Holy Week

Holy Week here at Jubilee is a flurry of activity that everyone seems to be swept up in at some point as a part of this wide, wild family of folks. Although a few people do much of the organizing, it takes everyone to make sure all the flowers get gathered, the songs get sung and the words are spoken that must be spoken in order to remember well. I must admit, I wasn’t looking forward to this week since it looked less like a holiday and much more like a whole lot of busyness for some small bit of religious devotion. Here is what our schedule looked like:

As it turned out, though, this has been an amazing experience for which I am deeply grateful. Even as I struggled to drag myself out of my bed and down to the library in my pajamas for devotions every three hours through the night and into the day on Thursday-Friday, something amazing was happening here. I remember the feeling of these days, waiting for a friend or a grandparent or someone you have heard of passing from this life on to the light beyond. It felt like those times beside my friend Heidi’s bed as she struggled with leukemia and battles we could only hold her hand through, or my grandmother as she asked us to sing hymns and stay with her while she heard, “her train a-comin” or grandpa with his furrowed, worried brow as he recalled story after story and drifted slowly away from us. These are the waking hours, the time when everything else stops for a while inside of you, even as the rest of the world goes rolling, plummeting ever forward in its relentless course.

I could only begin to imagine the the waiting, the exhaustion, the agony of the dark garden of Gethsemane as we gathered on Thursday night after the Seder Meal and footwashing to hold a vigil here at our own garden, around a single tall candle. (Sidenote: One of the partners, Josina, wrote a lovely piece about last year's vigil here: Warm Coffee on a Good Friday Morning.) We sat together, in silence, remembering and listening to the sounds of the night, watching the moon rising and the stars shining bravely on. In spite of all of my times beside those who were leaving this world, I still cannot imagine the absolute terror and loss the disciples must have felt at what unfolded afterwards: the sound of a kiss, the roar of angry crowds, the feel of thorns on his temples, the sound of hammer and nail pounding into the broken tree, the last breath and, eventually, the sound of cloth torn completely in two.

Today, after the last service, when the last candle in the library was extinguished and we went back to our houses to prepare supper by candlelight, I couldn't help but feel a bit of relief that it was finally over. We were all tired and worn out and could feel perhaps a little of how the disciples might have felt to be in that respite, Sabbath space. The smell of rosemary, Vietnamese mint, oregano and other herbs still emanated from our hands from the final service where we read about the women preparing spices for Jesus’ body and prepared our own jars of spices. We were together, the agony finished, the waiting begun and a surprise ahead that no one, after a deathbed waiting, could have ever expected.