The Mystery of Love Persisting

I can still feel the waves of nausea that began to hit my stomach when I heard the news. My whole world was turning upside down, and I had no way to stop it. The voices in my head were swirling around like a plastic bag being blown by a cyclone. I was about to…

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How To Holy Week: A Guide For Where You Are

At the request of readers, I’m rounding up my favorite posts on Holy Week and Triduum. For wherever you are and wherever God may meet you this week: blessings on all of it, the mess and the joy. If you’re expecting: Labor’s Stages: A Triduum. If you have a new baby: Baby’s First Holy Week.…

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Baby’s First Holy Week

baby's first holy week

Sweet boy, here we are. In the holiest of weeks. It all started on Palm Sunday. You solemnly gumming the long green palm in your father’s hands. Your brothers waving their palms wildly around the air (bonus points for whacking a sibling in the eye). Me watching all of you, half wondering why we bother to bring…

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Labor’s Stages: A Triduum

labor's stages like triduum

A journey of four days, each unique. Holy Week reveals itself in new shades every year, shadows of dark and light. It pushes through the broken, cold dirt of Lent’s long winter with a fresh green curl of hope. With only a few short weeks to go before baby’s birth, I see these feasts through a new slant. Each…

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The Forgotten Days of Holy Week

forgotten days of Holy Week

Monday. Tuesday. Wednesday. How easily we pass over them, eyes set eagerly on Easter Sunday. Or anticipating Thursday’s opening of the Triduum (the three liturgical days from Holy Thursday through Easter Sunday). Our first half of Holy Week probably looks a lot like yours. Work. School. Kids. Meetings. Chores. Bills. The lackluster pregame show before…

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Where I Saw Christ: Back Pew, Pink Coat

I glimpsed her at the back of a long line trailing down the aisle, shuffling forward in the slow side-to-side dance of people waiting their turn. She wore a bright fuchsia trench coat, hair coiffed in a cute side sweep. Behind her bobbed the heads of two bright-eyed daughters, brunettes like their mother. In her…

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The Footwashing

what it means to wash feet on Holy Thursday

We are growing everyday in what it means to do the footwashing. A friend shared these words from Abbot John Klassen at Saint John’s Abbey, from a homily he gave on Holy Thursday a few years ago. Today these words came back to me as I thought about what we celebrate at the start of…

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