Transformation and the Symbols of Holy Week

Religious symbols are technologies of transformation. The images, stories, and rituals of religion meet us where we are and carry us to some new place, to some new us. They grab hold of us in Kansas, transport us to Oz, and bring us back to a Kansas now somehow changed, as an us also somehow changed.

Religious symbols operate beyond the realm and reach of reason, at levels more intuitive than conceptual. We don't interpret them so much as they interpret us. To the degree that they do offer us some sense of meaning, those meanings are multiple, shifting, and frequently paradoxical. Rather than trying to analyze or explain them, we relate to symbols best when we simply bring ourselves into their proximity, breathe the air in their presence, and let them do their work.

Religious symbols can bring us to tears, to laughter, to remorse, to a sense of purpose, or to absolute silence. They work because we’re able to see ourselves in them, yet we also see more than ourselves, more of ourselves, the more ourselves could be. When a symbol hits us in just the right way, at just the right time, it can change us entirely. And that is their function: to transform.

Our Longing for Transformation

Transformation is the longing of all people, at all ages, at all times. We want to shed the skin of our current condition and renegotiate our relationship with reality. It's not that we don’t also experience moments of contentment, even entire seasons of contentment. But most of us, much of the time, no matter how good we’ve got it, have a sense that something’s not good enough, that something’s not quite right, that our personal ratio of satisfaction to dissatisfaction could be transformed for the better. We might believe that a greater share of happiness will be ours if things around us change: if the person we live with were a little less this way and a little more that, if we upgraded one of our possessions for something bigger and better, or if the political ideals we endorse were the law of the land. Or we might believe it’s something within ourselves that needs to change: if we were less anxious, or more organized, or not so needy. But we all long for transformation.

Springsteen said our hearts are hungry; the Buddha said they’re thirsty; St. Augustine said they’re restless. Religion meets us in the hungry thirsty restless place and says, in effect, “You’re right. The way you’re living is not satisfying. (This is the first of Buddhism’s Four Noble Truths: There is suffering.) Your longing is onto something, and it’s leading you into a journey very much worth making. That journey will be endless and will eventually cost you everything, but it will give you back an even greater everything. And here, for your journey, are some symbols that will help you along the way. You’ll never completely understand them, but these symbols will illumine your path and catalyze in you the qualities you’ll need to walk it."

The Symbol of Holy Week

Many people will be living this week in the symbol of Holy Week. For most of the Christian world, Holy Week began on Sunday, April 10, with the observance of Palm Sunday, and will end next Sunday, April 17, with the celebration of Easter. (In the Orthodox church, Holy Week happens a week later.)

I realize I am writing in a public space, for readers who may or may not be Christian. But religious symbols, stories, and rituals belong not just to the religious traditions in which they were downloaded and developed. They are perhaps more illuminative and meaningful to those who spend time with them consistently, sincerely, and sacrificially, but religious symbols are not the exclusive property of any people. They are open-source gifts for all.

So, I invite you, Christian or not, into the symbol of Holy Week—to see yourself in it, to re-see yourself, to receive yourself.

Source: Didgeman/Pixabay

The Holy Week story is too long to tell here, but, in brief, it's a story of conflict between two kinds of power and a kind of living that happens only by dying.

Jesus the teacher–healer, animated by spiritual power, enters into conflict with religious and political leaders animated by egoic power. The conflict intensifies, several betrayals happen, surrender happens, and the people of the lesser power arrest and execute the person of the higher power. But spiritual power proves stronger than material power, stronger even than death, and Jesus leaves his tomb as a resurrected body—a body his friends do not recognize with the eyes in their head until they recognize it first with the eyes of their hearts.

The Characters of Holy Week

Those are the bones of the story. The flesh on those bones comes through various characters, all of them highly symbolic, and all of them, you might find, alive and conflicting within you. These include the following:

• Religious leaders whose predilection for performative goodness blinds them to authentic goodness and whose self-righteousness makes them vicious
• A political leader, Pilate, who betrays his conscience and signs the execution papers of a man he knows to be innocent because it’s politically expedient to do so
• A woman named Mary who loves Jesus so much that she anoints his feet with perfume and dries his feet with her hair
• Jesus turning angry and driving money-makers out of a sacred place desecrated by commodification
• Jesus eating a last meal with his students, kneeling before them, and washing their feet
• Jesus praying in the dark until he sweats blood, finally speaking words similar to those his mother said at his conception, “not my will, but thine”
• A crowd crying, “Save us” (this is what the word Hosanna means)
• A crowd crying for blood
• Jesus surrendering his spirit into the hands of a God by whom he also feels forsaken
• Followers of Jesus who fall asleep on him, deny him and desert him
• Followers of Jesus who stay with him as he dies, accompany him to his tomb, and return to find it empty
• Jesus resurrected and reconnecting with those who stayed with him as well as those who did not

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There is more in this symbolic story—much more—but my purpose in this writing is not to tell it all but to tell enough that you might be moved to spend time in proximity to it. You don't have to understand it. Just breathe in its presence. Find yourself in it. Lose yourself in it. And allow it to transform you.