THE SWEET ODOUR OF CHRIST (Monday in Holy Week)
Aemiliana Lohr
We are in the great week now. Yesterday, at its beginning, we were already aware that for all its seriousness this is not a passion week, a week of mourning, suffering, and sorrow which some tried to make of it at a time when there was no more understanding for the real moods of the liturgy. The double melody of suffering and triumph which touched us so strongly yesterday is once more audible now. We hear it throughout all the days of this week, and always the notes of triumph, the free sounds of peace and glory, master the tones of suffering and complaint.
Fundamentally, even in this most serious week of the liturgical
year, joy receives the main accent whenever the Church prays or sings: that joy
in God and all his great works which
we see taking place before us in the liturgy as marvelous as they were on the
first day. Like Jesus himself, who looked up and beyond to God's saving design
and his Father's glory when his hour had come, so too, now that the time has
come to perform the liturgical memorial of his death, his bride the Church, who
might be expected to remain full of sorrow at his cross and wound, turns gently
to the ' glorifying and not destroying end of his pain. This is what
distinguishes the divinity of the Church's worship from the ways of merely
human piety: she regards the events of history as well as the mystical events
of her ritual with the eye of God, and therefore her first and last word is
always an expression of her joy in God, of his praise, the ardor and breath of
life that never fades.
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