Holy Week provides time to consider more deeply the love shown to us by God

My dear family in Christ,

It has become a bit of a tradition at The Catholic Center at the University of Vermont to begin our entry into Holy Week by inviting our students to participate in all-night Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament from Friday into Saturday just before Palm Sunday. With that in mind, I am writing this week’s musing sometime around 3:45 a.m. in the presence of our Eucharistic Lord.  It is quiet, peaceful and a beautiful opportunity to simply let Jesus speak to my heart. It is also an inspirational time as I think about the students who are taking time on a very secular university campus to forego the usual weekend college activities to spend an hour or more with Jesus in prayer.  It inspires and challenges my own faith.

While we may not all have the opportunity to participate in all-night adoration, we are all given the invitation to participate in the holiest days of the Church’s liturgical year. Holy Week provides us all the chance to be more intentional in our life of faith and worship to considering those events which led to our salvation and offer worship to the God who has saved us. Each of the liturgies of Holy Week provide the chance to consider more deeply the love shown to us by God in offering His Son to be the price of our redemption.

I remember as a child I sometimes wondered why the liturgies of Holy Week had to be so much different and sometimes so much longer than a regular Sunday Mass. However, as I matured in faith and began to pay attention more and more to what we were doing as a church in these liturgies, I began to see the beauty and wonder of each of them.

Passion/Palm Sunday gives us the opportunity to be part of the crowd that welcomed Jesus into Jerusalem but also to consider how quickly some of these people turned against Him. We are challenged to ask ourselves if our faith is so fickle that we turn away from Him when challenged or rejected for our faith.

Holy Thursday allows us to rejoice in the gift of the Eucharist, the priesthood and the universal call to serve others and to ask if we really have embraced the call to “serve, not to be served.”

Good Friday invites us to consider Our Lord’s sacrifice on the cross, the shedding of His blood and His willingness to give His life to set us free. Venerating the object of our salvation and listening to St. John’s Passion should cause us to consider somberly how much our God loves us.

Finally, the great Easter Vigil and Easter Sunday renew our spirit and faith with the promise that we are invited to share in the Lord’s victory over sin and death and to live a truly new life.

Does participating in these liturgies take time? Yes. Is it time well spent? Definitely. So, I invite us all to take the time this week to embrace the invitation to walk with the Lord — with Him who gave His life for our salvation — to ponder the mystery of His love and to allow the new life He promises to transform our lives.

In Christ the Lord,

Monsignor John J. McDermott

Diocesan Administrator