As we enter into Holy Week, I want to re-share the devotional Healing Justice and the Paschal Mystery, written in 2019.
This devotional uses the traditional liturgies for Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter as opportunities to reflect on the ways we practice healing justice in our own lives.
It includes questions about ongoing practices: of invitation, mercy, lament, confession, closure, remaining, and the hope of reconciliation. It also includes an invitation to consider applying these practices, gently and in individual contemplation, to conflicts in our own lives.
What this devotional is not is an attempt to “force” a process of reconciliation. The conflicts and healing in our lives do not naturally follow an easy narrative through the events of Holy Week to Easter Sunday! You are not expected to reach Easter healed, reconciled, and at peace. Healing is more complicated than that.
Instead, the goal is to use the events of Holy Week as a lens for reflecting on our own lives and being present to the emotions that arise: joyful and uncomfortable ones. And we always remember that where things are still painful, unhealed, and unreconciled, we can be present and compassionate to those feelings. Holy Week comes around again next year, and our feelings may be different then. This devotional is simply a way of imagining our feelings, reactions, and practices of healing justice at this moment in time.
Holy Week blessings! The devotional is available here: Healing Justice and the Paschal Mystery.