Dear Parishioners of Mary Immaculate and St. Rose,
Today we begin Holy Week.  In the reading of the Passion today when we stop and kneel for a moment of silence when Jesus dies upon the Cross, I always find this a very powerful moment.  We all kneel in silence before the awful truth that Jesus is dead!
Then we stand up and everything goes on. It is like every death that we encounter.  We pause, are silent in the face of this great mystery, and then we get up and everything goes on.  Maybe we just get used to it.  Or as used to it as we can ever get to death.  But this death is different.  It is through this death that we receive eternal life.
This week we especially reflect on the last days of Jesus’ life.  On Good Friday we again read the Passion and the silence is even more profound. We enter the church which seems bare and empty.  A church in which the calming and comforting presence of the Blessed Sacrament is eerily absent.  The candles are extinguished, the tabernacle stands open and empty, the altar is bare and stark. I always find this strongly disconcerting. I hear the echo of Jesus’ words uttered from the cross. . . “my God, my God, why have you forsaken me.” 
We come forward to adore the cross. . . A kiss, a genuflection, a touch, some small acknowledgment that this instrument of torture and death has now become the gateway to Eternal Life.
Then as if we could not stand the thought of Jesus not being with us, we bring in the Blessed Sacrament, consecrated at the Mass the evening before, because we cannot offer Mass on the day of the Lord’s death.  And as we commemorate the death of the Lord, we receive the Bread of Life.



 
Then we depart in silence. . .“Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.”         

Christ Crucified, Diego Velázquez (1632)