Heaven’s Loop called Holy Week

As each April morning dawns and May’s blossoms are longed for, I feel the anniversaries of my mom and dad‘s deaths even more. Sixteen years ago they died on the grace-filled days of Maundy Thursday and the Eve of Ascension, so spanning the Easter season. No matter how long our loved ones have gone to their eternal rest we can often wonder whether or not they know what we are thinking, feeling and doing. Saint John Henry Newman comforts us with the reality of Christ’s resurrection. As a result, we can experience their presence because he gathers them up and brings them to wherever we are -especially in familiar locations:

We naturally love places which remind us of friends; and sights and sounds (and scents) change our estimate of them by associating them with those we love – and thus pain loses its acuteness, and bereavement it’s heartache, and worldly anxiety no longer dries up the spirit, when we by faith regard them as memorials of him who once was a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.

(Sermons 1824-1843, Vol Il, p.183)

Newman, drawing on the insights of the eastern church, taught that this is particularly true because the prayer of prayer’s the mass. Here, through each person’s communion of mind and heart, the power of the Eucharist  extends beyond the sanctuary to include any setting we find ourselves in. Therefore, every 24 hours is a condensed, on-going, celebration of the spiritual fruits of Holy Week. These are available to us now -not just because of an annual commemoration. God is beyond time. We encounter these graces, only partially, here on earth, due to our capacity to sin . Whereas, those in eternal life behold the fullness of God’s joy always. They want us to have the vision they see. Six years before his own death, Newman writes to Mrs. Maxwell Scott on the loss of his brother-in-law and uncle:

You have indeed accumulated sorrows. One’s consolation under such trials, which are our necessary lot here, is that we have additional friends in heaven to plead and interest themselves for us. This I am confident of – if it is not presumptuous to be confident – but I think, as life goes on, it will be brought home to you, as it has been to me, that there are those who are busied about us, and in various matters taking our part.

(Letters and Diaries, XXX, p.67)

Thank Heaven for the perpetual loop of Holy Week.

Fr Peter Conley