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Growing up in Michigan, just a mile or so inland from the shore of Lake Michigan, Easter, even when it came early, was always heralded by signs of spring. Here in Huntington, Indiana, on the Monday of Holy Week in April 2020, the crocuses have come and (mostly) gone, the grape hyacinths are up, and the daffodils are in full bloom.
But what I really look forward to seeing are the forsythia.
With its mix of joy and sorrow, celebration of Christ’s kingship and anticipation of his death, Palm Sunday has always been a bittersweet start to Holy Week, but never more so than this year. The images of priests and bishops celebrating Mass in empty churches, reading St. Matthew’s Passion with only one person responding as the crowd, drove home the unusual nature of what we will experience over the coming week.
The responsorial psalm for today — Psalm 22 — foreshadows Christ’s passion, especially those final moments on the cross before he delivers up his spirit. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
It was a year ago this month that I lost my best friend.
Aaron D. Wolf went home to our Lord and Savior on April 21, 2019 — Easter Sunday. I knew no one — not even my own wife — as well as I knew Aaron, my coworker for 19 years and friend for 21.
Over the last few weeks, I have mentioned on more than one occasion “The Ladder of Divine Ascent” by St. John Climacus. It’s a work of great spiritual insight, originally written for monks, but read every Lent by many Eastern Catholics and Orthodox. I’ve read it a few times myself and have returned to it this year after several years away.
I read Step 28 today. It’s a chapter on prayer, and I was struck, as I have been in previous readings, by how simple and straightforward St. John’s advice is.
Psalm 91 is probably best known to most Catholics as the text of a hymn that everyone either loves or hates: “On Eagle’s Wings.” (Count me in the less than enthusiastic crowd. But then, my taste in Church music runs to Byzantine chant.)
That same psalm, in the Douay-Rheims translation of the Vulgate (the canonical Latin version of the Bible), is the source of a phrase that was once common in prayers and in discussions of the seven deadly sins: “the noonday devil.”