Walking Barefoot into Holy Week

Holy Week calls forth our courage. As the people of God, we enter the Triduum with the courage to look squarely at death and still believe that God calls us into life.

During Pope Leo’s first Palm Sunday as pope, he urged the faithful to end war. In Jesus’ crucifixion, said the Holy Father, we can see a “crucified humanity.”

“Above all, we hear the painful groans of all those who are oppressed by violence and are victims of war,” said Pope Leo. “Christ, King of Peace, cries out again from his cross: God is love! Have mercy! Lay down your weapons! Remember that you are brothers and sisters!”

This Holy Week invites us to reflect: who are we becoming in this broken, war-torn world?

In these first few years of our Catholic Church embracing synodality as a way of proceeding (what I call Synodality 1.0), we’ve been learning the synodal practices of encounter, listening, dialoguing, and discerning the will of the Holy Spirit as we walk into the future together. These synodal experiences are increasingly pointing us toward Synodality 2.0 and the deeper work of repair, reconciliation, resurrection.

Through the bombs, missiles, and images of war, how do we hear God’s tender voice calling us to lay down our arms? Despair is tempting. And yet we are part of a stubborn faith tradition that keeps calling us through death into new life.

Pope Francis gave us the image of becoming “artisans of peace,” a people engaged in relationships of care wherever we are: in our family kitchens, our classrooms, our workspaces, our parishes, our communities, our countries.

We also can draw hope from Israeli and Palestinian mothers who recenlty met Pope Leo. They walked through the streets of Rome barefoot, unafraid to demonstrate their vulnerability as they called us to peace. 

As an auntie grandmother to 18-month-old Isabella, I trust in the hope and courage of mothers and grandmothers that love will prevail. And when women are deacons, we will better be able to amplify the voices of peace — voices that believe in God’s dream that we live as one human family, creating the conditions for all of us to flourish.

Our Lenten practices — the Stations of the Cross and the prayers of Good Friday — give us opportunities to accompany a crucified humanity. Recently, I had the honor of being with the St. Monica Catholic Community in Santa Monica, California to offer their Lenten Mission. Here’s a link to their Stations of the Cross through the eyes of Mary organized by the parish’s St. Phoebe Ministry. 

I believe the Holy Spirit swirls during Holy Week to help each one of us take the next step toward becoming an artisan of peace. Can you imagine reaching out to a friend or relative with whom you’ve been in tension? Who would be pleasantly surprised to hear from you, to know you were thinking of them despite a previous conflict?

From the vulnerability and violence of the cross, Jesus calls us into belonging. We can choose this Holy Week to tend to fragile life and to be living water for one another: playing with a child, listening to an elder, joining a public Stations of the Cross, or gathering in prayerful silence on Good Friday. 

Holy Week invites us into God’s holy work of walking barefoot into the world as it is, trusting that love has the final word.