Anne Wetzel's camera captures Holy Week at Saint James Cathedral in Chicago with all the emotional and visual contrasts that accompany these ancient liturgies--the short-lived, processional daylight of Palm Sunday; the bittersweet hospitality of Maundy Thursday; the arid desert of Good Friday; the candlelight of Easter Vigil that finally sunders the darkness of the tomb; the celebratory incandescence of Easter Day.
Janet Campbell's meditations on the joys and rigors of the Easter journey show us a way through Holy Week that is sometimes in consonance with, sometimes in counterpoint to, Wetzel's photographs, a way that is as lonely as it is crowded, as individual as it is invariable.
The final section of the book, Campbell's "Pastoral Notes on the Liturgies", constitute not only a "how to" but a "why to" undertake these logistically and spiritually taxing liturgies; her no-nonsense approach manages to lift one veil of mystery--the one that separates sacristy "insiders" from the worshipers in the pew--and envelops us instead in Paschal Mystery.