By Walter Sánchez Silva
Mar 26, 2024 at 11:41
Father Juan María Solana, LC, director of the Magdala Center in the Holy Land, gives four tips for living an authentic Holy Week in 2024.
1. Holy Week is an opportunity to receive grace
Speaking to ACI Prensa, the Spanish-language agency of the ACI group, the priest of Mexican origin said: “the first piece of advice I can give is to think that we have an opportunity, an opportunity to take advantage of a grace, as Saint Augustine said, a grace that passes and won’t come back.”
The priest spoke of the importance of keeping in mind in these days that “Jesus will suffer in Jerusalem, die, give his life for us”.
2. Pray a lot during Holy Week
After commenting that when he was a child, his family used to go on vacation during Holy Week, Father Solana advised him to pray a lot during these days, going to Mass on Maundy Thursday where the priestly order and the Eucharist were instituted.
He also spoke of the importance of Good Friday, at 3 pm, the time of the Lord’s death, to pray, for example, three Hail Marys and three Our Fathers with some ejaculations, thanking Jesus, who at that moment “is giving his life for us on the cross.”
“Wherever we are, let us not lose sight of Jesus who is going to Jerusalem and will offer his life out of love for us. He is our salvation. He is our hope. He is our Passover,” he added.
3. Accompany Jesus “in the Holy Land”
“Holy Week is a small pilgrimage to the Holy Land, that is, it is accompanying Jesus more or less in a chronological and geographical order in what is his passion, the entry of Jesus into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, the first days of the week , in that sadness, in that anguish where he lives with his friends Lázaro, Marta and Maria, and then the passion is unleashed”, Father Solana told ACI Prensa.
After the Last Supper and “the prayer and agony in Gethsemane: Jesus suffers, is taken to the Sanhedrin. In the morning he is taken before Pontius Pilate. He undergoes two trials, one religious and one civil. And finally they condemn him and he dies on the cross.” Along this path it is possible to spiritually accompany the Lord.
4. Accompany the Virgin Mary in the great silence
On Holy Saturday, Father Solana continued, it is necessary to “accompany Our Lady a lot. Being close to the Virgin Mary because she is our hope.”
“She was faithful at the foot of the cross, suffering the unspeakable, so let us accompany the Virgin Mary in silence, in that great silence that some Fathers of the Church tell us about”, he urged.
“And on Sunday we will rise again with Jesus: Christ, our hope, has risen. Christ, our peace, Christ our light, the one who gives us life. A life that will never die again,” he concluded.
Walter Sánchez Silva is a journalist at ACI Prensa, the Spanish-language agency of the ACI group, with more than 15 years of experience covering Church events in Europe, America and Asia.
