Mudblood Catholic: Holy Week 2015

Collect

Monday, March 30, 2015

Holy Week 2015

What follows are some suggested meditations for Holy Week, taken from a number of English authors (two Catholics and five Anglicans), as well as some selections from the Litany and the Collects of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer. I'll be trying to reduce my time online this week, and am planning to be entirely off for the Triduum (Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday), so this will be my last update until after Easter; for the same reason, I won't be approving comments for a little while, though of course readers are still free to leave them if they don't mind waiting to see them published.

Fig Monday (March 30th)

Named for the famous incident in which Jesus blasted the fig tree -- His sole miracle of destruction -- this is also the date (ritually, at least; the precise chronology of Holy Week in history is notoriously difficult to work out from the Gospels) of the cleansing of the Temple.

At the back of the Christian moral code we find a number of pronouncements about the moral law, which are not regulations at all, but which purport to be statements of fact about man and the universe, and upon which the whole moral code depends for its authority and its validity in practice. These statements do not rest on human consent; they are either true or false. If they are true, man runs counter to them at his own peril. He may, of course, defy them, as he may defy the law of gravitation by jumping off the Eiffel Tower, but he cannot abolish them by edict. Nor yet can God abolish them, except by breaking up the structure of the universe, so that in this sense they are not arbitrary laws. ... There is a difference between saying: "If you hold your finger in the fire you will get burned" and saying, "If you whistle at your work I shall beat you, because the noise gets on my nerves." The God of the Christians is too often looked upon as an old gentleman of irritable nerves who beats people for whistling. This is the result of a confusion between arbitrary "law" and the "laws" which are statements of fact. ... Scattered about the New Testament are other statements concerning the moral law, many of which bear a similar air of being arbitrary, harsh, or paradoxical: "Whosoever will save his life shall lose it"; "to him that hath shall be given, but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath"; "it must needs be that offenses come, but woe unto that man by whom the offense cometh" ... We may hear a saying such as these a thousand times, and find in it nothing but mystification and unreason; the thousand and first time, it falls into our recollection pat upon some vital experience, and we suddenly know it to be a statement of inexorable fact. ... The cursing of the barren fig-tree looks like an outburst of irrational bad temper, "for it was not yet the time of figs"; till some desperate crisis confronts us with the challenge of that acted parable and we know that we must perform impossibilities or perish.

-- Dorothy Sayers, The Mind of the Maker pp. 8-10

From all evil and mischief; from sin, from the crafts and assaults of the devil; from thy wrath, and from everlasting damnation,

Good Lord, deliver us.

From all blindness of heart; from pride, vain-glory, and hypocrisy; from envy, hatred, and malice, and all uncharitableness,

Good Lord, deliver us.

From fornication, and all other deadly sin; and from all the deceits of the world, the flesh, and the devil,

Good Lord, deliver us.

From lightning and tempest; from plague, pestilence, and famine; from battle and murder, and from sudden death,

Good Lord, deliver us.

From all sedition, privy conspiracy, and rebellion; from all false doctrine, heresy, and schism; from hardness of heart, and contempt of thy Word and Commandment,

Good Lord, deliver us.

By the mystery of thy holy Incarnation; by thy holy Nativity and Circumcision; by thy Baptism, Fasting, and Temptation,

Good Lord, deliver us.

By thine Agony and bloody Sweat; by thy Cross and Passion; by thy precious Death and Burial; by thy glorious Resurrection and Ascension; and by the coming of the Holy Ghost,

Good Lord, deliver us.

In all time of our tribulation; in all time of our wealth; in the hour of death, and in the day of judgment,

Good Lord, deliver us.

-- From the Litany

Temple Tuesday (March 31st)

Named for the time before Passover that Jesus spent in the Temple court teaching. The many parables of Holy Week, the challenges from and to the Pharisees and Sadducees, and the Seven Woes are associated with this day.

Of all that was done in the past, you eat the fruit, either rotten or ripe.

And the Church must be forever building, and always decaying, and always being restored.

For every ill deed in the past we suffer the consequence:

For sloth, for avarice, gluttony, neglect of the Word of GOD,

For pride, for lechery, treachery, for every act of sin.

And of all that was done that was good, you have the inheritance.

For good and ill deeds belong to a man alone when he stands alone on the other side of death,

But here upon earth you have the reward of the good and ill that was done by those who have gone before you.

And all that is ill you may repair if you walk together in humble repentance, expiating the sins of your fathers;

And all that was good you must fight to keep with hearts as devoted as those of your fathers who fought to gain it.

The Church must be forever building, for it is forever decaying within and attacked from without;

For this is the law of life; and you must remember that while there is time of prosperity

The people will neglect the Temple, and in time of adversity they will decry it.

-- T. S. Eliot, Choruses from 'The Rock' II.25-37

That it may please thee to succor, help, and comfort all that are in danger, necessity, and tribulation,