April 2007 - Being There, in Holy Week

Being There, in Holy Week

From the Executive Director

I sat the other day with a friend of mine who always says to me “I’m losing my mind.” He really is “losing his mind”, as he suffers from a type of geriatric dementia. Of late, he’s taken to visiting others like himself, people who have even more advanced dementia. He told me that he can’t do anything for them, he can’t fix anything, or make anything better. “I’m just there, with them. And something happens. It’s a mystery.”

This is the week of the year when we are asked to just "be there," to walk with Jesus from that political demonstration of palm branches to the supper with his friends, to the arrest, the trial, and the crucifixion at the hands of the Empire. As we enter into the stories of Holy Week, the suffering of Jesus, we walk the way that leads us into and then beyond the empty tom--where, as my friend knows, "something happens"--and we discover Easter afoot in the world.

It’s a two-step process, described by Monica Hellwig in her 1983 book Jesus: The Compassion of God:

“To be a follower of Jesus means in the first place to enter by compassion into his experience, with all that it expresses of the divine and of the human. And it means in the second place to enter with him into the suffering and the hope of all human persons, making common cause with them as he does, and seeking out as he does the places of his predilection among the poor and despised and oppressed.”

This June, we will have an opportunity to “make common cause”, to practice the compassion of Jesus as students, faculty and friends of The Beatitudes Society join with the brave survivors of Katrina for our summer service trip: Heads, Hearts, Hands. Join us for this Benedictine experience, as we spend six days on the Gulf Coast working, learning and praying--just being there--and seeing Easter happen again.

A blessed Holy Week and Eastertide to you,
The Rev. Anne S. Howard

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