Lenten Campaign 2025
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Holy Week invites a deep engagement with mystery. For many, it’s a time of familiar rituals: the somber reading of the Passion, the silence of Holy Saturday, the bright alleluia of Easter morning. But beyond the lectionary, there are lesser-known texts — ancient and modern — that crack open other dimensions of the Paschal mystery. These writings do not replace Scripture, but they can awaken the imagination, helping us to dwell more fully in the tension, beauty, and strangeness of the week that changed everything.
One powerful companion to Good Friday is The Dream of the Rood, a poem from the 8th century found carved in runes on a stone cross in Northumbria. In this Old English vision, the Cross itself speaks — grieving, yet glorified — as the one who bore the crucified Christ:
“I was reared a cross; I raised up a mighty King,
the Lord of heaven; I dared not bend or break...”
The poem is striking for its paradox: the Cross, both instrument of death and tree of triumph, tells the Passion from its own aching perspective. It offers a glimpse into how early Christians in the British Isles understood Christ — not only as suffering servant, but as heroic victor who climbs the tree willingly.
T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, especially “East Coker” and “Little Gidding,” also offers rich meditations for Holy Week. Written during the Second World War, these poems are dense and musical, concerned with time, death, and divine presence. In “East Coker,” Eliot writes:
“In my beginning is my end. In succession
Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
Are removed, destroyed, restored...”
His language evokes both the passion and the resurrection: destruction intertwined with renewal. Eliot, who was deeply Christian in his later years, wrote with the theological insight of someone aware that Holy Week doesn’t simply recount an ancient story — it’s a pattern that underlies all things.
For Holy Saturday, that difficult day of silence and suspension, one might turn to the Ancient Homily on Holy Saturday, found in the Liturgy of the Hours. Its haunting opening line is unforgettable:
“What is happening? Today there is a great silence on earth, a great silence and stillness. A great silence because the King sleeps…”
In this short, anonymous homily from the early Church, Christ is depicted descending into the underworld — not in defeat, but in quiet triumph. He reaches out his hand to Adam, awakening the dead. The harrowing of hell becomes not just a theological idea, but a vivid drama of hope.
These texts — poetic, symbolic, sometimes strange — remind us that Holy Week is not tidy. It resists easy interpretations. The Catechism reminds us that “by his death, Christ liberates us from sin” and “opens for us the way to a new life” (CCC 654). But what that liberation feels like — how it looks, how it unsettles — has been imagined in many ways through the centuries.
Reading outside the usual texts can help us enter the mystery more deeply. This week, consider picking up a poem, a homily, or a piece of ancient Christian art in words. Let it linger. Let it discomfort and console. Let it lead you to the quiet fire of Easter.
