Monday of Holy Week

It is the Monday of Holy week.

I don't know about you, but the drama of Palm Sunday leaves me prepared to walk into Holy Week with some intention and gusto. The Rythm of Palm Sunday in the Catholic Church has a nice drama to it.

And yet, today I spent most of the day waiting for a plummer or working around a plummer.  My life was profoundly ordinary today.  There is nothing expressedly sacred about the monotany of my day.

Even though the whole week is considered, "Holy Week" much of it is startlingly ordinary.  The liturgy and rituals that make of Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday are poetry.  But today.  This is just Monday.   Maybe this strange ordinary we have before Holy Thursday, Good Friday and Then Easter is strange and ordinary in the right way.

Before any of us die, even when we know it is going to happen it is so profoundly ordinary.
Before my father died, when he was hospitalized but we were waiting for some meds to get out of his body we all did ordinary things.

We took showers and ate.
We laughed an watched movies.
We cried and wandered.

We could not escape our humanity.
We didn't.

This Holy week is not some secret show where we pretend tha we don't know what we will remember and relive on Thursday, Friday and Saturday.  It's not some movie we haven't seen the end of.

So this time, is liminal.
And ordinary.
We wait for plummers.
Take showers.
Eat meals.

We delve into the ordinary of our days.

I remember in that liminal time before my father died that when I was in public (and for months afterwards) I would look around me and see people doing ordinary things and want to scream, "don't know you what is going on here?!" "Don't you know my heart is in tattered shreds inside of me...?"

Something about this time recalls that type of being.
That Holy Week posesses something raw, human, incarnational.
Where we need to shout to ourselves- and maybe others...

"Don't you know what is going on here...!"
"Pay attention to your humanity..."
"Pay attention to your ordinary..."
"For this is the YOU that God loves."
"This is that YOU that God became."
"This is the ordinary- heart sometimes in tattered shreds- that God returns again and again for."