Rehearse and Remember

Many of us enter Holy Week with words like “rehearse the drama” which are of course fed by the enactment of the Passion on Palm Sunday.

This year when there were only private or less than 5 gathered replayings of the Passion because enactments had previously taken place in church buildings, new meaning was poured into the words “rehearse the drama”. new props, new settings, even new scripts...All of this begs the question is a rehearsal even necessary when we are living the passion!

Holy Week in this time of coronovirus only serves to heighten the drama and passion of Holy Week and has caused the word rehearsal to take on new poignancy. There are very few rehearsals; we are living it and have been doing so for a while now. We will continue to do so. This is no enactment. This is real.

Instead of rehearse, we are called to re-member the passion and the Christ in its midst.

And so might the Resurrection in the middle of this also be more real, even though there is nothing proveable or replicable.

We are all waiting. We are all at the foot of the cross. We are all at a tomb with something we love having died and placed inside a stone cold cave with a stone blocking our entrance and our loved one’s exit.

We cannot roll that stone away with our might, our force. We have lost control, for many of us the ultimate threat.

And so we pray. Kyrie Eleison. And so we stay. Pieta.

The drama will unfold. No rehearsal. Just grace pouring into the world, into our souls. The issue is not rehearsal. This key is emptiness that we might be filled. With resurrection life.

Blessings to you this holy week,

Martha