Passion Sunday marks our entrance into the high feast of our faith, the great holy days and sacred time of our lives as Christians. As you contemplate the readings for today’s liturgies—and the liturgies throughout the week—you may want to ask the Holy Spirit for special grace to enter into the Easter mysteries and to help lead others to enter into them.

Our experience of life can be very full. Each day seems jam-packed with things we have to do, places we are expected to be, relationships we are responsible for. Even when something causes an interruption to this flow of activity—say, illness or accident, or something more benign like vacation or retirement—we quickly fill up our time with a whole new set of concerns.

In only two days the eight-day Festival of Passover and the Feast of Unleavened Bread would begin. The high priests and religion scholars were looking for a way they could seize Jesus by stealth and kill him. They agreed that it should not be done during Passover Week. “We don’t want the crowds up in arms,” they said.

A few weeks ago, I watched a documentary film about a woman named Sonia Warshawski. Sonia is 91 and she is a survivor of the Holocaust. After the war, she moved to the United States with her husband, John, who was also a death camp survivor.

Labeled the most corrupt cop in Chicago history, a former Chicago police officer was sentenced a few years back to life in prison.

Movie screens are getting bigger. Special effects create worlds beyond our imagination. Hit movies need to be reviewed and labeled as “spectacular” and have stars of international status. Bigger, louder, more spectacular always seems better.

How do you pass on a living faith to the next generation? Some years back, Robert Wuthnow, sociologist of religion, conducted research among people who considered themselves religious and asked what influences from childhood had helped their faith take root.

As our time of accompanying Christ to Easter is nearing its end, let us call upon God’s mercy.

Let us go together to meet Christ on the Mount of Olives. . . . Let us spread before his feet, not garments or . . . olive branches . . . but ourselves, clothed in his grace. We who have been baptized into Christ must ourselves be the garments that we spread before him.