Hell on Holy Week

The holiest week of the Church calendar, a week of somber anticipation of the crucifixion and healing hope of the resurrection.

How was yours?

Mine began with finishing a two day trip south.
Arrived in anxiety and stayed there.
A tension one could taste.
Once the pressure valve opened, accusations held back like pressurized steam hissed from each connection.
Hellfire belched out in a blur.

Dare I declare the demons are in the air.
Should I confess those in my own breast.
How many have a hold on the home, or whisper so softly we do not know it is not ourselves.

As I await the glorious morning the tomb was found empty, I cannot help but feel so is my soul.
The joy and love flew away with the dove.
May He someday perch here again.
I hold on to hope until the end.

Perhaps you recognize something in that.
Perhaps your Holy Week was quieter but no less complicated.
Perhaps the candles and the liturgy felt a little hollow, the alleluias a little forced.
You would not be the first.

There is a peculiar cruelty to sacred seasons.
They arrive with expectations already attached.
Gratitude is the only appropriate response to Thanksgiving.
Joy is the only appropriate response to Christmas.
Hope is the only appropriate response to Easter.
Yet these are often the seasons when grief shows up uninvited, when families fracture, when the soul feels less like a resurrection and more like an empty tomb with no good news attached.

This is not a modern era problem.
It is not a failure of your particular faith or family.
It has always been this way.
We are simply used to our age of cheap comfort.

The disciples themselves spent Holy Week confused, afraid, and hiding.
The women at the tomb arrived expecting a body and left not with triumph but with trembling they could not name.

The calendar does not demand that we feel the right things.
It invites us to show up honestly to what is true.

And sometimes what is true is that we are holding on to hope until the end, not because we have arrived anywhere, but because we have nothing left but the heart’s holding.

That, I would argue, is enough.
It may even be the whole point.