Holy Week

In the days of my belief in the Christian dogma Holy Week became more important to me than Christmas. The latter seemed to center more on activities in the home, the decorated tree, the pretty packages beneath, the stuffed stockings, whereas the former was a series of theatrical enactments into which I invested myself.  It all began with Maunday Thursday as the purple vestments of Lent, symbolizing the blood of Christ, were stripped from the altars, and the setting was left bare to enact the truth of the coming death of the god worshiped there.  The theatrical cast to the event dramatically changed when the white hangings and decoration of Easter Sunday were laid on and the congregation moved from the darkness of death into the blaze of light of the Resurrection.  As an altar boy in our church in Iowa City I never failed to make the connection between Sunday Holy Communion service and the details of the Last Supper ("Take, eat, this is my body. . . . This is my blood of the covenant which is shed for thee . . . . ") always investing the offering with magical powers from the transformation which I felt in my youthful body as the alcoholic fumes of the sacramental wine filled my lungs and I became ever so slightly tipsy.  Jesus was in the wine and the wafer and I was filled with His spirit.  So powerful was this impression that seventy years later when I was visiting a Methodist church where the congregation shared in the communion of a loaf of bread and grape juice I declined to step forward, instinctively rejecting the lack of magical power in the grape juice, and uncertain of the fairy tale transformation that might reside in the bread.  I often think over what remains to me of the gospel account of these days even though the literal belief in them has long since faded, I mean Jesus mandating that we humble ourselves for love on Maundy Thursday, his clear eyed understanding of Peter's betrayal in the Garden of Gethsemane, of Judas' treacherous kiss before the soldiers, his to me startling calling out to his divine father "why have you forsaken me?" as his dying words.  When he declared to Pontius Pilate "To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth" what is more startling and powerful than Pilate''s reply "What is truth?" which Nietzsche considered the greatest statement in the whole of the New Testament.  The elements of this account that I mention remain a staple of my understanding of the experience of human death: Life betrays us finally and we do not know why.  The Resurrection is beyond my imagination.