Ready or Not: A Holy Week Reflection

This final piece in our CTA staff reflection series comes from Claire Hitchins, Re/Generation Program Coordinator. We wish all of you a very blessed Holy Week!

And like that, it’s Holy Week. How did we get here? In spite of nearly forty days of preparation, let me tell you, I am not prepared. All of my more ambitious Lenten practices fell by the wayside weeks ago. I’ve barely given any thought to selecting which of the infinite virtual liturgies to “attend” each day of the Triduum. I have yet to track down the ingredients to make my family’s traditional Easter dishes – the ones that say to my taste buds, “Christ is Risen!” Thank God Jesus’s resurrection is not dependent on my adequate preparation! Ready or not, here Easter comes. 

A different kind of preparation has been all over the news in these strange and terrifying weeks of pandemic: health workers preparing to be redeployed to emergency COVID units, shopping lists to prepare for not leaving the house for two weeks at a time, assessments of how governments should or could have prepared better. 

I have been reflecting myself on how I have – and have not – been prepared for a time such as this. My gut reaction is, “what could have possibly prepared me for this?” And it's true (and undoubtedly a function of my many privileges) – I had never imagined how life as I knew it might be impacted by a global pandemic. But as I have brought these questions to prayer, I have been surprised to see how all kinds of experiences have prepared me for this time. 

I think about serving as a hospital chaplain and learning the power of simply bearing witness to suffering. I think about living in an intentional community and learning to make do with less, to dismiss scarcity thinking, to trust the abundance we find when we share. I think about years of reckoning with my whiteness and unlearning the kind of white supremacist thinking that is exacerbating the suffering of so many right now. I think about the “emergent ritual” class that is currently teaching me how to hold sacred space for connection, grief, despair, and the possibility of hope. Reflecting on how I have been prepared for this, I see many ways that Spirit has been at work in my life.

Likewise, when I look back at my living through these unfamiliar Lenten days, I catch glimpses of Spirit preparing me for Easter in spite of myself. With a little sacred imagination, I can see how the mundane ritual of washing my hands has become a sacrament of purification and healing for myself and others, how conversations across computer screens have become communion, how spatial isolation has become a holy fast for the wellbeing of the whole, and how mutual aid efforts have become a particularly powerful form of almsgiving.

Maybe you’re feeling unprepared too – for Holy Week, for this global pandemic. I see you. I see how unprepared you feel. And I see how you have been prepared: 

You who have been living on the Catholic fringe – you’ve had your experience of church turned upside down before. You’ve felt the sting of being cut off from the community that once nourished you. And you’ve given yourself to transforming the failing institution, to being church in new ways. 

You who have felt the heavy weight of grief on your chest after the death of your beloved, the frightening diagnosis, the lost job, the lost marriage, the ambiguous loss of depression or addiction – you have felt your whole life turned upside down and shatter into a hundred sharp pieces before. You’ve somehow let the edges be weathered smooth through the passage of seasons. Through prayer and therapy and community and art, you’ve somehow put them back together in a new shape, somehow more whole than before.

You who have been excluded, forgotten, and harmed by the racism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, ageism, ableism, and misogyny that contort nearly every system meant to serve us –you have already learned to trust the power of the people over any other worldly power (“Who keeps us safe? We keep us safe!”). You have already woven networks of mutual aid whose strands reach as far as the margin of the margin and are as sturdy as our love for one another.

If this is not death and resurrection, I don’t know what is. 

Somehow God has been making a way all along where there appeared to be no way – in and through, because of and in spite of us. Again and again, God prepares us for this – to meet Her in the depths of human suffering, to be transformed by Her all-encompassing love, to proclaim the power of life over death, to practice resurrection. May we be open to receive God’s extravagant grace this Holy Week and Easter – ready or not.