Last week marked the holiest week in the Christian calendar. Beginning with Palm/Passion Sunday on March 24, through Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday, the week ended yesterday, with Easter Sunday. Those of us in liturgical traditions celebrated each day of the Triduum (Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and the Vigil of Easter on Saturday night) with special liturgies marking Jesus’ Last Supper and foot-washing, Jesus’ death on the cross and finally the recounting of the whole arc of salvation history culminating with the resurrection in the pre-dawn hours of Easter day.

Like many clergy – heck, like many Christians – I live for these liturgies. They are my favorites of the Church year. And this year was no different for me in that regard. But my Holy Week experience this year was different from the past in some very poignant ways:

For the first time in over a dozen years, I did not celebrate Holy Week with my dear Thankful Ones; instead, I worshipped at a lovely parish we have found in Austin, All Saints’, for both Sundays of Holy Week where the liturgies were beautifully done. The Palm Sunday service was especially moving. It was hard and holy to be seated in the pews alongside my family on these days. I caught myself mouthing the Celebrant’s words on more than one occasion. And, as any parent will tell you, experiencing a church service while caring for kiddos is a mixed blessing. Your attention is never fully focused on the actions of the liturgy, which is a loss – a sacrifice of parenthood – and yet I am always trying to find ways to help my children engage at different points in that liturgy, which allows me to come to worship with new eyes every Sunday.

As for the Triduum, I was invited to preach at all three services at one of the small churches in my diocese: Grace Church in Llano, Texas, a town about 70 miles northwest of our home. My “commute” on Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and for the Easter Vigil consisted of roughly an hour and a half along the winding road of State Highway 71, out of Austin and through the Texas hill country, at the end of March, in what I suspect is very near the height of wildflower season.

To say the beauty of that drive took my breath away is not an exaggeration. True beauty literally does often inhibit my breathing. Not in any dangerous ways, of course, but still… Something as gorgeous as the precise contrast of the deep blue of bluebonnets alongside red swaths of Indian paintbrush makes my chest hurt. I saw live oaks, in groups of two or three, reaching up with craggy arms into the blue sky of late afternoon or the purple haze of the evening with an expanse of shockingly green grass, scattered with yellow and white flowers, in between each grouping of trees. The Texas hills rolled past my windshield towards a horizon that pointed towards a divine eternity, with so many shades of green that I wondered if God took a few lessons from Bob Ross up there in heaven with Him. And my breath kept catching around that dull but not quite unpleasant ache in my chest – the one that travels up and down my sternum to pool in the triangle of space just beneath my ribcage and the hollow at the bottom of my throat.

I ached with the beauty of it on every drive those three days. And no more so than Good Friday. How impossible it seems that such beauty exists in this world when Christ Jesus himself hangs on the cross in pain and suffering. How impossible it seems that such beauty exists in this world when my people are being exterminated in front of my very eyes and the country I belong to participates in it. How impossible it seems that such beauty exists in this world alongside my longing for dear Thankful Ones whom I still miss and grieve. How impossible it seems that such beauty exists in this world when my father doesn’t.

How impossible it seems that such beauty exists in this world alongside so much evil and ugliness, so much suffering and loss. On the day Jesus hung on the cross, crying out to the Lord, feeling utterly forsaken, it was a beautiful day. And the contrast tore my heart in two as surely as the temple curtain.

On the drive home after the Good Friday service, I fingered all these griefs, unraveling them from each other amid the beauty of the landscape. I numbered them, as one does blessings, and let myself dwell within each of them for a few minutes. The massacre of Palestinians and the exposure of the (often willful) misunderstanding of so many in my own sphere. The strained and broken and difficult relationships in my life. The brutalization of my self by a system I trusted, from which my whole family is still recovering. The loss of a child, not yet quickened in my womb, all those years ago now. The distance from the people who made me a priest, whose love and support I miss from within the very cells of my bones. The lack of my father. Still and always.

And even in my sadness, even in my righteous anger that the world in which we live is not the one God wills for us, I marveled at the sheer variety. That one name, “grief,” encompasses such a wide range of human emotion and experience, of my emotions and experience, is itself a testament to divine creativity as surely as the blues and greens and yellows and whites of the landscape through which I drove.

I was still pondering all these things in my heart come Sunday morning. And as I worshipped among the good people of All Saints’ – none of whom I yet know – the two griefs that rose above them all in that moment were the longing for Thankful Ones and the loss of my father. I held onto them even in the midst of the beautiful hymnody and lovely aesthetic of Easter Day.

And in one moment, as I gazed upon the cross, surrounded by light and lilies, hearing the words of the Eucharistic prayer wash over me like the sacrament it is, I reminded myself that I was still worshipping with my Thankful Ones in some way, even as I allowed myself to acknowledge that it feels different nonetheless. “But it’s not like they’re dead, like Dad,” I said to myself. “They’re still here; even now, they are singing these hymns, saying these prayers, partaking in this same feast. I’m just not there with them.” And immediately as I said the words in my head, I knew that it really wasn’t all that different from my dead father after all. He, too, is worshipping in the fullness of glory, partaking in the same feast as I do. Only distantly from me. And, for a moment, I felt the ache of beauty again, up and down my sternum, pooling in the triangular space beneath my ribcage and the hollow at the bottom of my throat.

And right there, in the midst of loss and longing, in the midst of hope and holiness, in the midst of all that was and is and will be, I gave thanks to God, for the beauty that transcends the evil and ugliness of this world, for the love that transcends even the horrors of death.

Alleluia! Christ is risen!
The Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia!