Holy Week and Easter have been at the heart of my growth in the faith. From my late teenage years as a progressively more arch and spiky Anglo-Catholic, all the way through to my becoming a Catholic, entering religious life, and now a priest, those great days of the Triduum and the Octave of Easter have nourished a deepening of my faith and sense of vocation.
The beauty of the Catholic faith is the physical way in which we celebrate this mystery with its sights, smells and sounds. The crack of the crotalus at the Mass of the Lord’s Supper, seeing the very old and the very young making their way to kiss the feet of the Lord on the Cross, and the smell of balsam as the head of the neophyte is anointed after baptism, all of these go towards making these days so beautiful.
