Passion Week Monday: Gathering together
A warm welcome, a place for arrival, a blessing for the journey, and music to lure your heart into lament.
This is our gathering email to our Passion Week Consolations 2025. If you are new to our Cloister Notes - welcome! You can still receive our daily consolations in your inbox by choosing the paid subscription tier. You can also give this journey as a gift to a friend. If you are a paid subscriber but do not wish to receive our daily Passion Week Consolations you can manage your subscription here. 🙏
Dear fellow traveler,
We spent Palm Sunday marveling about Spring. Minnesota is made for this. The long, lingering grey of March makes your heart jump whenever it sees a sprout of green.
Drunken from warm temperatures and the first greening here and there, we simply spent our time in the moment, potting about in the back yard without much plan.
Still I walk the garden differently this year, look at our home differently this year.
My heart is burdened and in grief.
Will we stay, shall we stay? Can we even?
And so, with heavy hearts, we start this journey through passion week.
Pained by the state of the world, by personal events, by reminders of loss and grief in the midst of the Spring breaking through.
This is, I think, what Passion Week is about. Holding the tensions together between death and resurrection, our sorrows and the hope of new beginnings.
So welcome dear fellow traveler, on this passion journey, welcome dear heart, with all that you bring. This is your sacred space, where we walk along side each other, and make room for the sacred transformation to unfold.
From today on, we will journey through Holy Week in a group of almost 100 kindred souls who signed up for this experience longing, like me, to tend to our sorrows and to the sorrows of this world. Together we walk towards hope and new beginnings, lured into lamentation, and comforted, by Bach’s ethereal music and the communion of our fellow travelers.
We first started this journey 5 years ago in the depths of the pandemic when we cloistered at home with our little child, listening to Bach’s Passion Oratorio, day in and out to calm our spirits and to sooth our souls.
Yesterday we began this year’s journey with Johann Sebastian Bach’s Aria “Have mercy, Lord” and its haunting interpretation by Marian Anderson on the steps on the Capitol in 1939, steeped in the complexity and ambivalence of history.
Today I invite you to follow the movement of the Bach Passion by simply meditating on the first chorus "Come ye daughters, share my mourning..." We will use this to start our journaling practice to find words for the burden we bring, ending with a blessing for this journey.
Before we begin, let me say something about the space I envision for us while traveling together through this week.
How to journey together in communion and solitude
My hope is that we, together, create a sacred space where you can follow your own pace and the needs of your own heart. If you wish to follow alongside in solitude and quiet, you can do so. And if you wish to make yourself known to this community, to share your lament or inspiration with us, you can also do that.
For this purpose, I have constructed the consolations for paid subscribers so you can enjoy the privacy of our group behind these cloistered walls, and to share what is on your heart in a private and confidential space which is only accessible to our participants. It also allows me to show up more personally than I would be able to do in public posts, and to tend more personally to each of you.
Imagine this as being in a beautiful cloistered gathering space, a quiet place with big windows to the world, where we gather in quiet embrace, reading, writing, listening, and also from time to time exchange a word or experience, or just nod to each other with a smile.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Cloister Notes to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.