Holy Week, Part 1

It's been a busy Holy Week already.

Wednesday afternoon I attended the 12:10 Mass at the Franciscan Center in downtown Greensboro. I had not been to Mass there since last Lent, but it was a joy as always. I estimated there were about 100 people crammed into the little storefront at 215 N. Greene Street. What a tight little community it is, composed of people I imagine from every parish in Greensboro. I saw a number that I recognized from St. Paul's, including Sue Fullam from the Honduras trip and my friend Maureen Musci who sits in our little "neighborhood" at 5 PM Sunday Mass. At communion I noticed there were quite a few non-Catholics as well who received a blessing in lieu of communion.

As I looked over the community, it struck me as different somehow. There were many elderly people, which is not unusual for a daily Mass, but also a number who were sick or crippled, people from the streets, well-to-do people and professionals. Not many young people -- everybody here had some serious mileage on them. But I could not help but be struck by the atmosphere of unusual love and tolerance and trust and welcome.

Fr. Louie Canino celebrated the Mass as usual, and in truth most of these people come here for him, both because he loves each one of us so much, and because he feeds us spiritually -- a veritable banquet. Each Wednesday Fr. Louie travels to Greensboro from the St. Francis Springs Prayer Center in Stoneville just to celebrate this Mass.

Wednesday's Gospel centered around Matthew's account of Judas' betrayal of Jesus. In his homily Fr. Louie asked the community to share any times in their lives when they had suffered a great hurt. I was astounded by the response. Over the next ten minutes or so perhaps 20-25 different people shared the gravest hurts of their lives, the kinds of things people only share with family and close friends. "The death of my husband," "my son's addiction to drugs," "my husband's battle with PTSD," "the death of my son," "betrayal by a trusted friend," "the death of my wife"...and on and on. It was a litany of human suffering.

Fr. Louie then related their suffering that Jesus must have felt during his Passion. Not just the physical suffering, which was immense, but emotional hurt of His betrayal and denial by His disciples, and the fact that he was left to suffer these things utterly abandoned. It's hard to miss the physical suffering in the accounts of the Passion, but I had never considered how much greater was the emotional hurt.

Christ gave us an example of how to process this kind of hurt, Fr. Louie said:

• First you have to own it -- not gloss over it or deny it, but truly own it.
• Then you have to be angry. While we often think of anger as bad or negative, it's OK to be angry about something that really is bad. It's healthy and healing.
• After that you must grieve for what's been lost.
• Finally you must make it redemptive -- you have to find a way to bring forth goodness and growth from your hurt in order to move forward again.

That is the model Jesus gave us through his Passion and Resurrection. I plan to explore this a bit more from Easter on, but Fr. Louie's homily foreshadowed the major theme of Easter.