Csquared Thoughts

Good Friday

Since it's Good Friday, I think I'll acknowledge that, and leave it at that.

Triduum

Maundy Thursday
At Good Shepherd we came forward and Pastor Koch put a cross of water and oil on our foreheads, and said, "Your sins are forgiven," as a sort of bookend to Ash Wednesday. For Communion we all gathered around the altar in a circle and shared the wine and a loaf of real bread.

Good Friday
At St. Mary's Catholic Community, we gathered for a noon ecumenical service with clergy from five churches in town, listening to readings from the passion story in John, and reflections on those readings. The service ended with the congregation singing "Lord of the Dance."

A good, appropriate, and satisfying end to Holy Week.

What Happened to Lent?

Tomorrow is Palm Sunday/Passion Sunday. What happened to Lent? I never even got my Lenten discipline in gear, and it's over.

I saw my spiritual director on Thursday, and she suggested I take a step back and see what Holy Week might have to offer before heading in to Easter. Not a problem. I tend to have my major spiritual crises during Holy Week. It was during Holy Week that I realized that as much as I loved All Saints' Episcopal in Palo Alto, I couldn't keep commuting up there on Sundays after having moved 40 miles south to Gilroy. And it was during Holy Week that I realized that, for a variety of reasons, I couldn't handle being a part of that fine little Episcopal church in South San Jose that I had started attending a year earlier.

Fortunately, I don't have a spiritual crisis every year during Holy Week, but it is a "thin time" for me. A time when the layer that separates the human and the Divine is thinner than it is at other times.

So I go into Holy Week this year with faith and trust.