This weekend is known as Palm Sunday weekend.

So what?

It’s a fair question. In our culture, the significance of sacred days and times has long been forgotten. We live our lives on the surface of frenetic activity, seldom adding depth to any given moment. We surf and skim over a body of information, but rarely dive into the depths of knowledge, much less wisdom.

There are no “thin times”, as the ancient Celts would have noted; times when the separation between the eternal and the temporal was thin enough to walk the soul between both worlds.

But without that sensibility, we are lesser people.

So here’s the “so what.”

Palm Sunday is the traditional beginning of what has been known throughout Christian history as Holy Week, a week designed to focus our attention on the “passion,” or suffering, of Christ.

The story of Christ (a title meaning “messiah”) is the story of God Himself coming to earth in the form of a human being, a man named Jesus, living the perfect, sinless life and then willingly going to the cross in order to die for the sins of the world.

The tradition of Holy Week began when Christians making pilgrimages to Jerusalem had a natural desire to re-enact the last scenes of the life of Christ in dramas.

There is an ancient text called The Pilgrimage of Egeria which describes a fourth century visit to Jerusalem. It was noted that people were already observing Holy Week by this point in history, so it dates back many, many centuries.

There are five days in this week that are set apart:

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