Years ago, late in the studio, I was retouching the Crucifixion image we had shot in the high desert of Arizona. I had been with the file for hours. At full magnification I started to find things I had missed in the viewfinder. Goosebumps. A teardrop. And in the background, behind one of the Roman soldiers, a horse with its head bowed.
I have thought about that horse a lot. The crew did not stage it. The horse did it on its own, and we did not see it until later. That is how Holy Week tends to work. What looks like one thing in real time looks like another after the arc finishes. Friday was a death. Saturday was silence. On Sunday, Christ resurrected... and about 350 years later... with time and perspective we actually started to call those days 'holy week'.
I look back at the hardest chapters of my own faith the same way. 2016 was a nightmare in lots of ways. The year I almost lost my faith. Now it is holy to me, because it is where I found it again. There was nothing Holy about any of it while I was in it. The name came later.
That is the promise the empty tomb makes to the rest of our calendar. Not that the bad days were not bad. The light from a Sunday morning two thousand years ago is long enough to reach backwards. Imagine if we looked at our whole lives by that light.
"Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new."
Years ago, late in the studio, I was retouching the Crucifixion image we had shot in the high desert of Arizona. I had been with the file for hours. At full magnification I started to find things I had missed in the viewfinder. Goosebumps. A teardrop. And in the background, behind one of the Roman soldiers, a horse with its head bowed.
I have thought about that horse a lot. The crew did not stage it. The horse did it on its own, and we did not see it until later. That is how Holy Week tends to work. What looks like one thing in real time looks like another after the arc finishes. Friday was a death. Saturday was silence. On Sunday, Christ resurrected... and about 350 years later... with time and perspective we actually started to call those days 'holy week'.
I look back at the hardest chapters of my own faith the same way. 2016 was a nightmare in lots of ways. The year I almost lost my faith. Now it is holy to me, because it is where I found it again. There was nothing Holy about any of it while I was in it. The name came later.
That is the promise the empty tomb makes to the rest of our calendar. Not that the bad days were not bad. The light from a Sunday morning two thousand years ago is long enough to reach backwards. Imagine if we looked at our whole lives by that light.
"Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new."
