Dear Parishioners,

  Palm Sunday begins Holy Week, the most important celebration of the year.  All the celebrations this week are full of gestures & emotion as we journey with Jesus through His Passion, a powerful expression of God’s love for us.  We have celebrated many Holy Weeks & heard the readings many times.  This can make us complacent & lose the novelty of how God may be trying to speak to us. 

  My invitation to you for this Holy Week is to enter it with an attitude of expectancy, & openness.  How might God be revealing something new to me about Himself?  He always desires to reveal something more.  What is He trying to teach me about love, compassion, embracing my cross and suffering & even death if necessary? So, let us enter into His Passion with an open heart & a listening ear.

  I see the passion of Jesus as a humble surrender to suffering.  The Passion starts with Jesus’s gestures of love at the last supper.  Here, He gave us His body & blood in the Eucharist, His love in a tangible form.  He also teaches through example what humility in service means. 

  At Gethsemane Jesus His struggles in front of the will of the Father to go to the cross.  The church gives us a beautiful invitation to adoration after the Maundy Thursday service, we can accompany Jesus like Peter, James & John, trying to wait with Him, learning to pray from Him, trying to stay awake with Him through His suffering. 

On Good Friday Jesus surrenders to His suffering on the Cross, He accepts it, He embraces it, He abandons His Spirit to The Father & accepts death…..& we pause……

  Here we must pause, death requires a pause from us.  The church invites us so poignantly to sit with the empty tabernacle on Holy Saturday.  How many people live that reality, the absence of God in their lives? Loneliness, anxiety, pain, burn out, addiction, loss, suffering, sometimes wanting an end to it.  God seems absent, yet He is not inactive.  On Holy Saturday Jesus descends into hell.  He descends into all the hellish experiences of our lives, He is there with us, we are never alone, even if we think we are. 

  But….Jesus did not stay in hell, He rose and He brings us with Him. That is the hope of Easter that Jesus rose from the dead and He brings us out of our hell with Him.  Suffering and Death do not have the last word…the word of God does, The Word of God who is a person, Jesus.  He always has last word and His words bring hope, light and life to us.

  So as we read the drama of the Passion of Jesus this Palm Sunday, let it prepare us and prepare our hearts to receive Gods love in a new way this Holy Week.

Ann Marie D’Souza, FMVD