It’s arrived early this year. On Sunday in the Western church, we remember Jesus of Nazareth's entrance into Jerusalem with Palm Sunday. It is the beginning of a week involving triumphant expectations, rituals of washing and caring, betrayal, injustice, brutal capital punishment and death. We call it holy. Why? Most likely because life is filled with beautiful and terrible things. Holy Week fills out all the drama of the human condition.

Several years ago, I presided at the funeral of an older man. He had lived a long life, and the family gathered for the memorial service. They asked if the man’s teenage granddaughter could read a lesson during worship. She approached the podium with a kind of grace unusual for early teens. She opened a Bible and, before reading, said, “I chose this passage because it best shows the qualities of my grandfather.” She then began to read First Corinthians 13.

 Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing but rejoices in the truth.  It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

I must have heard those verses read hundreds of times at weddings. But, now, hearing this child read this passage as a description of her grandfather. I was slain, as was the congregation. Nothing more needed to be said. 

The columnist David Brooks describes two different kinds of virtues for living. In the first half of life, we work on our résumé virtues. These qualities help us earn a living, establish a family, and plan a career. We desire to impress people with the capabilities of our competence, education, and acuity for success. However, different questions begin to arise in the second half of life. An increasing awareness of the limits of life primarily brings this on. We realize we will not live forever. Therefore, our focus shifts from résumé virtues to eulogy virtues. We hope people will recount these qualities and characteristics at our funeral. Were we kind, compassionate, and thoughtful? Were we a good listener, a generous person, an encourager? Or were we a complainer, a know-it-all, a braggart? The second half of life brings an opportunity to ask questions of ultimate significance.[2]

Death is a tremendous gift to us. It forces us to face our limits and thereby helps us choose how we wish to spend our time and energy.

In many ways, Holy Week is a week of death. The historic liturgies of the Christian church turn our attention to a brutal death using an ancient form of capital punishment, namely crucifixion. We should not trivialize this form of execution. The Romans invented it to inflict maximum suffering on the victims and used it to convince other would-be rebels to think twice. This event culminates in the Good Friday liturgy.

Holy Week marinates in death. The week’s origin centered on the Passover celebration, which marked events in ancient Israel as enslaved people prepared to march out of bondage in Egypt. The meal before their departure became the center of Christian worship in early precursors to Holy Week, which took shape in the 4th century CE. But Jesus linking the Passover meal with his Last Supper brings yet another death marker into the week.

All this talk of death may get you a little down. Largely, that’s because Americans are death-phobic and grief-illiterate, as the Canadian philosopher and former palliative-care counselor Stephen Jenkinson has noted. Years ago, on departing the house to attend a Good Friday liturgy, my wife asked if anyone else wanted to join us. We had family in town for the weekend. One gentleman declined by saying, “Nah, it’s too depressing. I’ll wait for Easter. That’s more of an upper.” His choice of words (an upper) reflects an almost pharmaceutical metaphor. It’s as if religion and life are chemically inducing activities. Is Good Friday a downer as in a depressant, and is Easter Sunday a stimulant?

I believe the crusty Canadian is onto something as he describes our death-phobic and grief-illiterate culture. In 1976, the film Annie Hall caught my attention. It spoke to my young-adult angst of romances gone awry, confusion regarding vocation, and the ever-present quest for meaning. In the film, there is a scene in which the character Alvy Singer is trying to convince Annie to read some books on death. Somehow my adolescent existential self, became intrigued with those books. So, I went out and purchased Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death and read it over a weekend. My college roommate telephoned the campus ministry center out of concern. I can see my life and work calling rooted in this pursuit of death and its accompanying co-pilot grief. Working in a hospital cancer ward and emergency room was among my most life-giving and exhausting experiences as a young chaplain. Among the lessons I’ve learned most about death and grief is that they must be expressed.

To speak of sorrow
works upon it
                moves it from its
crouched place barring
the way to and from the soul’s hall—
out in the light it
shows clear, whether
shrunken or known as
a giant wrath—
                discrete
at least, where before

its great shadow joined
the walls and roof and seemed
to uphold the hall like a beam.

Denise Levertov writes of our unexpressed sorrows, the congested stories of loss, that, when left unattended, block our access to the soul. I would go so far as to suggest that it is in death and grief that we most profoundly connect with God: not exclusively; but something in the human experience of loss unites us.

Who has not experienced loss, heartache, shattered dreams, grave disappointments, all the little deaths of life, not to mention the significant deaths of loved ones who have passed away? In the past few years, more than a million Americans died from COVID-19; globally, the number has soared to six million. Add to this all the recent deaths, losses, addictions, and traumas as the result of a broken world. I remain convinced that a significant part of our current engagement with aggressive and even violent behavior is deeply connected to unexpressed grief.

We need more than a splendidly profound funeral, though that always helps. What we need is a cultural recalibration, maybe even an intervention. This reorientation would center around sorrow, loss, and grief. Every person reading this book could step forward to encourage their local church, synagogue, temple, community center, school, or even place of employment to form a grief group. There are free guidebooks available.[5]

Regardless of one’s religious affiliation, Holy Week serves as more than a reminder of the presence of death in life. It suggests a particular way in which death is life. As the mystics throughout history, the theologians of ancient and present times, and depth psychologists have all noted, the idea of God embracing death is a most meaningful embrace of life. We do well to see in death the gift of life.

So death is not something to run from, hide from, or pretend does not exist. Instead, if we are engaged in healthy and kind ways, we can encounter death as a friend. Death is the ultimate definer of what makes us human.

“The heart that breaks open can contain the whole universe.”

Joanna Macy[6]

This essay appears in the upcoming book Ordinary Mysteries: Faith, Doubt, and Meaning, which will be released on April 30. Next week, I’ll announce a presale of a limited hardcover edition. Proceeds of all sales will support the hospitals, schools, and congregations of the ELCJHL.

James Hazelwood, writer, bishop, and spiritual director, is the author of Weird Wisdom for the Second Half of Life and Everyday Spirituality: Discover a Life of Hope, Peace, and Meaning. He has a new book, Ordinary Mysteries: Reflections on Faith, Doubt & Meaning. His website is www.jameshazelwood.net