It’s been muggy and damp here. Spring has officially come and I’ve got the steamed up windows to prove it. And of course I’ve got new growth muscling its way out of the tangled detritus of my disreputable garden. I thought it was nice for the Bleeding Hearts to bloom just in time for Holy Week. They’re such a cheering sight and there seems like something portentious about seeing the cluster of bright heart-shaped flowers with the petals that look like droplets coming off each one. Since they make their appearance so early in the season, the Bleeding Hearts are my annual invitation to say, “Here comes spring again.”

I’m probably having something like the same feeling as we approach Holy Week. There’s so much to think about, so much to take in. So much to hope you get right, so much to try not to freak out about if you don’t. You don’t want to lose sight of what’s important, but you know you probably will from time to time. You start to feel that pulse of the church calendar growing louder every day, setting the tone, telling the story as the Cross begins to come into sight: glory, providence, betrayal, abandonment, inquisition, ridicule, brutality, torment, death. And then … glory again — this time, glory enough to blot out everything before it and everything after.

Can I avoid the sense of having been through it before? I don’t want to make some tortured effort to pretend like I don’t know what’s going to happen. I’ll join in on the responses, we’ll all sing the hymns. Though some primitive part of me doesn’t want to follow Christ through His passion, I will because I know I have to.The words prescribed by the Church have more than enough of the proper awe, wonder, jubilation, sorrow, penitence, but will I listen to what I hear/chant/read, or will I be unable to forget the usual things for the sake of one unusual week? I’ve noticed that if you aren’t fully engaged in Holy Week, even the blazing trumpet blasts of Pascha won’t ring quite as much as they could.

I want to keep it real, to use a hideously overused phrase, and I got a bit of help from a reading from Mpn. Anthony Bloom’s “Living Prayer”. I thought I’d pass it along, in case I’m not the only one who’s wondering if she’d be one of the 10 wise virgins or maybe the very bummed out 11th one. Mpn. Bloom is talking in regard to prayer, of course, but it carries over very well, I thought:

We usually live some sort of reflected life. Not only are we a variety of people successively under various circumstances but also the very life that is in us belongs so often to other people. If you look into yourself, and if you dare to question how often you act from the very core of your personality, how often you are expressing your own self, you will see that it happens rarely enough. Too often we are immersed in what is happening around us, all the unnecessaries we gather from the radio, television, newspapers, but during this period, these few minutes of concentration [in prayer], we must shed everything that is not essential to life.

Then of course you run the risk of remaining bored with yourself; all right, be bored. But this does not mean that there is nothing left in us, because at rock bottom we are made in the image of God, and this stripping is very much like the cleaning of an ancient, beautiful wall painting, or of a painting by a great master that was painted over in the course of the centuries by tasteless people who had intruded upon the real beauty that had been created by the master. To begin with, the more we clean, the more things disappear, and it seems to us that we have created a mess where there was at least a certain amount of beauty; perhaps not much, but some beauty. And then we begin to discover the real beauty which the great master has put into his painting; we see the misery, then the mess in between, but at the same time we have a preview of the authentic beauty. And we discover that what we are is a poor person who needs God; but not God to fill the gap — God to be met.

So let us set out to do this and let us also every evening of this week, pray a very simple prayer:

‘Help me, O God, to put off all pretences and to find my true self.’