It’s a Catholic Thing. Holy Week.

                                                        ENDING, DYING, KNOWING.

When I was twelve year old I spent a year in a place of terror and anxiety,  preoccupied, haunted by the prospect of dying. Of death.  Ending. You would die, no matter what.  You could die, at any time. I struggle now to remember what it was exactly that took me to the edge of that abyss, what thought, what feeling got you there.   Where you could not look away to manage the all consuming fear.  It was the not knowing when, maybe.  It was letting the knowing in, perhaps.  Yeah. The facing of the fact. It was the horror of not being, of annihilation.

                                                   CATHOLICS AND ALL THAT JAZZ

I stumbled on for another year, and for another after that. Looking back now, it seems a bit like depression, a touch like panic, obsession, all the labels.  But. Things, perspectives, were adjusting in me. Ground slowly gained.  Some spirit of survival whispered.  Something.  Oh not Catholicism, all that jazz.  That turned out to irrelevant to what ailed me, the spectre dogging my waking footsteps, tormenting dreamtime, nights.


                                                 

                                                    IF YOU WOULD ONLY LET ME IN 

I can recall my thirteen year old self, can see her clearly walking, back and forth and back again before the gates of our local Monastery, hesitant about going in there and asking them.  On one muggy Sunday when I really couldn't stand it anymore. I did not go in.  I did not know how. I figured they'd have nothing.  None of them,  monks or parents, family or priests.  Adults, being being only a source of pressure and reproach at my irritability, my preoccupation, distraction.  Judging my increasing withdrawal, anomie amplifying my fears of madness now, in the dark terrors of nighttime, beset by the sense of being stalked by something  inevitable, incalculable.

But things were shifting somehow... anyhow.  The more I could hold the idea of ending in my mind, could look at it full on, the better I became at imagining a life, and getting on with things and having things, of doing things, even if and even though the truth was always ending, dying, death... the part of me that could look at that, bear that, becoming a ledge to crawl back onto.


                                                   SO, HOLY WEEK REDEEMED THEM

And so for a few years, I was buzzed and frantic with doing, racing against time, getting things for myself,  having life.  But learned, you learn in time, to slow down, to visit the quiet place where death is, and I am, and life waits.  And being Catholic was not entirely useless as it turned out.  They do Holy Week.

I mean Christmas for a child was all sweaty excitement, anticipation, a giddy high, but Easter, Holy Week, was hiatus, timeout, a quiet space.  Scary, yeah but safe enough, familiar enough, contained in ceremony and in time.  You'd get your Easter holidays, run free and happyish on the farm all the lightening lengthening day ( except when your Mother caught you, put you to work at something needed) and in the evenings you'd go to church.

Memories were filed and stored, places to visit.  Ah there you are, your Sunday Coat, your polished shoes, squashed happy in the family car, a sibling on your knee your mother fussing.  You'd go, all go, all had to for,  Palm Sunday,  Confession Tuesday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday, Easter Sunday.  Confession, praying, kneeling, penitent,  copying adults who knew.  Snickering, yawning,  poking a sister, saying the words of the prayers, tickling the baby, maybe.  Sacred and boring, thrilling and mystery, all in  one. It was all consuming and everything slowing and stopping, for Christ dying nailed to his cross.  Crucifiction.  Stations. The Stations of the Cross.


                                                                     FORSAKEN 

Ah, Stations of the Cross. Our shuffling procession past shadowy pictures of Christ's flayed and splattered agony. See there he staggers under the cross, there falls, he falls, first, second and third time,  he falls, he is pierced in his side.  'My God my God' he cries, 'why? hast thou forsaken me..."  When I was eleven years old I related.

Easter Sunday, after the chocolate eggs, the chicken dinner, was anticlimax. Resurrection, Christ strolling from his tomb was just another thing they all believed, it didn't resonate. I always hated Sundays anyway. The slow winding down of hours, gateway into Monday and the workaday week.


                                               LOOKING THOUGH YOUR FINGERS FIRST

Every year has Christmas, Easter, Summer, School, and here in Ireland, Holy Week. Still hanging on, a relic of the past, and this year roaring back to meaning in Lockdown.  We are given,  whether we wanted it or not, space, where all things stop. We are obliged to look.  See here the beast is caged or over there becalmed, at the heart of darkness.  Obliged to feel the tenderest, darkest,  terrors lurking at the hearts deepest core.  We have to look. To hold.


                                               IF GOD CANT HAVE YOU DEVIL  MUST 

If Covid 19 keeps you up at night, impels your run like blazes to your holiday home, or fuels your rage at random cheaters,  consider this.  It's ending, death, that stalks you,  really.  Death, and this your opportunity to face, embrace and take it in.  Don't blame, don't run, or close your inner borders tight.  Embrace the darkness.  In this thoroughly modern Holy Week.

"And I will show you something  

different from either  

Your shadow at morning striding 

behind you

Or your shadow at evening rising to  

meet you

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

(T.S. Elliot. The Waste Land)

Do share my post from your social media page or by any other means, dear readers. And comment if the spirit moves you!  Anna.