‘Jesus said, wait with me. And maybe the stars did,
maybe the wind wound itself into a silver tree, and didn’t move.
Maybe the lake far away, where once he walked
as on a blue pavement,
lay still and waited, wild awake.'..’
- from Gethsemane by Mary Oliver

Oh, to be ‘wild awake’ with Christ this Holy Week like Mary Oliver’s blue lake. Maundy Thursday has come with the invitation to watch with Christ through these three days of his passion retold and lived. I always find this space of Holy Week both beautiful and challenging. I always start with a keen heart and quickened mind, ready to pray longer, watch more solemnly, discipline myself to a few days of real gravity and prayer. But I always struggle to keep my resolve; I sympathise more each year with the disciples who fell asleep. I think their exhaustion is just a small picture of human frailty in the ordinary, of daily weariness. In it I glimpse the way that even eternal dramas can play around us while we’re just…tired. And it’s a particularly weary watch this year away from church with the pandemic raging and these endless, unbounded days of strangely intense home life.

So I’m turning to works of music and story, art and film and imagination as companions to help keep my attention awake, my heart engaged and alert. Join me?

You see, one of the things I most love about worshipping in the Anglican tradition and will most deeply miss this year is the chance to join the drama of the Triduum, these three days when we, in a sense, dramatically enact the story of Christ’s death, burial, and resurrection. I didn’t grow up in a liturgical tradition, and when I first experienced a Maundy Thursday service with the stripping of the altars and the thick, dark silence that followed, and the sheltering in the candlelit presence of Christ at the end, I felt startled and alive, drawn into the fullness of Jesus’ passion in a way I never had before, able to actually join the drama through the words and imagery of the liturgy. My imagination and heart thrilled to life.

Remembering this, the way the liturgy and drama allowed me to feel myself ‘inside’ the story with Christ, and mulling how I could engage in a similar way this year, even without church, I’ve been reminded that the arts engage my whole self in a similar way. A turning point in my faith journey was discovering C.S. Lewis’ essay ‘Meditation in a Toolshed’, with his illustration of the way that works of imagination and beauty allow us a different way of ‘knowing’ truth by letting us stand inside an experience. This is true of art and image as well as ‘poetic works’ of story, poem, and myth. A writer named Owen Barfield described the way that reading poetry or literature allows us ‘a felt change of consciousness’. We see the world and ourselves differently. This is what happens in liturgy, but it’s also what happens when we engage our imaginations in the arts. We are able to enter into the drama of God’s love in a unique and dramatically powerful way.

So I invite you to join me in engaging with the passion and drama, the divine love and beauty of Holy Week through works of artistry, beauty, and imagination. I’ve compiled a list of the works I’ll be revisiting in order to help me keep watch with Christ, keep my heart attuned both to sorrow and hope, and ultimately to stand in that watchfulness that culminates in the crashing, opened tomb of Resurrection morning…

(Note: some of the works I list below are not directly related to Easter or Holy Week, but each engages in what I think is the theme of the different days in a way I find beautiful.)

Maundy Thursday

Film: Babette’s Feast
This lovely film echoes with the kind of humility and grace embodied by Jesus when he washed the disciples feet. A stranger comes among a small, devout village in Denmark, full of people who think they know what God’s grace means. They take the woman in on charity, never realising who she is until she offers to throw them a feast…

Music: Bread & Wine by Josh Garrells
My heart is always a little broken, in a good way, by this song. I often sing it to myself as a confession. I remember Peter’s blustery rejection of Jesus’ servant touch when I hear this, and it helps me to accept that touch for myself.

Book: This passage from Island of the World by Michael O’Brien (this is a stunning novel of suffering and love, and well worth reading in full; you can read my review HERE):
“Love is the soul of the world, though its body bleeds, and we must learn to bleed with it. Love is also the seed and milk and the fruit of the world, though we can partake of it in greed or reverence. We are born, we eat, and learn, and die. We leave a tracery of messages in the lives of others, a little shifting of the soil, a stone moved from here to there, a word uttered, a song, a poem left behind. I was here, each of these declare. I was here.”

Poem: The Agonie by George Herbert

Art: Christ in Gethsemane by Michael O’Brien and Jesus Washing Peter’s Feet by Ford Maddox Brown:

Good Friday

Film: Of Gods and Men
I am always struck still and quiet by this film, one based on the true story of a monastery in Algeria in the 1990s, whose monks were forced to decide whether to stay among the people they served and loved, or flee in the face of regional violence. It’s a Passion themed story, exploring what it means to lay down one’s life in love.

Music: St. Mathew’s Passion

Book: This passage from The Dream of the Rood, a devout poem in Old English:
It seemed to me that I saw the greatest tree
brought into the sky, bewound in light,
the brightest of beams. That beacon was entirely
garnished with gold. Gemstones
prominent and proud at the corners of the earth—
five more as well blazoned across the span of its shoulders.
Every angel of the Lord warded it there,
a brilliant sight of a universe to come.
Surely it was no longer the gallows of vile crime
in that place—yet there they kept close watch,
holy spirits for all humanity across the earth,
and every part of this widely famous creation.
(The whole thing is worth reading aloud on Good Friday…)

Poem: Salvator Mundi: Via Crucis by Denise Levertov

Art: Christ Carrying the Cross by Jan Sanders Hemessen:

Holy Saturday

Film: The Tree of Life
This is a film you must encounter almost as a visual symphony rather than a linear narrative. An impressionist film exploring what grace means in a broken world, what it means to love, what redemption might be for those who do.

Music: Ubi Caritas by my own brilliant brother HERE and by Ola Gjeilo HERE

Book: This passage from The Return of the King by J.R.R. Tolkien:
Suddenly Faramir stirred, and he opened his eyes, and he looked on Aragorn who bent over him; and a light of knowledge and love was kindled in his eyes, and he spoke softly. 'My lord, you called me. I come. What does the king command?’
'Walk no more in the shadows, but awake!’ said Aragorn. 'You are weary. Rest a while, and take food, and be ready when I return.’
'I will, lord,’ said Faramir. 'For who would lie idle when the king has returned?’

Poem: Ikon: The Harrowing of Hell by Denise Levertov

Art: Peter and John Running to the Tomb by Eugene Bernand: