How can we conduct ourselves well during Holy Week?
Holy Week is the holiest week of the year, and we should prepare for it beforehand so that we may gain spiritual fruits and a spiritual store that will benefit us throughout the remaining days of our lives.
Pope Shenouda III emphasizes that preparation begins with self-examination, sincere repentance, confession, and making a genuine decision to change our lives.
Holy Week should also be an ideal week in which we control our thoughts, tongues, senses, and behavior, and stay away from everything that distracts the heart from God.
Spiritual Message
The primary purpose of this week is to share with Christ in His sufferings, not externally or superficially, but through the feelings of the heart and through meditation on His sufferings for our sins.
We should remember our sins and grieve over them, and ask ourselves how we can imitate Christ in endurance, patience, forgiveness, and freedom from complaining.
Pope Shenouda also encourages retreat, solitude, and avoiding excessive conversation, discussions, and concern with other people’s affairs, so that the heart may remain occupied with God.
The readings, hymns, prayers, and sacred occasions of Holy Week help us follow the events of Christ’s Passion day by day and enter deeply into the spirit of the week.
Educational Lesson
The week teaches us that suffering can be a means of purifying the soul, and that a person should not respond to suffering with complaining, grumbling, and resentment, but with patience, endurance, and offering his sufferings to God as part of his worship.
It also explains that every person has his own cross and his own sufferings, and that we should offer them to God as an acceptable sacrifice and learn from Christ, who suffered and forgave those who wronged Him.
In fasting, each person should practice according to his ability and the guidance of his father of confession, without imposing his own practice on others or judging them because they are different from him.
Practical Application
A person should dedicate more time to personal, heartfelt prayer, meditate on the readings and hymns of the week, and benefit from every sacred occasion as a personal meditation on his own life.
He should also stay away from entertainment and distractions that do not build him up, and preserve outside the church the same spirit that he experiences inside it.
The person is also called to exercise self-control in food and other desires according to his ability and the guidance of his father of confession, while being careful not to turn asceticism into judgment of others.
In this way, Holy Week becomes a period of repentance, renewal, and solitude with God, helping the person to experience true repentance, prepare for Holy Communion, share in Christ’s sufferings from the heart, and preserve a spiritual store whose effect continues beyond the week.
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