Holy Week Weeds*

From NW Farms & Food blog

Sara Miles writes of the busyness of Holy Week, the chaos, the time demands larger than time, as presently constituted, can allow.  She speaks of the feeling of being overwhelmed, describing the feeling as being in the "Holy Week weeds".    
To whelm is to flow or heap up abundantly.  Google Dictionary

Advent and Christmas leave me feeling overwhelmed, swamped, in danger of disappearing into the demands, real and felt, of the season.

But Holy Week, blessed Holy Week, is a different matter entirely.

In Holy Week, I feel whelmed . . .

I feel the flow, the abundance heaping all round . . .

And it is marvelous . . .

Why it should be so, this difference, I do not know, I cannot say . . .

But down here in the weeds, in the tenacious tenacity of things, I live and love and have my being . . .

Down here in the weeds of Holy Week, the usual course of things is changed . . .

Worship happens at the odd times . . . the off-the-schedule times . . . the times when friends gathered for one last dinner together . . . when a man walked, crawled and crept to his death . . . when the sun broke the horizon and the light transformed into The Light . . . when naked men gathered around a friend thought lost for a feast of fish on the fire . . . when children surely laughed and hunted lost or hidden things . . . when praise and song were the order of the day . . .

Holy Week – the one week of the year when God’s schedule, the Divine time frame, becomes my own . . .

Sara Miles is right – Holy Week is a weedy place, filled as it is with the demands of the busy schedule, but oh, what whelming weeds they are . . .


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*Title inspired by a comment in Sara Miles’ essay The Edge of the World in Daniel Clendenin’s Journey with Jesus