Holy Week, Sacred You...

As health care providers, educators, ministers, healers, we often lose site of the larger picture of ourselves and the others whom we treat, teach, serve, and engage with our very selves.  The day to day routine of our care for others can sometimes yield a focus on the micro aspects of the individuals and ourselves versus the macro sense of each of us as human beings in a larger world that is much bigger than either of us or our shared relationship.   The loss of the macro view can also result in a loss of honor of self and other as a sacred being. It can dampen our wonder and awe as well as the act of celebration and experiencing of life itself.

 This week starting Sunday, March 29 through Sunday, April 5, is often called, "Holy Week." In Jewish traditions it is the week leading to Passover, a tradition honoring the Angel of Death passing over the Jewish families who honored their relationship to God by marking their door posts with the blood of a sacrificed lamb. In the Christian tradition, this same ritual is embraced and taken to a new dimension of honoring Jesus Christ as both the Son of God and Sacrificial Lamb whose blood was shed so that the Angel of Death passes over all people who honor their relationship with God through faith in Christ, his Son.  And various pagan religions have roots in the Latin name Eostre, which means Spring and celebrates both the arrival of the Spring Equinox and the Sun and Mother Goddess by the same name.  Some of these pagan traditions also share stories and themes of goddess death, burial and resurrection. Holy Week carries themes of celebration of life, facing death, loss, and burial, ultimately experiencing awe and celebration of life saved, renewed, reincarnated, resurrected.  The Season of Spring itself yields this message through nature's very earthly activity.  This week is full with ritual and metaphor!

Regardless of your belief or faith, the symbolism of these and other various religions and belief systems can invite us to pause and reflect on life, its celebration, our birth, survival and salvation, death, re-birth or resurrection. Spring and its many rituals celebrates new and refreshed energy suffusing new life within each of us even as in its newly flowering and emerging buds on trees and plants. 

Significant in the midst of this Holy Week is the call to consider life, its forces and cycles that are much larger than our individual selves alone.  Birth, Death, Salvation, Re-Birth, Fresh Beginnings.  These aspects of Holy Week are symbolic of cycles of life, vibrant with each emotional and relational state.  Significant also in the rite of Spring and Easter is the beauty and power of each individual creation, including you and those around you. You, yourself are Sacred in all of your senses, capabilities, emotions, moods, thoughts, activities, energies and relationships.  You are Sacred in all of your creativity, both expressed and unexpressed.  Death, loss, renewal, and re-emergence are Sacred. Life in all of its aspects is Holy and Sacred.

I invite you to take a moment and allow this week to call to you to consider the sacred and the holy, whether it is through a religious ritual or a pause over the affecting energy of a sunset.  The feel of the breeze on your skin.  The subtle energetic surge from the touch by another's hand against your own skin or the power shared in a deep embrace. Your own inhale and exhale.  I invite you to pause to consider and be amazed at your very existence.  You are Sacred.  Those with whom we engage personally and professionally are also Sacred. Regardless of outcome of our intervention as health care providers and healers, regardless of our impact, regardless of our success and failure, the sacred continues for each and every person we encounter.

Pause this week.  Feel the Holy, Honor the Sacred. Honor you and the other(s) you find yourself engaging for the amazing beings that you are.