Holy Week 2005

Holy Week has a very different feel in Tegucigalpa than it does in the Northeast. It is vacation time here. Banks, government offices, businesses, and even internet cafes close for most of the week. Everyone who can flees the city for the beach, or for the mountain villages where they grew up. Tegucigalpa becomes like a ghost town. Holy Week falls at the hottest and driest time of the year here. Easter season will bring much needed rain and cooler temperatures.

Holy Week is vacation time for El Hogar Projects, also. Both the Institute and the Agricultural School close for the week. The older boys who have no place to go, come and live at El Hogar and help with the smaller boys. Everyone who has any sort of acceptable relative or safe place to go is given leave for a few days. The boys who remain go on picnics, or to the pool, or to the movies, or just play on the grounds. Most of the teachers are on vacation.

Last year at this time I was rector of a busy parish. Holy Week was spent preparing and giving sermons at the daily services, training acolytes for their special responsibilities, visiting shut-ins, looking over a thousand leaflets for the services, and working with altar guild, ushers, lay readers, choir, etc. This is very different for me!

However it is celebrated, Holy Week brings us to the very heart of Christianity and the Gospel. It is in the remembrance of the events of Jesus' last week that we see the deepest truths about God and God's love for us revealed. What I have been thinking about is how these events look different to me here in Honduras. What light does the experience of the people here shed on the Gospel for me?

One of the things that makes Christianity so powerful is that, especially in Holy Week, it looks unsparingly at the depth of need we have in our human condition. Until we get to the Resurrection, much of the story is about betrayal, hate, abandonment, cruelty, the cynical undermining of justice, lack of compassion, and cold hearted violence. It is about abuse of the innocent, the inconstancy of human love, and the seeming triumph of the self-seeking.

It is my suspicion that many of the people living here in Honduras understand these things at a level we North Americans cannot. For many of them, their lives are steeped in chronic suffering and limited by intractable injustices. Perhaps that is one reason that this culture is so naturally devoted to Jesus. They see in what he experienced a connection with their own lives. For them, Holy Week does not call for an active exercise of imagination about what Jesus suffered. It is simply a reaffirmation that, in love, he shared their condition.

I am not meaning to say that as US and Canadian Christians we do not know real suffering. But, from the perspective I have here, some of what we call suffering is really dealing with recoverable loss. Much of it is more on the order of "set backs" than of the true draining away of our lives. Yes, we experience loss and hardship, but we also often know that, with work, our lives can be rebuilt in a satisfying way.

Because there is so little safely net here, people deal constantly with irreplaceable loss. The woman in my neighborhood who took in laundry to support her children after fleeing an abusive marriage quietly decided to spend the little money she had on food for the children rather than on her medication for diabetes. Now she has lost both her leg, amputated below the knee, and her livelihood. The young man who provides security for my apartment building is from the country, and has a wife and two children. In order to provide for them, he lives in an 8 X8 room in the garage, and sees his children only one day a week. These years in which they are growing up will not be given back to him. The El Hogar boys who are visiting relatives this week will be spending time in shacks, in neighborhoods that are not safe, eating beans and rice and nothing else, and needing to carry water in order to wash. Their families are often fractured and destitute, and they cannot go back and make it any different.

I think as North Americans we often associate Death and Resurrection with new opportunities given to us after hard times. That is proper, but it does not plumb the depths revealed by the Gospel. In Honduras, I believe people have a more instinctive grasp of the magnitude of the stakes involved in the death of Jesus.

And since they understand that, their hope is truly a Gospel hope. It is not based on wishful thinking, or denial, or on their own prosperity. They know that the Son of God dove into the depths of the darkness of human experience with them. And he now lives and reigns forever. Their hope is based on this amazing life and love of God revealed in the Resurrection.

It is this deep hope that we seek to cultivate in the boys who are in our care. Providing food and opportunity and education and medical care are all important. But ultimately, we cannot protect them from the world, and they will need a faith that can carry them through the hardest times. Holy Week points them toward the source of that abiding hope.

The Rev. Rich Kunz
Executive Director
El Hogar Projects