Holy Week

I feel about Holy Week the same way I feel about Advent. It’s the most beautiful, unfolding story. Every sacrement and liturgy is drenched in poetry and aesthetic, and my beauty craving soul sings.

Palm Sunday

Holy Monday

Fig Tuesday

Spy Wednesday/Silent Wednesday

Maundy Thursday

Good Friday

Holy Saturday

Easter Sunday/Easter Vigil

Easter Monday

When we were away, Cody and I went to a small church in a small little town, tucked right in to the Manitoba prairies. The pastor was someone we knew, and as he spoke about relationship and mystery, it reminded me of the days when I was a girl love drunk on religion. My spirituality doesn’t fit into a pew anymore, but the ritual of religion still takes my breath away.

Is it possible to have strayed, only to find yourself closer to the center than ever before?

The differentiation of Christianity as it was intended to be versus Judaism, from which it has its roots, is the aspect of a personal relationship with God. God as Father. God as Mother.

I wrote a few weeks back about what I know of death, I also know of birth. I would also be so bold as to say what I know to be true of motherhood, I know to be true of God. I remember the first Easter after Paris died, only a few short weeks had passed since his birth and I hadn’t left the bed, and I asked what I now think of as the universal question of the grieving: where is God? My son had died, my body was declining into what would eventually be the decomposition needed for my transplant, surely a good God wouldn’t do such a thing.

Surely we are not so bold as to think we can understand God

I was reminded of a story I heard from a fellow woman also in eating disorder recovery. Like me, she’d been raised in conservative christianity with a notion that she needed to impress or be worthy of God. I’m omitting details to protect her privacy, but the essence of the story went that during one of her purging episodes, there on the bathroom floor, feeling the most shameful and guilty and disgusting she’d ever felt, she felt the presence of God. A God that didn’t demand she shape up, fix herself and be pretty. A God that held her hair back while she vomitted into the toilet.

I thought of that story when I was in bed recovering from delivery, empty arms and empty womb, not having showered in days or pulled back the blinds to let the light in. And God was there.

“My son died.”

“I know, mine too.”

Silence.

Sometimes in our pain we’re not looking for answers, or reasons. What we’re looking for is a safe place to land.

In that broken hearted, messy, matted hair moment I knew more of God than I’d ever learned sitting in a church pew all dressed up for Sunday. The kind of selfless, rip our heart open, reckless kind of love I felt for my son taught me more about God than any theology book written by any scholar of any religious background could have.

It wasn’t pretty.

But then again, is it ever?

We celebrate holy week, the focus on easter and the triumphant story. But before Easter there was Good Friday. Death, the most violent, bloody, gory kind. Betrayal, secrets, lies. Before the light, there was and is absolute darkness.

I love pretty things, and rituals, aesthetics and beauty. I still have hopes of one day creating beautiful, picture worthy aesthetics around the things that matter most. That Holy week looked like dirty sheets and blinds pulled tight to keep the light out. This one looks like piles of paperwork, life shifts and eating alone. It’s not pretty. but its meaningful.

I want to choose meaningful over beautiful

I want the brokenness of life to pull me closer to a God who was broken for love