Moving in circles
Today, Palm Sunday, marks the beginning of Holy Week. I confess sometimes to a slight weariness about facing another Holy Week and Easter season, especially so soon before I am faced with packing boxes and moving house! It is easy to complain about the stress of it all. Many people outside the church might wonder why we bother to put ourselves through the same rituals year after year, the same preparations and time spent contemplating the same stories ….
The same but different
At such times I remember that I have always loved and got a lot from celebrating Holy Week well. Yes, it is the same every year, but it is also different. There are, of course, different people, different preachers, different experiences, but mostly I think the difference comes from the changes that I have experienced over the year since I last celebrated the festivals, since I last immersed myself in the story of Jesus’s death and resurrection. I have had new experiences, including experiences of suffering, death, joy, resurrection in my own little world.
And so each year I am called deeper, differently, into the story and into making it my own. Perhaps each year I lose a little too: I can just about remember the vividness and excitement with which I entered into Bible stories as a child and teenager and that is harder to recapture as an adult.
Upward spirals
This is, in fact, why we keep on celebrating the whole round of festivals of the church year. They mark and define our spiritual lives, showing us how we are growing and changing in ourselves and our relationships with God, while also providing the steady and familiar markers that steady us and keep us focussed on what really matters in our lives and our world. T S Eliot famously likened the Christian life to a spiral staircase: we go round and round again but each turn also takes us on upwards.
I would encourage us all this week to take time amidst whatever else is going on in our lives to engage again with the story of our salvation, to contemplate how we now understand the mystery of death and resurrection.
Rebecca Lloyd
9 April 2017
