Holy Week time to reflect on power of prayer

As you read this article, Christians are preparing for Easter morning. Easter morning is for us the climactic moment of our spiritual narrative that began on Palm Sunday. It concludes a week of prayer, daily worship services, fasting, and silence.

We contemplate what Martin Luther called the Gospel in miniature: "For God so love the world that He gave His only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life." (John 3:16).

Holy Week is a time for us to receive and to use the gift from God of prayer and the gift of cleansing and healing forgiveness. We will once again also receive the gift of what the early church called the Great Forty Hours of Silence. Those hours are from when Jesus' human voice was silenced by mortal death until the restoration of His Resurrection voice on Easter morning.

The fully human Jesus taught his disciples how to pray. They also had to learn to trust in the Divine voice of the Risen Christ. It was not automatic and even 50 days after the Resurrection "some still doubted." (Matthew 28:17) In the same way, we are called to listen to and trust the voice of Christ in our daily spiritual journey.

We are to daily pray The Lord's Prayer and our intercessions and then wait in silence for the divine voice that will guide us as we go into the world as Jesus' Easter disciples. God gave and we received and we are then sent into the world to love God and our neighbors and to tell them the Easter story so that they too can learn to pray with their new voices of resurrection hope.

The Rev. Dennis Campbell tells his story of both the tragic and the resurrection as he experienced it as a child living with his family in Truman, Ark.

During the summer the Spring River is "trout" cool and a favorite place to go on family outings. It runs from shallow to deep holes. One day his father took their family to the river and tragically he stepped into a deep hole and because he couldn't swim, he drowned. Dennis' mother drove her grieving family home and immediately enrolled her children in swim lessons. Every day they learned to swim. They progressed from the shallow water to the deep. From the death of their father arose a learned confidence that chased away their new fears of water. From ones man's death a family commitment was born and all the children and the grandchildren learn to swim at an early age.

We can all live every day prayerfully with the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. They are interesting traveling companions! We speak and they listen and then they speak and we listen. We can all be Easter disciples. But first we need to once again experience Holy Week including the silence from the cross.

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Parks is rector of St. Theodore's Episcopal Church in Bella Vista. He can be reached by email to [email protected].

Editorial on 03/25/2015