Passion Week in our Domestic Church

What's rolling around in my head this week. Purple shrouds, Passion Week, Preparation. Jesus hiding. Truth. And I might as well cogitate here as anywhere. I don't know what I think until I write it down, you know.

If you get a chance, pull out your Douay and read the whole of John, chapter 8; it deals with such a pertinent issue in our day (any day, really), the issue of truth. Remember the scene from this past Sunday's Gospel? Jesus was sparring with the Pharisees again, about Truth, nonsubjective, black and white, incontrovertible -- and they weren't buying it. The truth didn't match up with their life view and who Christ claimed to be didn't portend of a future for their cushy jobs at the Temple. Inconvenient truths are so... inconvenient!

But there He was, this controversial itinerant preacher, curse Him, making brash statements about truth right there in the Temple. Accusing them of avoiding the truth -- and then in defense of knowing the truth, having the gall to utter -- in reference to Himself -- the words: I AM.  Straight out, Jesus said them, no apology: Amen, amen, I say to you, before Abraham was made, I AM. (John 8:58) 

I Am: the universally recognized name for God Almighty. Out of the mouth of this man from Nazareth, the words I AM. 

How the men of the Temple didn't want to hear that ultimate truth. In their self-centeredness, they couldn't allow truth to change their own wills for themselves, their own comfortable ruts. Whether it was from God or not. They could just deny it was God speaking and they wouldn't be responsible for anything He said. And that's what they did.

 But the bottom line was and  is that every true thing is from God, whether they -- whether we -- like it or not, whether it's easy or not.  All things true are from God; all things from God are true. If a thing's not true... Well, fill in the blanks; you know where it's from. 

 Jesus later told his Apostles: I am the way, the truth, and the life. (John 14:6)   I AM, He said. Truth. He, Himself, and all He taught.  But then -- as now -- those most liable to the truth, take the greatest offense by it, and the Pharisees took up stones to cast at Him. But Jesus hid Himself, and went out of the temple. (John 8:59) * Painting by J. Tissot: Jesus foretelling the destruction of the Temple.

God help me not to throw stones at the truth. How easy it is when it contradicts my own selfish pleasures and my laziness!

And God help our world in the big picture, where basic truths of natural law are cavalierly explained away and contradicted: truths about marriage, purity, the murder of the unborn and the unwanted (the list goes on and on).

So, anyway, here we are in Passion Week; the purple coverings over all the holy images in our churches today symbolize the day when Jesus hid Himself from His would-be assassins. It was not His time yet. Not quite. And it's not quite time for us to commemorate Good Friday, but we know it's coming, as Jesus knew after this altercation in the Temple. And so we prepare. And wait. And pray.

We accept the austerity of these last two weeks before the Sacred Triduum in the spirit of joy shrouded in the purple of foreboding. The terrible time is coming. I wonder if the Apostles felt a change in the air as Jesus tried so hard to prepare them in these final days? I wonder if the world felt covered in a kind of gloom, especially for those so close to Jesus who feared for Him and didn't know what was going to happen, the bad or the good?

We know what's coming, though, on Good Friday. We don't have any excuse not to prepare and lament the foolishness and hatred of the human race that made it necessary.

But, then we also have that other foreknowledge. Even as we suffer through the purple shrouds and quiet sorrow, in a corner of our Catholic hearts we know the sorrow we share with the Apostles -- though it's the merest hint of what it should be -- only foreshadows the greatest joy the world has ever known: Easter.

And the more we understand the sorrow, the greater will be our joy.

Jesus instructing the Pharisees. -- James Tissot

The purpose of Passiontide is to call to our memory the persecutions of which Our Lord was the object during His public life and especially toward the end. If Septuagesima season acts as a remote preparation for Easter, and Lent the proximate one, the last two weeks of Passiontide are the immediate preparation.

 -- Maria Augusta Trapp

At our house this week: the statues are covered (Ahem. Most of them. St. Patrick is new and we don't have a big enough piece of violet fabric to cover him yet), the periphery art is put away, everything is cleaned and dusted. Generally speaking, the only things we leave uncovered are images of the Passion and Crucifixion. Not in the frame of this photo is our chalkboard door, which we left blank, stark black this year. (Though, never fear: we'll come up with something special for Easter). Music now is strictly instrumental, classical, or sacred. The spirit is as calm and watchful as we can make it. Easier nowadays to accomplish that when all we have home are people over the age of sixteen, mind you. And the anticipation is a little different these days, less about accommodating children's simple understanding and more about really understanding it all myself. What a thought! 

By the time I die, I will have looked at clouds from both sides: castles and umbrellas from a child's POV and cumulonimbus world-wide patterns of weather, mood and history from a brain free to roam past castles and umbrellas. To everything there is a season.

Blessed and fruitful Passion Week, everyone!