknowledging the reality of the cross – in our own lives and in the life and death of Jesus – means that we are open to the Resurrection.
So it is good to come back, to return again, to hear those stories of a final meal together, of courage and fear, of love poured out, of a tomb now empty, life stronger than death. Our lives are a spiral.
We keep coming back to what matters most. Think about your own family. What are the places, the routines, the memories, the people who give you your deepest sense of identity and belonging? What are the family stories and memories that your own children go back to time and again?
What happens over these days through Holy Week and culminating in the joy of Easter Sunday, these are the stories that give us as Christians our deepest sense of who we are and what matters most in life. So if we have those days when our confidence is shaken, when we are too familiar with what the tomb feels like from the inside, we need to be able to go back to the centre, to our deepest identity and know that we are an Easter people.
