What Does Holy Week Mean to You?
Q: What Does Holy Week Mean to You?
A: An epic question for epic times. My experience of this time of year has transformed dramatically from my youth and continues to shapeshift as I traverse my own understanding of what “Holy” means. When I was young it meant scavenging for Easter eggs, chocolate and flowers. It was a time when my family would come together, mostly for brunch since they weren’t religious, and share quality time together.
Then it became spring break. We spent days on end driving in our suburban, longing for the open sea air to ‘relax’ only to drive right back home. Later spring break morphed into trips with friends and way too much ‘fun’, especially those days in Myrtle Beach.
During my college years, I was immersing myself deeper into the yoga culture and left most of the western holiday schedule behind me. I had very little interest in the consumerism movement as my studies took me into environmentalism and I was feeling more detached from a society where Black Friday became seemingly more common than Good Friday.
At one point in my life, the type of yoga I was practicing wasn’t enough for me and I began to pay attention to a deeper yearning, one that I had felt even as a child yet never understood. It led me to an insatiable journey of seeking that which is beyond me as I stepped into the transpersonal realm. Like a magnet, I drew people, life challenges, health opportunities, shamans, gurus, plant medicines etc. to me producing a relentless flow of events that took me deeper and deeper into my inner world. I thought I was seeking freedom, and perhaps I was, yet it turns out I was only tangling myself ever more into the paths of others.
And even in that blind imprisonment, I finally found what I was looking for. It wasn’t until I was brought to a moment of reckoning for myself that I was able to connect with the authentic missing piece. And a question is, had it actually been missing? Or had I been missing it all along?
In the early stages of my “more mature” spiritual undertaking, this time of year shifted to a more intellectual nature. One of deep study, biblical study, sacred text study, and a lot of seminar study to say the least. I read, I listened, I felt, I meditated and I eventually lectured on the subject of that which is Holy. My mind was in training and I was so inspired, at least as much as I could be in those circumstances.
Long story short, in the tumult of what happened next, my constructed world fell apart and so did everything that I had thought was important to me, except that one thing. And not only did this occur exactly on this week three years ago, my own person was exemplified as a Judas to a supposed Christ at that time. Talk about metaphor. And thank God for the grace, the mercy and the opportunity to rectify within my own heart all I had experienced, lived through and even become.
Now in a new stage of life, totally uncomfortable and in a deep process of formation, I am still reflecting on what this Holy Week or Semana Santa means. That which is Holy is so deeply personal, so intimate, so immensely powerful and possible. I am grateful to be able to lean into that possibility as I walk with an aching discernment forward into a new life and a continued reflection on what Holy means to me.
