Faith and Family / Sean Gallagher

Like in Holy Week, the past lives on today in our families and in the Church

I can remember like it was yesterday. Sometimes, the memory is so strong that it feels like it’s happening right in the moment when it comes to mind.

In the summer of 2003, our son Michael, my wife Cindy’s and my first child, and just past his first birthday, came down with a bad case of pneumonia. For a few weeks, he’d been on a roller coaster, having breathing problems, then getting better only to worsen again.

Then one day after he’d gotten a chest X-ray, we got a call from our doctor’s office telling us to take Michael to the hospital in Columbus where we lived at the time.

About a day later, it was determined that the care our very sick little boy needed was beyond what that hospital could offer. So, he was sent to Riley Children’s Hospital in Indianapolis.

Cindy rode with him in the ambulance. As a registered nurse, she was beside herself that she would allow her own child to become so sick, although our kind doctor in Columbus assured her that there was nothing she could have done to prevent what was happening to Michael.

At the same time, I drove home and got what Cindy and I needed for what might become an extended stay in Indianapolis. I was on nerve and the drive to Riley seemed to take forever.

When I arrived, I found our little boy on a ventilator with a chest tube inserted by his left lung. It was a harrowing thing for Cindy and me as young parents to see.

Michael spent about two weeks at Riley and eventually had to have surgery. Thanks be to God, he recovered. Today, he’s almost 24.

In a real way, those frightening days in 2003 live on in us here and now. I dare say that all families probably have moments of various kinds that they can point to that happened years ago, but live on vividly in their hearts and minds and continue to shape who they are today.

This happens in the Church and is embodied dramatically in the liturgies of Holy Week.

From its earliest days, the Church has believed that in every celebration of the Mass, the walls of time and space spiritually break down, and both the Last Supper and Christ’s death on the cross on Calvary continue to take place where the faithful gather for worship.

This belief is rooted in the beliefs of the Jewish people. For them, there’s really only one Passover—that wondrous night when their ancestors were freed from slavery in Egypt. Every seder meal on Passover since then is for them a spiritual continuation of that one event in Egypt so long ago.

And, of course as we read in the Gospels, what happened at the Last Supper and on Calvary was intimately connected to the Passover.

The events in the Upper Room, on Calvary and ultimately in the empty tomb, are together that moment in our family of faith that is the Church that lives on in the hearts and minds of all believers.

But these events are not simply brought into our lives. We are also empowered by God’s grace to bring our lives, with all of their crosses and blessings, to these events.

Christ invites us to join all those events in the lives of our families that live on within us to his sacrifice of himself at the Last Supper and on Calvary.

Do that this Holy Week and, indeed, at every celebration of the Mass, and you’ll be amazed at how the life of Christ will flourish in your life and the life of your family. †