Pages 4.qxp_The Road Chosen 10/02/2022 16:16 Page 9
The Road Chosen
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INTRODUCTION As I prepared this collection of material for Holy Week, I wanted more than anything else to connect imaginatively with the humanity of Jesus. He is the ‘kinsman’, our kin as well as our God, and he moved among fallible, flawed, perplexed people, much like ourselves. People saw him and wondered, and even his closest companions did not understand what he meant or why he did certain things. I’ve used a variety of perspectives to try to get close to the events traditionally known as ‘Holy Week’. Some of the events are far from holy: treacherous, hostile and increasingly isolating for the Man at their heart. He comes to us in his isolation, in confrontation and rejection, in the sorrow and anguish he experienced, in order that we might never be alone. There is a poem by Philip Larkin, ‘An Arundel Tomb’, which I like very much. In it he describes the stone effigies of an armoured knight and his lady and the sudden ‘tender shock’ of seeing the knight’s hand, ungauntleted, holding his wife’s hand. In this material for Holy Week I would love to create moments of ‘tender shock’ as we see the hand of God reaching out to us in our frailty and need through the humanity and vulnerability of Jesus, Son of Man. Janet Killeen
