Overwhelmed By Love: A Reflection on Holy Week, 2014.

Feeling overwhelmed is a common human experience. We often say “it never rains but it pours,”  to express being overwhelmed by the negative events that occur in our lives. So often, it seems that just as one appliance breaks down, the furnace quits, or the water heater leaks. It seems uncanny how so many negative events can all occur at, seemingly, the same time.

However, we can also be overwhelmed by the positive events in our lives. Graduations, an engagement, birthdays, weddings, the birth of a child can also be a catalyst for an onslaught of really positive events that can overwhelm us.  

 Can one be overwhelmed both negatively and positively at the same time? The answer is yes. Is not the painful experience of child labor, accompanied by the joy of receiving the new born child an example of being overwhelmed by both negative and positive events?   I have experienced being overwhelmed both negatively and positively. The  day after I had to have my artificial hip surgically removed because of a MRSA infection was a very low time in my life. Along with all the pain, nausea, and discomfort following the surgery, I knew that at least for the next 12 weeks, I would not have a hip. I was feeling pretty overwhelmed by this severe downturn in my life, when a male nurse’s aide walks into my hospital room with two paper grocery bags filled with cards. He set them down on the table next to my hospital bed and asked, “Just who are you? No one ever gets these many get well cards!” There were 300 cards packed in those two grocery bags. In the midst of being overwhelmed by the negative turn of events in my life, I was feeling overwhelmed by the kindness, and the care by all those who sent me cards.

 Holy Week is the one week where we as Christian disciples can feel overwhelmed by the horror of Jesus’ torture and execution, followed by the overwhelming joy of his resurrection from the dead. While hindsight is 20/20, within the horrible passion and death of Jesus inflicted by the hands of evil humans, exists the incredible love of Christ poured out for us in that same passion and death.

 I think this beautiful irony is expressed in the writings of the 14^th century anchoress, Julian of Norwich. In  Revelations of Divine Love, she writes,  “And all shall be well. And all shall be well. And all manner of things shall be well.” She wrote this as pestilence and war was destroying people all around her. She was able to see beyond the torture, the bloodshed of her time, and the torture and the awful pain that Jesus experienced, to see the great gift of God's grace that flows upon us continually. Jesus became totally and wholly one with us in suffering and death so much so, that he accompanies us in our suffering and in our death. We would never again be alone to suffer. We would never again be overwhelmed, alone, by death. Julian called this the “oneing.”

 The poet Denise Levertov in her poem, On a theme from Julian’s Chapter XX, wrote,

 The oneing, she saw, the oneing
with the Godhead opened Him utterly
to the pain of all minds, all bodies
sands of the sea,
of the desert-
from first beginning
to last day. The great wonder is
that the human cells of His flesh and bone
didn’t explode
when utmost Imagination rose
in that flood of knowledge. Unique
in agony, infinite strength, Incarnate,
empowered Him to endure
inside of history,
through those hours when He took Himself
the sum total of anguish and drank
even the lees of that cup:


… Every sorrow and desolation
He saw, and sorrowed in kinship.


Jesus during his passion and death, allowed himself to be overwhelmed by all the horrors of human experience from the beginning of time to the end of time. All the hurt, all the sadness, all the desolation, all violence, and all the darkness, so that he could be one with you and me in our sorrows and our hurts. This is the oneing of which Julian speaks, the oneing of Emmanuel, God with us, who took all of human tragedy and transformed it in his body so that we could be overwhelmed by grace.
During this week in which Jesus oned himself with our humanity, we, in turn, are oned with his Divinity, made one with the One who created us.


 Pope Francis has expressed it this way, “We look at the sky. There are many, many stars. But when the sun rises in the morning, the light is such that we can’t see the stars. God’s mercy is like that … A great light of love and tenderness. God forgives us, not with a decree, but with his love, healing the wounds of sin.”


May we celebrate the oneing of this Holy Week, when humanity is married to divinity, in an all consuming embrace of love. May we be overwhelmed by God’s love throughout this week.