Faith and Family / Sean Gallagher

Families live out the glory of Holy Week, Easter Octave all year long

Holy Week and the Octave of Easter are surely the two richest weeks of the Church’s liturgical year.

It starts with the blessing of palms on Palm Sunday and goes on to the blessing of oils at the chrism Mass. Many parishes have the washing of the feet during the Evening Mass of the Lord’s Supper on Holy Thursday, and a beautifully decorated altar of repose where the Blessed Sacrament is kept after the liturgy. Then the Church’s worship moves into the starkness of the Celebration of the Lord’s Passion on Good Friday afternoon.

The darkness that enveloped the world when our Lord died on Calvary, though, gives joyful way to his undying light as the paschal candle is processed into parish churches on the night of Holy Saturday at the Easter Vigil.

Christ’s new and unending life is shared with catechumens in baptism and renewed in the life of all worshippers who renew their baptismal promises.

While the Octave of Easter does not have the deeply symbolic rituals of Holy Week, the joy of Christ’s resurrection radiates throughout it. Parish churches are beautifully adorned with flowers. Mass on each day of the octave is celebrated as if it was still Easter Sunday with all of its proper prayers being repeated throughout.

The octave ends with Divine Mercy Sunday, in which worshippers bask in the great gift of God’s forgiveness won for us through the paschal mystery of Christ’s suffering, death and resurrection.

No other two-week span in the Church’s year comes anywhere close to Holy Week and the Octave of Easter. After their peak moments, the day-to-day liturgical life of the Church in the doldrums of Ordinary Time might seem, well, ordinary.

But we should never forget that each Mass, no matter when it is celebrated, contains the fullness of Christ’s paschal mystery that is on such intense display during Holy Week and the Easter Octave.

And what is true of the Church’s worship is also true of its families. The teaching that families are the domestic Church isn’t just a nice theological catchphrase. It’s a transcendent reality that daily mirrors and fully embodies in its own way Christ’s dying and rising.

Countless time every day, husbands and wives, parents and children die to themselves and rise to a greater life than they can imagine in the life they share.

Spouses learn to let slide by the idiosyncrasies of their partners that can really grate them. Parents change one more diaper, make one more meal, wash one more load of laundry and balance a million and one household duties before falling into their beds, only to wake up the next day and do it again.

Children take their turn in this mystery by learning how to live with the craziness of their siblings (and their parents) and in doing what mom or dad ask them to do, especially when there are a million and one other things they’d rather do.

All of these moments, and so many others, are hard. And I’ll be the first to confess that there are many times I fail in them. But it is possible for us to die and rise with Christ in them—but only with the help of his grace.

This all may seem a world away from the Church’s profound worship in Holy Week and the Easter Octave. But the glory of Christ’s dying and rising which he draws us into in that worship is just as fully present in its own way in the family home, the domestic Church, as it is in our parish churches. †