Holy week--Human week

We're standing in the back of my childhood church, a place my grandfather had a hand in building--he was a member of the building committee back then. Why do I remember that?--I don't know. I just do. 

But he died--a sudden heart attack--sometime before the church was completed, so he never saw that new church he championed and must have sweat over. His wife, who wasn't born into that church but into a more progressive Dutch Reformed church just up the street, wanted to honor his memory with a beautiful wooden cross that could be placed appropriately up front, behind the pulpit. It's there today.

"You know the story, right?" a childhood friend asked me not long ago when we were standing at the back. I told him I was sure my grandma had donated that cross up front and that there was some kind of pitched battle about it. Back then, I was a just a boy. That there had been a fight was all I knew.

"Erwie Roelse just about had a kid," he said. This friend always was a natural historian. "He absolutely wouldn't have a cross in the front of his church."

Ernie Roelse was also on the Building Committee, and he lived to worship in that brand new building.

Erwie Roelse told the consistory, "Over my dead body" --or so my friend claimed.

There we stood, looking up at grandma's cross. "There it is," I said, pointing. "What happened?"

"Erwie Roelse died," he said, and broke into the chattering laugh that made me think fifty years hadn't passed.

Erwie was concerned about Catholics, his DNA still going to war with minnow munchers and their sinful graven images. What's more, the pitched battle over grandma's cross took place before my uncle stood up in front of that church and told a hundred scared evangelicals that if JFK was elected, the U.S. of A. would be ruled by the Pope and run by the Vatican. The Reformation was only 400 years old, after all.

Today that whole silliness seems as much "the Dark Ages" as thumb screws. 

The panel above is the seventh station of the cross, one of fourteen that line the walls of the Cathedral of the Prairie in Haven, South Dakota. I love my heritage. I'm proud of who and what I come from; my parents were wonderful, their families were just that--families. But when I wander through cathedrals, I wonder how I would be different if I'd grown up surrounded by the stations of the cross.  

If I'd studied this beefy Roman gendarme screaming profanities at the bleeding savior beneath the cross, would I wince more than I do today? If I had seen a treacherous face behind that sign "King of the Jews," would the indecency make my blood boil? 

If I had actually seen a man I thought to be Nicodemus, would I have treasured his selflessness more than I do? And I'd looked up at this station and wondered about the figure on the right, even wondered about his age, would I have wondered if I too would have cast my fate with the bloody prophet buckling just then beneath the savagery? 

If I had studied this bloody image, would "O Sacred Head Now Wounded" sounded even more horrifying? If I had seen that crown of thorns, would I have felt it more? 

And if I were Lakota, and if I were to partake of Holy Eucharist for my whole life beneath this painting, would I know the gift of grace somehow better than I do?

I wonder whether we've misnamed "Holy Week." Maybe we should call it "Human Week" instead, because from the outset, from the tears he shed in the tickertape on Jerusalem's streets through every bit of suffering he withstood, all week long, the story of Holy Week is so painfully and palpably human. That crown of thorns may have been divine, but the blood was ours--and his.

I suppose I'm just playing a game old people can't help pulling out of the cupboard. It's called "What might have been?"  

But there's no going back, and I'll never be Lakota. Besides, I have my own story.

Faith is not something I dreamed up or bought or borrowed or wore to church. It's a gift. It may be fun to ask "what if," but I don't need a cathedral to see the stations of the cross, to feel the nails, to taste the hyssop. 

And so, today, Good Friday, "the human week" continues so painfully.

Thank the Lord for Sunday, because the holy-day is coming.  

Thank the Lord for grandma's empty cross.