By Br. Pius Marie Gagne, CFR
As we enter Holy Week this year, we may find ourselves beset by overwhelming fear and anxiety. Our nation is polarized, war rages between nations, new technological advances offer both new promise and unprecedented dangers, and even the Church faces division and sinfulness within her members. These large-scale challenges only compound the difficulties each of us faces personally: illness, marital discord, children and grandchildren who have abandoned their faith, financial woes, loneliness, etc. All of this can feel so terribly “too much” for us to handle and make us feel like the Lord is far away.
Yet what we celebrate in the Sacred Triduum that proves his claim that he is the resurrection and the life, not just theoretically, but concretely. It is an invitation to look beyond the external appearances of things and pierce the darkness that looms all around us with the light of faith, faith in the victory of Christ over sin and death. Our faith does not rest on feelings, which can so often make things seem impossible. The same doubts and despair that filled the hearts of the Apostles and the travelers on the road to Emmaus can fill our own. We have an advantage, though! We know that things did not end with Good Friday: Jesus rose on the third day, triumphant!
Think about what things looked like during the first Triduum. The Lord’s his entire public ministry seemed like an abysmal failure: his closest friends betrayed and utterly abandoned him, save one; the Chosen People rejected him, choosing Barabbas instead of him; and in his last moments, it seemed as though even God the Father abandoned him! Jesus chose to experience all of this so that, by entering the deepest depths of pain and suffering, he might transform it from the inside, and we can know, by faith, that he truly is “God with us”. By ourselves, the troubled times we live in are too much for us. But Holy Week reminds us that we are not alone in our sorrows and that Jesus has already conquered whatever we face.
Br. Pius Marie Gagne, CFR is one of the Co-Chaplains at the National Blue Army Shrine of Our Lady of Fatima.
