With the arrival of Holy Week, beginning on Palm Sunday, we come to a closing of this Lenten season. The journey is almost complete. Jerusalem remains ahead, but now on the near horizon. But there is some rough road to travel yet, spiritually speaking.

It is so much a part of our human nature to want to avoid suffering. To "seek" suffering is pathological, but to suffer is quite human-indeed it is part of what defines the human experience. We need not seek suffering; it will find us quite of its own accord. Suffering comes in so many different forms as we know-there is physical suffering as well as spiritual and emotional suffering. Some suffer quietly and internally, while others make sure everyone with whom they come in contact knows about their pain. Universally, however, suffering involves some sort of loss-loss of a dream, loss of an ideal, loss of comfort, loss of a loved one. Holy Week reminds us that God also suffers. The God of our Christian faith is not removed from suffering, and the Cross is ever before us as a reminder of that certain reality.

The transformational power of Holy Week, I believe, is that once we accept that God did not avoid the Cross-recall that Jesus gave his life, it was not taken-then we may see our way forward in a new way. When we face into the reality of our suffering, without denial, without seeking pity, we too discover that we do not have to be alone. I believe that what God "discovered" is that he could count on those who loved him and that he would not be abandoned. At our best, here in the Christian community of Calvary we can have the same assurance. God and those who love us will not abandon us even at our most difficult times. Trusting that is faith!

Easter we must realize, if it is to make any sense at all, stands on "the other side" of the Cross. We cannot have Easter without Good Friday. I'm reminded of Julian of Norwich's famous and resounding words, "all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well." Julian's words were spoken when she herself lay near death during the third wave of the bubonic plague that ravaged Norwich in the mid-14th century. We may be more familiar with T. S. Elliot's echo of Julian's words at the end of his Four Quartets ("All shall be well"), but it is Julian's words that capture the full breadth of Holy Week and Easter. Julian knew the immense suffering of others and she knew it firsthand, and her response, in the words of one writer: