Photo provided by Br. Jimmy Henke, C.S.C.
Holy Week makes me think of death. And death makes me think of my vocation. Not because it feels like death! Although certainly there is a dying that comes along with any vocational journey in life. But more because an intimate experience of death came shortly after my first thoughts about religious life.
Going into my senior year of high school, I was just starting to ask myself what my faith actually meant to me. I was starting to ask myself if my faith was my own or just something I did with my family. A window into what a deeper commitment to my faith could mean for me began to open up.
But just as I started to allow myself to peer into the window of vocation and discernment, calling and faith, my dad became ill and died a short 6 weeks later. So much for taking time to look through that window of calling.
Well, at least that’s what I thought initially.
But grieving my dad, both for myself and for my family, invited me into prayer – real prayer. And by that I don’t mean to doubt that any of my other bedtime prayers or meal prayers or Masses were real – only that I finally opened myself completely and honestly before God. Jesus’ very human prayer in the garden of Gethsemane became mine. Not the same words that Jesus prayed, but that same rawness. That same vulnerability. That same desperate reaching out when faced with the finality of death.
I couldn’t have named it as such then, but in my grief I was learning how to be in a relationship with Jesus. And instead of derailing my discernment journey, I was invited into a warm embrace and a reassuring presence. Not an embrace that made the separation and loss feel less real, nor a reassurance that made all the pain go away, but a persistent presence much like Mary at the foot of the Cross telling me, “I am with you.”
What makes the Easter experience so rich for me is the discoveries that I have made about myself and about God through the Good Friday and Holy Saturday experiences. The wounds received bring greater clarity into what the resurrected life means. The wounds aren’t dismissed or disregarded but, in all their glory, serve as a witness to the reality of the Resurrection.
For me, death means vocation and call. Death is a reminder that God is real and invites us into raw relationship with him. Death is where the veil between this world and the next is as thin as it gets, and Easter is the reassurance that all of our suffering in this life will not be swept away and disregarded as nothing, but will be transfigured and glorified. God sees us and God endows our lives with meaning, including the painful bits.
I pray that your experience of the Passion and death of Jesus serves as a window into how God is inviting you into a more intimate relationship with Him. And I likewise pray that your experience of Easter may be a continual reaping of the fruits of your experiences of the Passion and death of Jesus in your own lives.
By Br. Jimmy Henke, C.S.C.
Published April 8, 2026 by the Office of Vocations
