A Motley Collection of Quotes for Holy Week

Apr 12, 2025

I’m heading into Holy Week feeling more than a little fragmented. What I’ve come up with to share this week are some quotes from the books that have been faithfully sitting on my nightstand and on the bookshelf by the rocking chair. Sometimes, the things gathered your mind from different places start talking to each other—this the main benefit of reading, I think—and these are my examples for today.

Searching for and Maintaining Peace has been close by, in my purse or on my bookshelf, for a full year now. My friend Rachel introduced it to me during a 2024 Lenten book study. Fr. Jacques Philippe writes of the Cross in this tiny pink book, which has given me much more than $7.95 worth of solace, “The most decisive motive to aid us in peacefully confronting the drama of suffering is this: we must take very seriously the mystery of the Incarnation and that of the Cross. Jesus took our flesh, He really took upon Himself our sufferings. And in all people who suffer there is Jesus who suffers.”

Including us. Whether misunderstood or made fun of or martyred, there is no suffering too slight or too tremendous for Him to enter into it with us.

Free Colorful stained glass window featuring a cross and palm branches, perfect for religious themes. Stock Photo — photo credit J.S. McDuff

II.

Elie Wiesel’s book, Night, is largely about the impotence and absence of God, but a faithful Catholic, François Mauriac, was the person who encouraged Wiesel to write it in the first place (so I learned from Fr. Joe at book club approximately five years ago). Mauriac wrote the foreword to Wiesel’s memoir about his childhood experiences in a Nazi concentration camp. One of the gruesome memories that Wiesel explores is the execution of a child by hanging, a warning to the rest of the prisoners. Wiesel remembers hearing the person behind him weeping, “Where is God?”

Then, Wiesel describes, “ ‘And from within me, I heard a voice answer: “Where He is? This is where—hanging here from this gallows.’”

Mauriac reflects on this moment from the memoir in the foreword of Night,

And I, who believe that God is love, what answer was there to give my young interlocutor whose dark eyes still held the reflection of the angelic sadness that had appeared one day on the face of a hanged child? What did I say to him? Did I speak to him of that other Jew, this crucified brother who perhaps resembled him and whose cross conquered the world? Did I explain to him that what had been a stumbling block for his faith and become a cornerstone for mine?

The death of God is a contradiction that we all have to contend with, one that splinters into a thousand different takeaways. I’ve been clinging to what Fr. Philippe says: in all people who suffer there is Jesus who suffers. Wiesel was right, but not in the way he thought—God was there, in that unimaginable moment, with that child.

III.

One of the characters in C.S. Lewis’s final novel, Till We Have Faces, laments, “I wonder do the gods know what it feels like to be a man.”

No, there is not a question mark after “man,” because this is C.S. Lewis, who gets to do whatever he wants with punctuation.

The hope of Holy Week is that the answer to that unpunctuated question is, “Yes.”

IV.

Now, I’m just tearing this next quote full sale from the quotations that preface Daniel Nayeri’s Everything Sad is Untrue. The book would be an interesting choice for Holy Week for a thousand reasons, including the staggering Christian witness of Nayeri’s mother, Sima (the story is a true story—if you don’t have time for it at the moment, the lovely folks from

Reading Revisited

are going to read it together in July). One of the quotes Nayeri offers his readers before his tale begins is from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov:

I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage, like the despicable fabrication of the impotent and infinitely small Euclidean mind of man, that in the worlds finale, at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, for the atonement of all the crimes of humanity, of all the blood they’ve shed; that it will make it not only possible to forgive but to justify all that has happened.

I have no idea which Dostoyevsky character says this1, but this is what I believe, said in a more beautiful way than I could ever come up with. That at the end of everything, things won’t just make sense, they’ll harmonize. And the reason that’s going to be possible is because of the things that happened on the very first Holy Week, almost two thousand years ago now.

Coda.

Just as a final thing here… can we talk about how St. Paul references the Harrowing of Hell in Ephesians 4:7-10? I’m using the NIV here, just for fun. I love Holy Saturday. I didn’t grow up with the tradition that, after Jesus died, He descended (or “stormed”) into hell to ransom the faithful who lived in the generations before, from Abraham to the Macabee brothers to his own foster father Joseph and then took all of them with Him up to heaven. The Nicene Creed that says “He descended into hell,” the tradition of the Harrowing speaks to why He did that.

The [c] there? “depths of the earth,” so… maybe it's not referencing “Earth, first century countryside surrounding Jerusalem” but the unreachable part of it. That’s what I’m going with, anyway—and to ponder later, the link between the Ascension and Holy Saturday.

On the Calendar: Holy Week

✝️This is my body, which will be given for you ✝️

🐂 The Gospel for Sunday: Luke 22:14—23:56 — the longest Gospel reading of the year, and we even get lines!

For this Week of Weeks (and what I’m intending to do to help the family enter into the week in italics).

Palm Sunday (remain in the pew as much as possible for the longest Gospel reading of the whole year, whether helped or harmed by the fact that each of my children have been handed ~~a stick~~ a sacred palm branch).

Spy Wednesday (organize a “hunt for the 30 pieces of silver” (nickels) around the house a la Kendra Tierney, which can be turned into a bit of a lesson if things get rowdy)

Holy Thursday (wash each other’s feet in the kitchen [try to remember to have people shower on Wednesday])

Good Friday (attend the 3 pm Veneration of the Cross—one year, we did have a three-year-old announce to the whole hushed crowd while the priest processed down with the cross, “That’s the cross, and I’m gonna KISS IT!”)

Holy Saturday (maintain [relative] peace and quiet throughout the day—NO PLANS. I’m sticking to it).

I couldn’t help but notice that 83% of poll respondents last week are, like I am, “learning a lot” with their Lenten sacrifices (rather than, you know, sticking to them). Imperfections and all, Christ will make us whole on Easter. For my part, I’ll write again after the feast, on Easter Saturday.

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