Yesterday marked the beginning of Holy Week for Western Christian churches with Palm Sunday. It is the most important week of the liturgical year culminating in the Easter Triduum of Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter itself. This week also marks the beginning of Passover. Both are times of prayer, remembrance, and celebration. These holy periods can stand in stark, counter-cultural contrast to the demands of our daily university lives. In the build up to the semester’s end, we are often so go, go, go, that it can feel overly taxing to carve our time for silence and reflection.
In my role as one of the chaplains, I often speak with students about silence– the importance of silence in their lives and in discernment. Silence is one of the best places to listen for and meet the divine and to learn more about who we truly are. In my home tradition of the Roman Catholic faith, the celebration of Holy Thursday through vigil is one liturgy marked by silence. Holy Thursday ends in quiet procession removing the Eucharist from the chapel. Congregants are invited to stay late into the night in quiet prayer with the Eucharist. Similarly, Good Friday is for the most part, a day of silent reflection and prayer. The Easter Vigil service begins in silence and total darkness, broken only by the reading and candlelight.
These three days are a memorial of sorts about one type of silence, marked by our silent reflection. The first Good Friday, with a tortuous death on a cross, is the silence where there should have been dignity, creativity, and life. This type of silence is the ally of death and the men who tortured and killed Jesus, used violence to coerce silence out of vibrant life. This is the insidious silence that was inflicted on Jesus on that first Good Friday.
But there are two types of silence. The first is the silence that demeans and crushes human life for the short-sighted goal of power. But this week, we have the opportunity to practice another type of silence. It is the silence of solace, the silence of prayer, reflection, and meditation. At times it may feel lonely, but we are never alone in this silence, in this silence we are always in communion with each other. In our quiet moments we may only have this silence, this reflective silence that contains in it all of creation.
This silence is filled with hope. The silence of abandonment is only responded to with hope. We are called to reject the silence of fear and death and instead embrace the silence of contemplative love.