There are lots of calendars I keep.  There's the one on my phone with its buzzing reminders that order and regulate my daily life: Corin to the gym, Seth to soccer, Birtie's friend here on Wednesday. There's the seasonal calendar I keep by watching the world outside: the meadowlarks are back, the vinca is greening by the door, the trees have not yet budded out.  The moon is its own calendar.  So too, the light in this season, creeping a little earlier into each morning, stretching a bit further into every evening.

And then there's the calendar of the liturgical year.  By the reckoning of this calendar it is Holy Week.

Holy Week.  The words alone, make me want to set aside everything - the appointment with Corin's teacher, the man coming to inspect our furnace, the grocery shopping that must be done if my children are to have lunch, the mountain of plastic eggs that need to be filled for the neighborhood egg hunt - and choose activities that center on the sacred.

In the liturgical year, Holy Week is the annual invitation to explore the most sacred, painful, hopeful, bruising, beautiful, texts in our cannon.  Over the course of these eight days (Palm Sunday to Easter Sunday), we recount the central story of our faith: Jesus' death and resurrection; darkness' inability to overcome light.

It's a eucatastrophic story - the eucatastrophic story - to use a word of Tolkien's coinage.  Eucatastrophe (eu from the Greek "good") is a story in which victory arrives unlooked for out of certain defeat.  The eucatastrophic is the point in the story when somehow, beyond all imagining, things come right.  It is a story where all has been given up for loss, where bitter defeat is certain, and yet, somehow a better, higher, more complete victory breaks forth like sunrise.  As Tolkien writes, the eucatastrophic is "the sudden happy turn in a story which pierces you with a joy that brings tears...a sudden glimpse of Truth."  In an essay, he further explains:
 ...it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.

Joy beyond the walls of the world.  Isn't this exactly where Easter takes us?  Not, of course, the Easter of eggs and candy and ham dinners, the Easter on my civic calendar.  The eucatastrophic is only in the Easter of Holy Week - the Easter that follows the week's recounting of betrayal, rejection, abandonment and death, the week where all the evidence is on the side of utter defeat.  If we don't journey through the dark drama of Maundy Thursday and Good Friday, then we're unprepared for the radical surprise and dawning joy of being met Sunday morning at that darkest door with the question: why do you look for the living among the dead?

That's the joyous turn, the privileged glimpse into a world where nothing is lost, nothing is abandoned, where love has the last word - where love is the last word.  And this glimpse, beyond the walls of the world we usually inhabit, is Holy Week's invitation.  It's an invitation to the sacred center, to meeting the rising sun.