Approaching the holy city
Step by step I advance in the dark
- Raissa Maritain, “Procession”
As I begin to think about this post, I have a dream. I’m walking in familiar, tawny hills, somewhere at the edge of a city - such as the Port Hills above Christchurch in early autumn.
All seems well to begin with. Then I notice a cloud beside a far-off peak. It’s not an ordinary weather cloud, but dust. It’s as if there’s been a small earthquake, or a cliff has suddenly collapsed.
I continue walking. There are others on the track with me now. Halfway in, with the city behind us, a sudden rumble and another cloud of dust. But it’s much nearer now. In fact, it’s on the hilltops above us! I turn to head back. There’s another big rumble and shake. An avalanche of dirt is tumbling down! It just misses me, but my son and others in front of us get smothered. A moment of panic, then I spring into action, rescuing my son, digging out other buried children. They’re okay because I’ve acted quickly. Others around me seem frozen, indecisive, and withdrawn.
We go to leave, get back to the safety of the plains and away from the crumbling hills. I take one last look. A dark hill in front of me is smouldering. It looks angry and threatening, but also seems deeply familiar. I know these hills and love them. It’s in their nature to fire up and destroy things once in a while.
The threat in my dream is in the hills - or is the hills. It’s the opposite for Jesus in his final period. He makes a decisive shift from the countryside - where he’s been travelling, healing, preaching - and now turns to face Jerusalem.
This is the most action-packed time of the Christian year. So much is about to happen. But before both cross and tomb, there is a significant, concentrated series of events in which many things are said, done, and revealed.
Holy Week (beginning next Sunday on the thirteenth of April), is, according to my battered, blue-bound Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church,
“…observed throughout Catholic Christendom, both in the East and the West, as a period of devotion to the Passion of Christ. The various traditional rites of the week, of which each day has its own, probably began to develop in Jerusalem in the fourth century, when pilgrimages became easily possible, and Christians could indulge a natural desire to re-enact the last scenes of the life of Christ in liturgical drama.”
Indeed, it is very good we have such “natural desires” and “indulge” them, or learn to indulge them once again. As Gustav Mahler once said, “tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.”
In the Catholic churches of my childhood, the drama of Holy Week was enacted and lived out with fresh-cut greenery being waved on Palm Sunday, with our local parish priest washing the feet of parishioners on Holy Thursday, and, on Good Friday, with meditations around the Stations of the Cross, and with dramatized readings of the Passion of Christ. It all culminated in the Easter Vigil service on Saturday night, when the congregation gathered around a brazier outside (in the cold autumn air of New Zealand, or the muggy night air of India), and when the new, thick Paschal candle was lit. We then processed into the dark church, carrying candles (slowly lit from the Paschal flame), meeting the priest's chant of "Christ the Light!" with an echoing "Thanks be to God!" The priest would sing the Exsultet (“May this flame be found still burning by the Morning Star”), and we would sit and listen to the vigil readings. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth…” - the church still dark - moving through Exodus and the Prophets up to Paul, and then finally, the resurrection, the hope of our journeying. The lights of the church would blaze on at that point.
In both Judaism and Christianity, there is a long tradition of encountering God through visions and dreams. In the dream I began this post with, what is it that is smouldering within me? What is shaking things apart, remaking the landscape, and covering the kids with sudden debris in the process? I have wondered if it is my anger! But/and…
The hills in my dream feel like numinous ground. I’m drawn to them, yet they turn out to be dangerous, too. Fire is destructive, as well as purifying, creative. Jesus heads toward Jerusalem…
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Boundless love,
sending us strange visitors in the night,
waiting outside our guarded heart,
urging us to enter the city;
one yes floods us with your presence.
Image at top of page: The Entry into Jerusalem, Pol de Limbourg, Très riches heures de Jean, duc de Berry.
