Tonight I celebrated Good Friday services at my church. I remember when I was growing up that we typically celebrated Maundy Thursday instead. Sometimes, I think that the pomp and circumstance of the Catholic celebration of Holy week may be closer to what we should all be doing. The problem is that after a few years of celebrating that way, it would become rote as well.
I know that my focus is to be on Jesus’s death and the turmoil that the disciples were feeling. It mirrors the confusion non-believers feel. But since I know how it ends, it is difficult to feel the depths of despair Peter, John, and the rest felt.
Can you imagine how excited, elated even, satan and his henchmen felt after Jesus died? God’s best shot to redeem men was dead, an apparent failure. What plans he must have made! Did he taunt God? Did he view it as his way to buy his way into heaven with a trade of mankind?
Then what happened when he realized Jesus had won? Was he paralyzed by fear? Did the full consequences of his treason fall upon him?
My questions will not be answered in this life time. But I may get them answered some day in heaven. Or maybe I’ll be too busy praising the lamb that was slain to worry about it.
“Sometimes, I think that the pomp and circumstance of the Catholic celebration of Holy week may be closer to what we should all be doing. The problem is that after a few years of celebrating that way, it would become rote as well.”
Says whom?
You still celebrate Christmas and Eater and your birthday every year… Ever take a year or two off to assure the novelty of it?
With each Holy Week celebration I go through (up to #31 now) I see more to contemplate and grow in. What I heard last year and the year before, I hear again and hear for the first time. No, it does not become “rote as well”.
Liturgical prescribed prayer is God’s way in the Old Testament, and we see it continued on in the new covenant. For the life of me, I really can’t imagine the Jews of Old Israel forming a worship committee and debating about what “to do” this year to keep it interesting… That is just not how worship worked then, and as Catholics we believe that is not how worship works now.
I think one of the problems with tradition is that sometimes we do it without the underlying thought processes. In other words, if I just have communion on Maundy Thursday or Good Friday because that’s what we always do on those days, I have lost something valuable.
That isn’t to say we need something new every year, or even every other year, but I think a fresh look at any tradition is a worth while exercise – if only to affirm why it was done that way in the first place.
As a recent convert to the Catholic church I have been amazed at how what I once thought was empty Catholic ritual is so deep – such deep roots and such depth in meaning, the fullness of it all blows me away!
We all have our traditions and rituals whether Protestant or Catholic but we decide whether they become empty ritual or meaningless tradition in our approach to them. As you said – a fresh look is a worthy exercise in affirming the real depth of any tradition.