I arrived today at the monastery of the Society of St. John the Evangelist in Cambridge, Massachusetts, just around the corner from where I completed seminary almost 32 years ago (the seminary is no longer there).
My journey here represents a return in a number of ways. It is a place where I used to find refuge regularly from the intensity of seminary life — and I really have not spent any time here since then. So being here now does have something of a “coming full circle” quality to it.
But this journey has another quality of returning. I came here to observe the heart of Holy Week and to celebrate Easter — and these are liturgies in which I have not participated since 2020. The great exploding of my life detonated on the second Sunday of Easter season that year, and in the long and winding journey toward recovery from that, I have mostly not taken part in liturgical celebrations at all, and certainly not those associated with this center point of the Christian tradition.
Something, however, seemed to shift this year, and I felt drawn to return to this place that was once a refuge to experience these liturgies again, to allow them to draw me into the mystery. Without knowing how they will settle in me, or how they will feel after this long hiatus.
One thing that I am very aware of is that the central concepts of Holy Week — suffering, crucifixion, death, resurrection — live in me now in a way that they never did before. For most of my life, these have existed as ideas. I could see them playing out perpetually in the larger drama of our shared humanity, I could see them playing out in the lives of some people I knew. Yet, it was difficult to see them playing out in my own life in anything but perhaps a somewhat symbolic way.
That, however, has all shifted. I have known these things intimately. In the last four years, they have moved from metaphor to lived experience. And so Holy Week hits a bit differently now.
The liturgies of Holy Week are meant to take us through the places in our lived experience where these themes have become reality. And by taking us through them, they help us to integrate these experiences into the whole of our personal history. It is too often our tendency to resist the difficult parts of our lives, to push them away, to rail against them, to avoid confronting them in all their ugliness. And the liturgies of Holy Week acknowledge that tendency. And then move us beyond that to confrontation, to acknowledgement, and ultimately, into integration.
That is another returning: the integrative journey returns us to ourselves — and in doing so, we find that we are not as we once were.
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