When Lent is extra Lenty, you need Holy Week even more

Propped up on pillows, ice packs piled on my aching chest, I watched our parish livestream of the celebration of the Lord’s Passion on Good Friday. After the painful biopsy earlier that morning, I could not make it to church — one more loss in an unexpectedly hard Holy Week.

Two weeks earlier I had found a lump in my breast. The routine exam turned into a mammogram, then an ultrasound, then the biopsy.

That year Lent turned into a physical suffering I carried in my body. During Holy Week, caught in the harrowing in-between, all I had was Christ’s own passion to hold my anxiety and fear.

On that Good Friday, my husband had taken our five boys to church alone — and since our youngest had just turned 3, we were still firmly front-row-people: the only pew where we knew our brood had the best chance to pay attention.

But the angle of the live-stream camera between the altar and the ambo was also aimed at the front pew. So for the entire solemn service, I watched my beloved family somber-faced without me at their side. Wincing from my incisions, I wrestled with my worst fears: It looked like I was watching my own funeral. My bereaved spouse. My motherless children.

Needless to say, I wept through that Good Friday. Holy Saturday brought extra weight as we waited for the biopsy results. Even Easter felt hard that year — especially when Easter Monday brought the news that the tumor was cancer. How could I rejoice when I felt my own mortality breathing down my neck?

Three years later, cancer-free and preparing for another Easter on the horizon, I look back on that hardest Holy Week with unexpected perspective. Not a blithe and bright “everything happens for a reason” cliche. But a bone-deep gratitude for a faith that never shies away from the hardest parts of living, that embraces Christ’s own suffering as a transformation of our grief and loss.

There is nowhere we can go that God has not gone before us.

This Lent has felt extra Lenty, personally and communally. In my home state of Minnesota, friends and neighbors are still reeling from unexpected chaos, suffering, fear and violence. Our world has once again descended into the chaos of war. At home, my own list of petitions runs long and hard: a couple struggling with infertility, parents and children estranged because of mental illness, families grieving for grandparents and a community suffering from the latest gun violence.

Nearly every day I pray the same plaintive plea: “How long, O Lord?”

Yet the reality of resurrection remains the bedrock of my faith. Our family, our home and our hopes are built on this firm ground. I will not let seasons of suffering define who we are forever.

As St. John Paul II said, “We are an Easter people, and Alleluia is our song.” Christ’s suffering and dying transform our own, but it is his rising that gives us eternal life. No matter how long our seasons of Lent stretch, Easter is waiting for us.

In the years when life becomes extra Lenty, the gift of the Triduum becomes even more clear. As a Church we enter completely into the passion, death and resurrection of Jesus. We hold nothing back. All our personal losses and griefs are gathered into Christ’s embrace on the cross — only to be transformed by the astonishing joy of Easter morning.

If this Lent, this year, or what feels like your whole lifetime has been hard and heavy, may you and those you love find hope in the promise of what Holy Week holds. When everything looks like death, God is already at work to bring new life. Even the longest Lents pale in comparison to the stunning light that Easter brings.

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