Everything We Need: A Holy Week Round Up

Okay. Take a deep breath. 

Holy Week is almost upon us and yet, no matter the planning that goes into this season, it can feel like we are at loose ends. And, importantly, there is a gap between what it means to be prepared to lead ministry during Holy Week and how we experience this season for ourselves and our families. Our own devotion can feel like it takes a back seat.

I won’t pretend there’s a magic solution to finding that balance or even feeling fully prepared for Holy Week. (I’m – once again – revising my children’s multi-sensory Stations of the Cross program.) That being said, having the right resources for Holy Week can go a long way towards cutting down on the chaos. 

Primers

In theory, we start Holy Week with Palm Sunday’s procession and the Passion reading. But especially if you’re ushering children through the rituals marking Jesus’s final days, you might need a few pre-Holy Week tools. How do we offer up a meaningful, age-appropriate theology of this time to children (and maybe redeem the one we were offered as children)?

Get ready to Holy Week by:

• Digging out the oxblood red underlays or tablecloths to replace your Lenten purple, particularly if this is something your main parish spaces do. It’s going to be a busy week; you don’t need to be digging out home altar materials in the midst of it all.
• Listening to “How to Talk About Jesus on the Cross – with Kids” with the Rev. Emily Garcia in conversation with the Revs. Laura Di Panfilo and Lizzie McManus-Dail, hosts of the And Also With You podcast.
• Watching “Understanding and Sharing a Theology of the Cross with Children: Beyond Substitutionary Atonement” with Traci Smith, Herb Montgomery, and Daneen Akers and/or “A Theology of the Cross and Children: Beyond Substitutionary Atonement” with Traci Smith and Laura Alary
• Reading “Three Teaching Points for Holy Week” from Building Faith. Even if you don’t find yourself articulating any of these points specifically, these are lessons that can shape how you embody this sacred week in your own worship.
• Pulling up the Rev. Emily Garcia’s Instagram Prompts for Holy Week. You don’t need to be in charge of any social media pages to use these. In fact, if walking through Holy Week with your children is feeling overwhelming, these prompts can help you anchor your days in scripture and simple reflection.
• Studying up on how to make a Palm Cross. Maybe you’re great at this, but I know I usually need a slight refresher. I also keep this set of instructions in my files so I can set them out in the parish hall for folks.
• Putting a hold on Love One Another by Lauren Thompson at your library or digging up a copy from a used book site. The book is out of print, but it’s such an excellent book for Holy Week and is available inexpensively.

Palm Sunday

Now, to get started for real – Palm Sunday. It all kicks off here. We’re waving palms and shouting Hosannas! Attendance is up and there are so many moving parts. Here’s what you need:

• If your church has pre-folded palm crosses rather than long pieces of palms, make sure you’ve downloaded Illustrated Ministry’s coloring Palm Frond so that everyone who wants one has a palm to customize and wave!
• Holy Week: An Emotions Primer is a board book that helps hold the complexity of this week – from the excitement of Palm Sunday to the gratitude of the Last Supper and the sadness of the tomb. There are also coloring pages that parallel each page of the book.
• While there are certainly a few storybooks I’d consider Holy Week classics, one of my more recent favorites is Bare Tree and Little Wind by Mitali Perkins and illustrated by Khoa Le. It’s a beautiful and peculiar telling of the Holy Week story that follows the wind blowing through Jerusalem in conversation with one of the trees, as they wait for Real King to come.
• Look-and-Find Easter Stories for Young Children, illustrated by Megan Higgins, picks up on Palm Sunday, offering brief snippets of the many stories that make up this time while encouraging children to get to know the stories better by searching out hidden elements in the illustrations.
• Set your soundscape! I really like Be A Heart’s playlist, Holy Holy Holy Week, but you might also opt for Page CXVI’s album Lent to Maundy Thursday album.

The In-Between (Monday/Tuesday/Wednesday)

Not that you don’t have enough to do, but there are a few places you might want to pause as you head into the intensity of the Triduum. In particular, I recommend trying this Holy Week Church Prayer Walk. This is a deep cut from somewhere in the Sparkhouse archives. It’s a simple way to recognize the work that happens in the life of the parish – and you don’t need any special skills or a particular role to lead the activity. In fact, it’s best if the people in charge of things don’t lead this practice, but that they do know they are being prayed for.

Maundy Thursday

Maundy Thursday is so wonderfully concrete as our holy days go. With its commemoration of the Last Supper, foot washing, and stripping of the altar. If you’re not sharing in an agape meal at church or otherwise in a program whirlwind, allow those materials to guide your evening. Read these stories over dinner at home, wondering together. 

Celebrating Maundy Thursday at home might look like sharing good bread, perhaps using fancy dishes, washing each other’s feet, and taking down your home altar. You might also:

• Consider using a story like Gathered at the Table by Glenys Nellist. This book celebrates the many forms communion has taken since the first time it was shared and how we are united around it. Another option is We Gather at This Table by Anna V. Ostenso Moore, which is more distinctly Episcopal while still offering an expansive vision of how the ritual of Eucharist shapes us as God’s people.
• Create opportunities for exploring foot washing more deeply. Specifically, if you have a young child who will participate in this activity at church, it’s unlikely that brief exposure will give them enough time to sit with both the physical activity and the importance of it.
  
  Carve out some time for them to practice pouring, washing, and drying with appropriately-sized materials and visual references to this story. The foot washing page from Glenys Nellist’s Easter Love Letters from God includes both the story and a prayer for this activity.

Good Friday

Good Friday is intense. The stations of the cross are weighty but also valuable. (That’s why we did all of that theology of the cross stuff in preparation for Holy Week.)  With that in mind, I also want to suggest that there are a lot of different ways to be present to this story and ways to recombine elements – and also that, while youth and adults can be left with the closed tomb at the end of a Stations presentation, younger children shouldn’t be left at the foot of the cross. Resurrection needs to make an appearance in some way, even though it isn’t yet Easter.

• Starting with the standard elements, the Rev. Emily Garcia offers adapted collects for the Stations of the Cross on her website – and she’s even preformatted a booklet with art! While resurrection isn’t in this very traditional guide, it’s worth noting that her practice with children & families concludes with reading The Tale of Three Trees, which does lead us to this essential ending.
• Equipped with the alternative collects, you might also try out the Rev. Mia Kano’s liturgy for Finding the Way of the Cross in Nature. This post includes links to both children’s and adult versions of the practice, but I would add a search for something blooming or similar to the end for that resurrection moment.
• Remember that soundtrack from before? You can swap the Lent to Maundy Thursday tunes for Page CXVI’s Good Friday to Easter album. I often use this as the background as my families gather for our Stations programming. 
• Maybe you’ve got a teenager or young adult in your life who is looking for a new way to engage with the traditional Stations of the Cross. Consider checking out artist Jacqueline Romo’s The Passion of the Monarca Migrante, which uses the migration of the Monarch butterfly, whose migration pattern crosses the US-Mexican border, as a way of reenvisioning the Passion story.
• Looking for another story to trade in for The Tale of Three Trees? Consider sharing Gleny Nellist’s ‘Twas the Morning of Easter or Paul Kerensa’s Mary and the Gardener.

As for the Vigil and Easter Day – I leave you here, peering around the corner at Resurrection. We’ve had a glimpse of what is ahead. 

Take another deep breath. You have everything you need. Making Easter happen is out of our hands. We are just living in the midst of it.