Holy Week & Easter During a Time of Pandemic: A Spiritual Meditation

Holy Week & Easter During a Time of Pandemic: A Spiritual Meditation

By Anthony Maranise, Obl.S.B.

We tend to view the happenings around us through a “me-centered” prism. Some examples help: That four-engine long train is going to make me late for work!; That Dow plunge cost me so much yesterday!; perhaps even, Social distance is making me stir-crazy! How relevant that last one, right?

This year, Holy Week and Easter is a bit different for us all. We are living the most hallowed of liturgical seasons amidst one of recent history’s most difficult, challenging, and uncertain seasons — that of a viral pandemic. ‘Social distancing’, then, is a term to which many of us have become accustomed. As an infection mitigation effort, it refers to the necessity to physically withdraw from close contact with one another. These efforts are not cruel, but selfless as through them, we can help to ‘slow the spread’ of illness and keep safer those with compromised immune systems and the elderly for whom illness can be more costly.

Be that as it may, how are we supposed to live Holy Week without being able to gather in our churches for worship? To celebrate Easter’s exceeding joys without being able to be close to our families and friends? It is truly a different kind of Holy Week this year, and it will be a different of Easter as well.

Let’s shift from that typical “me-centered” prism for a moment. Consider this, instead:

Both voluntarily and involuntarily, the object of our imitation and devotion in this holiest of time of the year — Jesus, Himself — experienced and knew ‘social distance.’

In two salient instances during what Religion scholars have revealed to be the timeline of historical events which make up the Easter Triduum (Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday) of Holy Week, Jesus either ‘socially distanced’ or was ‘socially distant’ from those He loved.

1. After His Last Supper, Jesus went with His Apostles into a nearby garden known as Gethsemane. He asks the Apostles to settle there for a bit, to pray, and to keep watch with Him. Though together at first, all the synoptic Gospels report that Jesus withdraws Himself from them for a while to be alone in prayer by Himself. He ‘socially distances’ Himself and experiences His agonia (literally, ‘a struggle towards victory;’ ‘severe emotional anguish’), only to emerge strengthened in will, spirit, and mission.

1. Hours later, after Jesus is arrested, mocked, condemned, shamed, brutally scourged, and made to carry His own instrument of torture — all willingly, for the sake of our redemption — He is nailed to the Cross. The base of His Cross is placed in a hole in the ground and filled in with rock-pebbles to support its vertical position. Here, in this second instance, when Jesus is lifted high up above the onlookers in the crowd, we see Him made ‘socially distant’, indeed, physically separated from those various others who were usually so physically close to Him.

In this different kind of Holy Week, this different kind of Easter, we can be sure that though we face our own sorts of ‘emotional anguish’ precipitated by being ‘socially distant’ from those we love, we do so, not out of a “me-centeredness”, but out of an expression of care and concern for the well-being of those we love — to keep them safe. We do this inspired by Jesus’ first instance of ‘social distancing’ in the Garden of Gethsemane.

Though ever fully Divine and God, we so often forget that Jesus, while on earth, was fully human as well. Like any human facing a major injustice and forthcoming unimaginable suffering, He ‘needed a moment’ to collect and compose Himself. He needed spiritual and emotional strengthening which God, the Father provided Him in earnest. He emerged from that agonia even stronger. From our own ‘social distancing’, so also shall we, if only we seek, as Jesus did, strength from God.

Finally, our being ‘socially distant’ need not necessitate ‘spiritual distance’ in us. We should continue to look to Jesus in this Holy Week, as we have in all Holy Weeks past, as we should in all Holy Weeks to come, and always. We should look upon His Cross, but look into the ‘distance’ beyond it even more intently because Jesus’ own history ends not in His being ‘socially distant’ on that Cross. He rises! He rises from death and above it. He vanquishes it, conquers it, overcomes it, and returns from His ‘social distance’ to be once again reunited with and among those He loves!

The beauty is that includes us, even today. His Resurrection imbued into all of us who love Him and believe in Him a share in that strength He obtained through His ‘agonia’. Moreover, He has given us assurance that because He first endured the worst sorts of ‘social distance’ in pain, rejection, sorrow, shame, and death — but overcame it — so also shall we; and, all these things are so because of the events that took place on and are the reason for the Friday we call “Good.”

Anthony Maranise is an oblate of Saint Benedict affiliated with St. Bernard Abbey in Cullman, Alabama and a member of the 47^th cohort of studies with the EdD in Interdisciplinary Leadership Program at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska. His most recent book, Cross of a Different Kind: Cancer & Christian Spirituality (Eternal Insight Press, 2018), earned a 2019 Catholic Press Association award in Spirituality. He lives in Memphis, Tennessee where he is an instructor of both religious studies and philosophy for several institutions.