Holy Week is a fascinating beast to me. I am drawn toward the tradition, the rhythm, and the sincerity of being somber. Raised as a fundamentalist (and a conservative one at that), though, placing such importance on period of time is false…thus misleading.
Shouldn’t we grapple with Christ’s crucifixtion everyday, if it’s that important to us? These were the questions I was raising at ten years old to my Baptist friends (I didn’t have many friends outside the protestant realm until later in life). From my childhood I can’t remember one Easter Sunday in which the ‘details’ of the typical Easter service were talked of…the closest would be the closing invitation in which there would be implied guilt to those who only come to church twice a year along with a heap of implications about those who thought the this day in April was any different than any other Sunday.
Easter to me was always about bunnies and candy. As a liberal Christian now, I don’t mind this—I think silly holidays do our adult and child psyches good.
But what do I do as a progressive post-modern Christian aching for the sincerity of Christ who subconsciously regards Holy Week with the modern, fundamentalist approach of disdain?
I doubt my ability to sincerely approach the services and thought processes that typically come with Holy Week, so I shy away from them. Friday, however, I am planning on attending Holy Week on the Streets, a walking Stations of the Cross. I’ve been grappling over whether or not to attend, mostly because I know that it won’t mean as much to me as it will to the people leading and attending this. For me, however, it will simply have to play as a study on the mental approach Christians take to the capital punishment that happened long ago. Hoping that as with all the other things I have wrestled with in modern and post-modern Christianity, I will find the beauty and have grace.
On that note: Happy Passover.
Becca Kello 