The Role of Feelings in Holy Week

We’ve entered the beginning of Holy Week. In a couple days we’ll be beginning the Triduum, the time when we walk with Jesus during His Passion, death, and ultimately His Resurrection.

I always find myself very focused on what I’m feeling during this time, as we celebrate the Triduum and participate in the liturgies for it. Am I feeling fervent? Do I feel sad? Do I feel the importance of this time? Does this feel like a good Triduum to me? And that’s how I determine whether it was a spiritually fulfilling time – depending on how I felt.

But it struck me all of a sudden that I’m approaching this all wrong. The reason for this focus on what I’m feeling is because I want to feel (again) like I’m doing it right, like I can be satisfied with where I am in my relationship with Christ. You’ve probably noticed already what the problem is: every single part of this circles around to none other than me. And as it turns out, I am not the point of Holy Week and the Triduum. Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ is, and my preoccupation with my own emotions is stopping me from actually paying attention to Him.

As usual, C.S. Lewis puts it better than I could:

“Some writers use the word charity to describe not only Christian love between human beings, but also God’s love for man and man’s love for God. About the second of these two, people are often worried. They are told they ought to love God. They cannot find any such feeling in themselves. What are they to do? The answer is the same as before. Act as if you did. Do not sit trying to manufacture feelings. Ask yourself, ‘If I were sure that I loved God, what would I do?’ When you have found the answer, go and do it.

“On the whole, God’s love for us is a much safer subject to think about than our love for Him. Nobody can always have devout feelings: and even if we could, feelings are not what God principally cares about. Christian Love, either towards God or towards man, is an affair of the will. If we are trying to do His will we are obeying the commandment, ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God.’ He will give us feelings of love if He pleases. We cannot create them for ourselves, and we must not demand them as a right. But the great thing to remember is that, though our feelings come and go, His love for us does not. It is not wearied by our sins, or our indifference; and therefore, it is quite relentless in its determination that we shall be cured of those sins, at whatever cost to us, at whatever cost to Him.”

– Mere Christianity, chapter 9, “Charity”

So this hyper-focus on my feelings is, I think, exactly backwards. To describe situations where you focus on something superficial instead of the real issue, my mom has sometimes used the analogy of a car engine light going off, and your attempting to fix it by covering over the warning symbol with tape so you can’t see it. I think that’s a very apt analogy here. Emotions are like the car engine light; they might tell us something about our inner life, the choices we make, the thoughts we choose to dwell on, &c., but they are not themselves the important part – they aren’t the car engine itself. As Marianne very wisely says near the end of my favorite 2008 version of Sense and Sensibility, “It is not what we say or feel that makes us what we are, it is what we do…or fail to do.”

So, this Triduum and Easter season, I’m going to try very hard to change the way that I think and go through this time. I’ll try not to ‘sit trying to manufacture feelings’ of fervor and love, but instead to act with love. Rather than constantly assessing myself and my emotional state, I will try instead to simply be with Christ and spend this time with Him, not inside my own head.

Please pray for me during this time for help in my walk with Christ; I’m praying for you in yours!