Holy Week Devotionals

Hi All,

Here's a list of simple but compelling exercises that you might read or do during this Holy Week.  They are opportunities and food for thought, a chance to walk the whole walk of Holy Week.  Poke around, see if one of these works better for you...this story is your story!  See yourself in it.

-Kelly+


Morning and Evening Prayer services with appropriate readings for each day.

Live streams of services from St. Thomas's, 5th Ave and other congregations

Video Sermons and Hymn Texts from the Brothers at the Society of St. John the Evangelist

Follow the Holy Week blogging of the "Internet Monk"

A series of family activities for those with young children.

You can also follow @Virtual_Abbey on Twitter to participate in their brief services



If you have another link for a devotional source you like to do or a family tradition that you'd like to share, please post them in the comment section!

A Hard Blog Entry

The past few days I have been haunted by a conversation I had about the war in Syria.  The conversation began around the "did they or didn't they" argument about chemical weapons that may have been used there on Tuesday.  But during the course of the conversation, I became aware of the extent to which rape is being used as a weapon of war by both sides of the conflict.  In fact, many of the refugees that have reached Turkey and Jordan have reported that it is the risk of sexualized violence against women and girls that compelled them to flee their homes even more than the fear of guns and bombs and lack of food.

It's nothing new of course.  Sexualized violence against women has been a feature of warfare since Biblical times (see Judges 21).  And it's been heart-wrenchingly common in our modern era as well...from the Korean "Comfort Women" of WWII to Bosnia to Rwanda.  Syria isn't even the only place this is happening right now, today, as the conflict in South Kivu in the Democratic Republic of Congo continues.

What does this have to do with Henri Nouwen?  In our reading for today, he references the idea that in some times and places and cultures, suffering has been justified by claims that it is the "will of God."  If God is omnipotent, then instances of suffering must exist because God either wanted it that way or God didn't care enough to change the circumstances.

Nouwen dismisses this argument, reminds us that we were created for joy, and calls us to look for the presence of God amidst suffering.

Denis Mukwege is a Congolese gynocologist who has been forced, by necessity, to become an expert in treating victims of sexualized violence.  He has worked to help women recover from the physical and psychological injuries they've experienced, and then has helped set-up networks to ensure that these women who have lost everything are not exposed to further abuses by their poverty.  His work has earned him an assassination attempt and threats on the lives of his wife and daughters.  He fled the Congo after the attempt, but returned to the country this past January.  Women, many of whom were his patients, raised the money from their meager wages (less than a dollar a day for most) to send him a plane ticket to come back.  He now lives in a hospital with security provided by rotating groups of twenty female volunteers who are unarmed, but never leave him unprotected.

God is present amongst great suffering.  I pray for many things for the people of Syria, and one is that they have a Denis Mukwege.

Helping Each Other on the Journey

I don't know about you, but I find myself so very easily distracted these days, just as Nouen describes.  It's easy to fall victim to a kind of helpless despair as we read the papers and see what goes on in this world. It is difficult sometimes to keep an eye on Easter, to know that no matter what happens, all will, somehow be well.  As Palm Sunday and Holy Week approach I think it is ever more important to be aware that we are not on this journey alone.

When I walk into St. Albans's on a Sunday morning I truly feel surrounded by my fellow-travellers - some old timers to this church, some new, all at different stages of their faith journey.  If I feel too weary or distracted to say the prayers, I know there are others there who will be saying them on my behalf. Perhaps nowhere during the service do I feel as close to my fellow parishioners as when I put the communion bread into their hands.  This is such a sacred moment for me, and, I hope, for the ones receiving the bread.  We are connected.  We are in this together.  We listen to the wonderful stories of the Church every Sunday and we break bread together.  There is much to be said about the Church today - and not a lot of it very good.  But at her best, the Church is there for us with solace, story, companionship, and the assurance of the Eucharist.

All food indeed for the journey.

He's Got the Whole World in His Hands

I love the bit in this morning's reading when St. Francis suddenly saw the whole world in God's hands, and wondered why God didn't drop it.  What a thought - God just dropping the world! I imagine there are times God would like to do just that; we human beings do manage to screw things up so badly sometimes that I wonder if God wouldn't like to say, "you've had chance after chance and I'm fed up with the lot of you," and then just drop the world into oblivion.  Poof!

Well, God doesn't work that way.  God loves this world, warts and all, and doesn't give up on it, or on us, God's frail and faltering people.  God craves intimacy with us, the kind of intimacy he shared with Jesus; and God, like the father in the parable of the Prodigal Son, waits patiently for us to enter into that intimacy.  God watches for us as we journey on that road to intimacy, as we come to know that everything, everything comes from God, and that the greatest of these things is love and closeness, whether in times of sorrow or in times of joy. Through silence and prayer we can learn to weld this knowledge into our hearts.  Through service to our fellow human beings we can learn to feel this in our bones.

God won't drop this world; God loves it too much.  Perhaps as I write this God is rejoicing in the snow that is falling here in New England.  We may not be rejoicing a whole lot as the snowplows block off our driveways yet again, but we can also say to ourselves, "boy this snow is beautiful.  So beautiful."

Audrey

In our first passage from Nouwen for today, he indicates that it is "false ways of obtaining love" that keep us bound to anxiety and violence.

It's amazing how easily we can get ourselves confused.  It's not even that we are confused about what love is, instinctually we already know that.  It's the false way of getting there...a way that is inauthentic to what the love actually is when it is graciously and freely bestowed.  True love can't be coerced or demanded, you can't get there by anything other than honest means.

It's like what our prayer for the day says.  Taken from Psalm 25, it points out that "Integrity and generosity are marks of Yahweh."  Seeking love in a way that compromises our own integrity is is one of those false ways of getting there.  But if we can get there, if we can experience genuine love of others and genuine love of God, then we are taking steps on the journey for each of us towards new life.

Poor Listening

"We are poor listeners because we are afraid that there is something other than love in God."

-Nouwen, 121

At my last job, I have a very clear memory of sitting in a meeting where someone said something that annoyed me.  It more than annoyed me.  It made me mad.  It actually made me pretty furious.  And I sat in my chair silently fuming for I don't know how long before I realized that I hadn't been paying any attention to what was actually happening in the meeting.  Perhaps someone else in the room had disagreed with the speaker.  Perhaps the speaker later apologized or edited their previous remarks.   I imagine that would have been very satisfying to watch, but I have no idea if it happened because I was far too busy focusing on my own emotions and my own sense that a boundary had been violated to bother paying attention to anything else.  Furthermore, I have no recollection of what decisions were made in the meeting during that time...I lost out on my chance to offer feedback.  And it was all because I had this anger that was blocking my ability to listen.

Maybe you've had an experience like that.  Perhaps it was another kind of emotion that overwhelmed you.  I think anger is a common way to get to that point, and I think fear is another common way to get there as well...something Nouwen touched on in today's passage.

 I love the sentence quoted above for two reasons.  I'm interested in the question of what keeps us from listening to God, but I'm also curious about the idea that there might be something other than love in God.  The sentence rings true to me, but what other things do we think are in God?

Perhaps we believe that God may be judgmental or wrathful or disappointed or indifferent.  And there's certainly been enough bad theology combined with personal experience to lead us to that point.  But if we can't listen to God because of our fear or anger that God might be those things, then it's kinda like me having no idea what actually happened in that meeting.  If negative emotions block us from listening, then we can't hear the reality of what's actually happening - the truth that God is love.  Nothing more.  Nothing less.

Where Is Our Glory?

Nouen does not make life easy for us, does he?  Every meditation is so full of food for thought, and so full of counterintuitive observations!  We human beings, especially in America, thrive on competition - it's the American way, right?  Our "glory" so often comes from making it to the top, being the best, the coolest, the smartest, the richest.  We always have our eye fixed on the top of the ladder.

It is just the opposite with Jesus.  Instead of scrabbling for glory by being the best rabbi in town, the best prophet, the cleverest orator, he kept his eye fixed on the poor and the outcasts, on the ones who didn't count worth beans in his society.  God's glory is revealed to us by moving downward.  How bizarre this seems to us at first glance, and how difficult a concept for us; I think it is something we all struggle with all the time. We want to pattern our lives after Jesus, but it is so hard to break old patterns, to turn ourselves away from what most of us have known since we were little kids - the vying for our parents' attention, trying to beat out the other kids with better grades, more accolades at school - you know the drill.  Our eye keeps moving up that ladder!

In reading Nouen's meditations this Lent I have been most intrigued by this "downward call" of Jesus - not an easy concept, but one that we can hold before us and aspire to.  I don't expect in a million years that I can come close to answering that call for myself; I can but try my best, and maybe that is enough.

Audrey