As a child growing up in a small town in southern Ohio, the practice of observing Holy Week was much different than the one I engage in now. During those weeks of my childhood and teen years, the churches in town held services every night of the week leading up to Easter. The minister of a particular denomination always preached in a church not their own and the choir or singers from a congregation did not sing from their own choir loft. I suppose this presented the challenge of an accompanist playing a strange instrument and a preacher finding a different comfort level in an alien pulpit. There was not much attention paid to what I now think of as 'traditional' liturgy of Maundy Thursday or Good Friday. We simply showed up as guests in the pews of churches not our own to share stories we held in common.

I have to admit to being kind of a 'church geek' even as a kid. I loved going to those services at other churches. I loved seeing people I knew from the grocery store or school in their own worship setting. The fact of the matter is, I know now, there was not much difference in what happened in any of those Protestant churches all highly influenced by a common world view. But, as is also common, we all like to think our way of doing things has a particular flair, a more certain truth than the next person especially when it comes to how we worship. So there was a certain element of spying on how others were doing things in this week we knew to be central to our faith. 

Today as I sat in our small chapel for our Maundy Thursday worship service, I thought about those worship services of my youth. I looked around and saw many people I knew and others I didn't. Everyone there knew pretty much what they were in for: what hymns might be sung, the scripture that would be read. There was comfort in that. As I listened to the scripture of Jesus and the disciples sharing a meal, of him washing the feet of the disciples, I thought about how often I have heard that story. Something about it never gets old. Friends gathered around a table sharing bread and wine, being urged to remember who they were, who they had become, how their lives had been changed.  

Today Christians around the world will hear this same story, one that if you listen closely, if your heart is open, always carries something new. While my experience of how I observe this day may have changed, I am connected in deep ways to those people in my hometown who still travel from church to church. As they take up their place in a pew that is foreign to them, I find my place in one that I occupy with regularity. But what holds us together is the story, the bread, the cup, the spirit of remembering what it means to be people who continue to mine the gifts of this very complicated way called Christian. 

"God of the ages
to whom the hours
are nothing
and everything:
may I know each moment
as a sacred guest
to be welcomed,
to be savored,
to be sent
with a blessing."
~Jan L. Richardson