Holy Week

As we enter into Holy Week, I wanted to share something a little different than past traditional
blog post – I wanted to share something you could actively engage in.
This week, I invite you to participate in this interactive approach in experiencing Holy Week that
I hope you find introspective, enlightening, and most of all – hopeful.
Welcome to Holy Week –
Your Chrysalis Team

Exploring the Depths: Stations of The Cross

Welcome to Exploring the Depths: An Interactive View of the Stations of The Cross. This 7-
Station in-depth reflection will take you throughout the city of Albuquerque NM to reflect,
meditate, and pray. If you are not in the city, an image and/or information has been hyperlinked
so you can participate wherever you are located. Feel free to customize to reflect your
community.
Please take time during Holy Week to complete the exercise, or feel free to explore each station
in one day. We just ask that you take time to fully take in the experience.
Blessings on the journey.

Station 1: Jesus Prays (Matthew 26:36-41)
 Place: Public Labyrinth @ The Center For Action and Contemplation, Richard Rohr
https://cac.org/about/visitor-center.org
 Thoughts: Prayer takes so many forms – Folded hands, a rosary, kneeling, and words in a
prayer book, are all images that come to mind. Jesus in Gethsemane is also a powerful
picture of prayer. The image comes into even greater relief when the disciples are
pictured sleeping a stone’s throw away. I also see labyrinths used a lot to represent
prayer.  The labyrinth is a centuries old type of walking prayer. It is not a direct path; just
like prayer is often not a direct path. Instead, the labyrinth’s circumlocution awakens us
to the twists and turns of our own lives. Unlike mazes which try to confuse walkers, the
labyrinth’s non-linear path is designed to invite the pilgrim to pay close attention to their
heart space as they make their journey to the center. The path of Holy Week does not
move in a straight line. Instead, the last week of Jesus’ life is a journey to the cross
marked by intimacy, emotions, pathos, surprise, grief, and even joy.  
 Questions for Reflection: 
1) As you walk the labyrinth, what distracts you as you journey to the center? 
2) What does the center of the labyrinth represent for you? Similarly, what do the outer
rings symbolize?  The inner rings?  The entrance/exit?
3) Is there an invitation for you through your experience of immersing yourself in the
labyrinth?

Station 2: Jesus is Betrayed (Mark 14:43-46)
 Place: Public Mirror Mural Project https://www.visitalbuquerque.org/event/making-
mosaic-mirrors-part-1/56033/
 Thoughts: What we see happening in the world is a reflection of what is happening
within us. When we notice arrogance and greed around us, it’s often because we are
working with unconscious arrogance and greed from within. The indignation we feel
toward someone is the indignation we have ourselves. I am often reminded to look
internally when I look externally.
 Questions for Reflection:
1) In what ways do you project your own feelings of self onto others?
2) How you attempt to control the uncontrollable in others or in the world around you?
3) What are ways you can work on your realm of control to best prepare you to be
present in those areas you have no control?

Station 3: Jesus is Condemned (Luke 22:66-71)
 Place: Courthouse Corner Bernalillo County Metro Court 401 Lomas Blvd, NW;
Second Judicial District Court Bernalillo County 400 Lomas NW; Pete V
Domenici US Courthouse 333 Lomas Blvd, NW
https://www.cabq.gov/community-services/safety-legal/courts-and-legal
 Thoughts: Our lot in life is not so easily determined by how “good” or “bad” we
are. We so often condemn or forgive according to our whims. If I am angry or
feeling self-righteous, I may not give you compassion or empathy. If you are
hungry, you may lose your patience with me quickly. This black and white, wrong
or right, up or down, in our outward way of seeing the world is called dualism. The
reality is that the two-sided coin we hold is an illusion made up by our self-
centered collective egos. It is not either/or, but both/and. There are always
multidimensional ways of seeing. What if we started seeing in this non-dualistic
way?
 Questions for Reflection:
1) How do we seek justice while also showing compassion and empathy?
2) How did Jesus seek justice while also showing compassion and empathy?
3) How have we, as a society and individually, skewed the word justice to be synonymous
with revenge?

Station 4: Jesus is Mocked (John 19:1-3)
 Place: Washington Middle School Shooting August 13 th 2021
https://abcnews.go.com/US/middle-schooler-fatally-shot-fellow-student-
albuquerque/story?id=79402045
 Thoughts: The mocking, shaming, taunting, belittling, disparaging of others is some of
the vilest actions we as humans engage in. Some of these actions are more overt than
others, while more are much more nuanced and commonplace. These traumatic acts have
long-lasting impacts on both parties – the offenders and the victims – and we embed
these acts as individuals and as a society in various ways.
 Questions for Reflection:
1) What do we feel when we are mocked?
2) How do people often respond when someone near the, including their friends, are
mocked? How do you respond?
3) When considering our scripture and Station where someone stood up for another and was
murdered, does it make sense why Jesus’ friends said and did nothing?

Station 5: Jesus is Crucified (Luke 23:33-34)
 Place: New Mexico State University/University New Mexico Shooting November 23,
2022 https://www.espn.com/mens-college-basketball/story/_/id/35060858/new-
mexico-state-new-mexico-basketball-game-postponed-shooting
 Thoughts: Life is sacrificial. We can’t seem to help but interact with, and bring about
death no matter what we do or how we live, but we can be more conscious of it.
Becoming conscious of the sacredness of all life is transformative.
 Questions for Reflection:
1) How do we acknowledge the reality From dust we come, to dust we shall return?
2) What does it mean to recognize the sacredness in yourself and in others? How does this
affect how you live your life in the day-to-day?
3) Re-read Luke 23:33-34 and reflect on 1-2 words to consider throughout your day. What
do these words say or mean to you. How do you use these words or phrases to elevate
your sense of sacredness?

Station 6: Jesus Dies (Luke 23: 44-46)
 Place: West Mesa Women and Descanso
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Mesa_murders
https://blogs.loc.gov/law/2023/10/descansos-roadside-memorials/
 Thoughts: Jesus’ death by the Romans, was meant to be part spectacle and part
deterrence.  Make no mistake about it, the Romans demonstrated through their policy of
public execution that they had zero tolerance for those who wished to step out of line. 
Like the cartels in Juarez, Mexico who hang bodies from bridges, or what is happening in
Haiti right now, death on display can be an effective way to scare people.  But what about
death in the dark?  What about the innumerable people who are “disappeared?”  What
about the nameless, the trafficked, and the discarded?  Perhaps in some ways, their deaths
are even more terrifying.  In a world without justice anyone’s life can become
disposable.  Thank God that there were those who were willing to grieve through the
Roman spectacle so that they could be near the Jesus that they loved.  May we all find a
way to stand as witnesses to the ones who have been disappeared. 
 Questions for Reflection:
1) Read Luke 23: 44-46.  What do you feel when you read, “Jesus breathed his last?”
2) Allow your imagination to place you at the scene of Jesus’ crucifixion.  What do you
see, hear, feel, in the crowd?  Can you look upon Jesus’ face?  What does this moment in
the story of Holy Week say to you in terms of discipleship and what it means to follow
the Master? 
3) How have you been invited to stand witness for someone who has died?  How do you
bear witness to family members or loved ones who have died?  How do you honor them
or remember them?  What would be a way for you to remember the nameless and
forgotten?

Station 7: Jesus Rises Easter Sunrise – Home Service
As Holy Weeks ends and we come to our 7 th Station of the Cross on this Easter morning, we
journey to the tomb with Mary Magdalene and discover the stone is rolled away. An empty grave
remains and with joy, we discover that Christ Jesus has risen.

This morning, you are invited to seek a quiet space where you can minimize interruptions and
take a few moments to enter the silence and beauty of this Easter morning.
Let yourself sink deeply into the quiet and invite God in. Read through the order of service – the
liturgy, poems, and scripture. Pay attention to the words, the sounds – what you are reading and
hearing. As you read and hear, notice which words or phrases catch your attention.
Take time to journal your thoughts or impressions:

 What new ways of seeing or hearing are opening for you?
 What truth do you hear that intersects with the unfolding of your life?
 What parts call you to be present or to see in an entirely different way?
 How does this worship reflect or resonate with your own experience? What
insights does it spark?

Sunrise Service – Order of Service

Call to Worship
Christ has risen! Christ has risen indeed.
Faith, hope, and joy are alive.
A new age is dawning, and death cannot harm us.
Prayer
Creator God, I am here in the early morning of your Resurrection. I have been mourning and
weeping, believing that you have been taken from us. Instead, you meet me in the garden of new
life. Here, in this sacred place, I discover that you are alive, that sin and death cannot defeat you.
Now my tears of sorrow turn to tears of joy as I fully experience your very presence. Today, I sit
and listen, and I begin to understand that joy comes from grief. You call me again and again to
go into the world to share this good news, and because I am never left alone, I am reminded to
pray…Lord’s Prayer
Scripture Reading
John 20:1-18
Poetry for Meditation
When Death Comes by Mary Oliver
When death comes like the hungry bear in autumn; when death comes and takes all the bright
coins from his purse to buy me, and snaps the purse shut; when death comes like the measle-pox;
when death comes like an iceberg between the shoulder blades, I want to step through the door
full of curiosity, wondering: what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?
And therefore I look upon everything as a brotherhood and a sisterhood, and I look upon time as
no more than an idea, and I consider eternity as another possibility, and I think of each life as a
flower, as common as a field daisy, and as singular, and each name a comfortable music in the
mouth, tending, as all music does, toward silence, and each body a lion of courage, and
something precious to the earth.

When it’s over, I want to say all my life I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms. When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder if I
have made of my life something particular, and real. I don’t want to find myself sighing and
frightened, or full of argument. I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.
The Death of Death By Scott Cairns
Put fear aside. Now that he has entered into death on our behalf, all who live no longer die as
men once died. That ephemeral occasion has met its utter end. As seeds cast to the earth, we will
not perish, but like those seeds shall rise again—the shroud of death itself having been burst to
tatters by love’s immensity.
Benediction
Take time to simply sit in silence and as the closing benediction, you are invited to compose your
own short prayer as a response. Amen