Before this year, Holy Week was something I mostly watched from a distance.
I knew what it was about—the palms, the cross, the empty tomb—but I never really entered into it. I stayed on the edges, comfortable and detached.
This year at Newman University Church, it felt like I finally stepped inside the garden. Not a bright, blooming garden (not yet, at least). It felt more like Gethsemane: dark, heavy, and uncomfortable.
Palm Sunday felt like standing at the threshold of something that even the apostles themselves didn’t fully understand. I held a palm in my hand and listened to the Passion being read aloud while it hit me that the same crowd shouting “Hosanna” would also be shouting “Crucify Him” in just a few days. It reminded me that praise comes easy but true faith is a choice.
Holy Thursday brought me deeper. Watching the washing of the feet, hearing the call to serve, and staying after Mass to pray with the Eucharist was quiet and raw, like sitting with Christ in Gethsemane when He asked His friends to stay awake with Him. The church grew more silent as the night went on, and for the first time I understood that silence isn’t empty—it’s full of a love willing to suffer.
Good Friday was the hardest part. Watching others venerate the cross made the gravity of Christ’s suffering clearer. I found myself imagining I was one of the women weeping at the feet of Jesus, feeling the weight of their grief. Suffering wasn’t just something happening to someone else anymore; it was something Christ chose to carry for me. Yet somehow, even in the heaviness, there was a kind of peace in knowing I didn’t have to hide from it.
Holy Saturday was waiting in the thick silence of the garden. When you can’t see the way forward. When the story feels unfinished. We sat in the tension between death and life, between loss and hope.
Then came Easter, not as an immediate resolution, but as a quiet promise unfolding. Even though Jesus rose, we still find ourselves like the apostles, unsure and questioning if it’s really Him. The resurrection doesn’t erase the struggles or doubts we face. It offers us the space to wrestle with them and find hope in the waiting.
This was the first time I lived Holy Week all the way through. It called me to stay—to stay in the silence, in the heaviness, in the waiting—just as Christ stayed in Gethsemane.
