This Holy Week, let's stop pretending

It has become something of a cliché to say that faith is not just intellectual but embodied, not just words and ideas but experience and practice. At no time of the year is this clearer than Holy Week. We wave palm branches. We wash one another’s feet. We stay up to keep vigil. We act out the passion and kiss the cross.

These practices are a great liturgical gift. They help us not only proclaim the stories of Holy Week but also enter them. They remind us that these are stories that involve us.

Yet these practices are not without their dangers. Living through Holy Week can feel like a game of pretend—because we already know how the story ends. We might feel like Good Friday loses some of its meaning if we are already thinking about Easter. And so we end up trying to embody the stories as if we didn’t know, as if we could get closer to the cross if we could step into the disciples’ sandals.