Sunday, March 28, was Palm Sunday, the beginning of Holy Week. This is a week when Christians recall the events leading up to Jesus’ death by crucifixion and Resurrection. The week includes five significant days, the first being Palm Sunday, which commemorates Jesus’ humble entry (on a donkey) into Jerusalem to observe Passover. Maundy Thursday marks Jesus’ institution at the Last Supper of the Eucharist, a central element of Christian worship. Good Friday commemorates Jesus’ suffering and death on the cross; it is traditionally a day of sorrow, penance, reflection, and fasting.
The climax is Easter Sunday, the beginning of a new week, the celebration of Jesus’ Resurrection, according to the Gospels, on the third day after his crucifixion. Like Christmas, the modern observance of Easter has become associated with various folk traditions that have little connection with the religious celebration: special dress, the Easter rabbit, the painting of Easter eggs, and Easter egg hunts.
Millions of Christians will reflect and celebrate during this Holy Week. In this pondering, I am concerned about holy other than as a description of a week on the Christian calendar. We have lost our sense of the holy. This is a universal problem…certainly in our country. It is so universal and serious; I label it a modern plague.
Ponder it. We are neck-deep in secularism. We put forth great effort legislatively that our public schools not deal with the holy. We make the smug assumption that prosperity is natural. We believe that “money talks.” We guard against any group seeking to establish moral standards. The obsession with sex is blatantly expressed in commercials…even in the selling of automobiles. Personal and social morality is trivialized.
T.S. Eliot expressed this in The Rock:
And the wind shall say: “here were decent godless people;
Their only monument the asphalt road
And a thousand lost golf balls.”
Frederick Speakman made a terrifying assessment, “The man who has nothing before which he is eager to bow will someday be flattened by the sheer weight of himself.” Is this not our problem? Too few have relationships they consider holy. We prioritize values with no reference to holy. We have no holy places to which we go, no sacred places which we revere.
All of us need a holy place. It need not be a church, though certainly the church should be one. It may be a quiet retreat in some out-of-the-way place. It may be a favorite nook in your bedroom, a corner in your backyard, well secluded from your neighbors. Ever since Eden, some persons have been “nearer to God’s heart in a garden than anywhere else on earth.” So, it may be a garden.
We all need a holy place. Though we may have to find it amidst the noise and din of a too busy world, still we must find it. And we can!
There is a viewless, cloistered room,
As high as heaven, as fair as day,
Where, though my feet may join the throng,
My soil can enter in, and pray.
Consider this word from the prophet, Ezekiel: God says, “Priests have violated my law, and have profaned my holy things; they have put no difference between the holy and the profane…and I am profaned among them (Eze. 22:26)