Postscript to Holy Week

This year Holy Week was meaningful and memorable. Worship, the Creator congregation, reading and new prayer exercises contributed. Also, after better following the rhythym of this part of the year the purpose beyond remembrance and worship is clearer.

We start with Maundy Thursday the commandment to love one another and the sharing of the Eucharist. Pastor Mark's sermon gave a key of looking at what was recorded for this day as what is important in life and what Jesus chose to do on his last day.

Good Friday encompasses a specific phase of our spiritual life. There are moments of suffering and misery in life. The heart is destroyed, cracked apart but, as Pastor Dayle once said in a sermon, this is when we are finally open to our fullest potential and able to absorb the Light of God.

This state of misery and later grace is known by different names in the great traditions. Buddists name it Solving the Great Matter while the Sufis know it as Fanaah. It is St. John of the Cross' Dark Night Of The Soul, Fannah for the Sufis and the Lakota call it the Wakan or Holy Way. It is a tempering of the Holy Spirit and, for us through remembering our baptism, we are reborn carrying the only thing that can survive this passage, namely Love.

The understanding that opened Easter up started with what Borg as wrote about resurrection and the pre- and post-Easter Jesus. In essence Borg's writing and Pastor Dayle pointed me back to not what I believed about the details of resurrection but to the deeper meaning. That for all the no built into our lives, Christians understand life as Easter people. A point I read about was that the gospel stories often repeat and confirm details. The appearance stories in the New Testament after Easter are all individual and do not repeat.

Easter filled me with hope this year and an additional sense of Christian identity.