Different and the same, an invitation to Holy Week

On Sunday the children wanted to know how much more of Lent we had before Easter came.  They were relieved that we had made it more than halfway, but for them Easter can never come too soon.  I understand.  I have years of organizing Holy Week liturgies in congregations large and small.  Now I sit in the pew and stand and kneel and walk through it all as directed.  Well, pretty much as directed :)  I understand Palm Sunday will include a donkey this year.  

Every year it is different, and the same.  There are layers and layers laid down in past experience, and new things which I have never done, but somehow it is the same in a deep inexplicable way.  This is all a communal action, yet also something I do myself.  The series of four questions asked by a young child at the Seder dinner, the dinner remembering the Passover, begins: Manishtanah: (Hebrew for: What is different (about this night)?  Every year it is different, and the same.

Walk through Holy Week for the first time, or do it again.   Lay down some new layers.  If you are not part of a community that walks through Holy Week, tag along with a friend for the experience.  You might join us at St. Mark*s Glen Ellyn on Palm Sunday (April 17).  I understand we will have a donkey leading the procession at 9:15 and 10:30 (outside, mind you).

We have made it past the middle

Of Lent.

In my mailbox are invitations

To be quiet,

To share the Passover meal,

To consider all of Holy Week,

Walk through it as I have done

For over thirty years,

Invited people to walk with me

From beginning to end

To beginning again.

Every year I walk it

Alone;

Every year

a new layer

A particular nuance.

Manishtanah:

What is different this year?

Why is this week so different

from all other weeks?

It is not a question of wafers or bread,

wine or grape juice;

Not the particular parade

To the Garden of Repose;

It is different because

Every year it is new, yet somehow the same.

Every year I have never remembered it this way before

Yet somehow I remember we have always done it just exactly

Like this.

It is familiar;

It is completely new.

Every year I come out the other end

The same as I went in, yet 

Never the same again,

Never the same.

Every year I somehow arrive at Easter

Dazed

And dancing.