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Dear Parents,
After a restful week of spring break (complete with a couple of days of hiking in the mountains of North Georgia with bright, beautiful weather), it was a bit of a "shock" to enter into the Palm Sunday liturgy with its proclamation of the Passion narrative. The account of Christ's suffering and death never fails to strike me with the harsh reality of sin - my sins. For me, it is always a powerful and sobering experience to utter the words of the crowd with my very own voice: "Let him be crucified...His blood be upon us..."
Palm Sunday ushers in Holy Week, a week which one might describe as the most "intense" week of the Christian calendar. It is the time when, through the prayers and readings of the liturgy, God, as it were, "shouts" to us the incredible message of His boundless love for us.
In one of his homilies for Palm Sunday, Pope Francis reflects on the magnitude of God's love for us:
Jesus "emptied" and "humbled" Himself (Phil 2:7-8). These two verbs show the boundlessness of God's love for us. Jesus emptied Himself...He lived among us in "the condition of a servant" (v. 7); not of a king or a prince, but of a servant. Therefore, He humbled Himself, and the abyss of His humiliation, as Holy Week shows us, seems to be bottomless.
The painful reality of our sins and failings can feel overwhelming. Sometimes, when working with a student who "got into trouble", I find that the young person is not so much afraid of being punished as being distressed by the sense of failure or disappointment - deep down, we do not like to be wrong because we believe that our loveable-ness is contingent upon our personal perfection. Thankfully, our faith teaches us that our failings are mercifully tempered by God's tender and tenacious love for us and are in fact occasions for experiencing that God's love for us does not depend on our level of achievement at all! It is in light of this amazing love that we can dare to hope that sin and death do not have the last word in our lives and the lives of our loved ones.
Holy Week is the perfect time to entrust our sins and failings, our hopes and dreams, to our merciful Savior. Just as children expect big gifts from their parents on special occasions, so we should also expect big graces from our Heavenly Father on these very special days which commemorate the events of our salvation history. Let us ask for big graces for our world, our country, our Church, our families and loved ones.
With prayers for a blessed Easter,
Sister Mary Jacinta, O.P.
Principal
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