Holy Week

Sunday is Palm Sunday or as Catholics call it Passion Sunday. There is no week in the year where I feel more Catholic and more tied to my Pagan Mediterranean roots than during this time. I have lived and been many places during Holy Week. As a young person we used to go to De Andreas Seminary in Lemont, IL where the Vincentians had a formation house. The Holy Week Services were always wonderful, full of passion. Now when I remember those days from Childhood I can see also that every year there were less and less seminarians until they closed the seminary, but this will be my first remembrance of Holy Week the slow ebbing of a church that was changing for the better and for the worst.

I like the way that Catholics ' do' holy week. I love the idea of suffering and purgation
that fills the week and the majesty too. The love the idea that people imagine God scourged and whipped and suffering along with us. When I lived in Bolivia I had the absolute best Holy Weeks, I have written about this before the prison where I worked the men all washed each others feet- as the priest does in Catholic Holy Thursday Mass. Watching 2500 inmates do this was the closest I have ever been to the Gospel.
In the end Christmas is a ' nice' holiday but Easter is THE holiday.

In the end I love the Paganism of Holy Week. I could never be part of a religion that was not full of Paganism. I find Protestantism too cut off from the organic religions of the world and I find Judaism and Islam too concerned with Oneness.

I like plurality and I like the fact that my worship is tied to the Pagan worship of the land in which my people arose from, Italia.

Irony seems to be the coin of the realm today and I think that it is ironic that God was Crucified for political opposition I wonder what Jesus would do with George W Bush?