The Editors' Recommendations for Holy Week
Photo by Grant Whitty on Unsplash
This week every year, Christians remember the Passion, Death, and Resurrection of Christ with a multitude of liturgies, prayers, and reflections. We turn our minds and hearts to those most crucial moments in our salvation history that culminate in the empty tomb. This Holy Week, the Fare Forward editors reflect on some of their favorite creative works that deepen their Lenten meditations, with the hope that these will also help you, our readers, prepare for the joyous celebration of Easter.
“The Road to Emmaus” by Spencer Reece
Sarah Clark, Editor-in-Chief
Photo by Levi Meir Clancy on Unsplash
The titular poem of Spencer Reece’s second poetry collection begins in the office of Sister Ann, a Franciscan nun who offers free counseling. Reece is there to talk about Durell, his long-time AA sponsor, now deceased: “I did not know how to end sentences about Durell. / He had taught me—what? To live? Not to wince in the mirror?” As the lines spool on, moving between Sister Ann’s office and a church basement in Cambridge, the present day and the distant past, Reece draws a portrait of a life that is certainly flawed and largely wasted—but also of a man who offered him companionship and a listening ear for years on end. “Listening, Sister Ann said, is a memorable form of love.” We are all of us flawed and broken—so deeply flawed and utterly broken that God had to die for us to be made whole. But He did. And when we look up from our own flaws, we will find He’s been quietly walking beside us, unrecognized and unnoticed, all this time.
The Road to Emmaus by Spencer Reece was published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux in 2014. You can purchase a copy of the collection here, and you can read the poem here.
“A Small Good Thing” by Raymond Carver
Whitney Rio-Ross, Poetry Editor
Photo by Blake Cheek on Unsplash
The first time I read Raymond Carver’s “A Small Good Thing,” I was shaken to the point of nearly vomiting. The author renders a married couple’s terror and devastation in his signature sparse prose, mirroring the stark numbness that often accompanies our experiences with death. Yet the writing and narrative are also imbued with life. I consider this story an essential piece of religious short fiction, though there is no overtly religious content. Carver weds a painfully realistic narrative and Christian symbolism in the way that I hope to move through Holy Week—simultaneously inhabiting the unglamorous griefs of today and Lent’s final liturgies. Most importantly, I see aspects of the entire Triduum reflected here: Maundy Thursday’s death-haunted feast, Good Friday’s pietà, and Holy Saturday’s unbearable absence. Even Easter Vigil is present as the sun rises in the last scene, making Saturday afternoon the perfect time to read this classic.
“A Small Good Thing” by Raymond Carver was published in the collection Cathedrals by Vintage in 1989. You can purchase a copy of the collection here, and you can read the story here.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight by Unknown
Sara Holston, Managing Editor
Photo by Alexander Mass on Unsplash
While its tale may begin and end at Christmas, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was described by my thesis advisor as a Good Friday poem. Sir Gawain’s journey toward an encounter he expects can only end in his death has a kind of Lenten gravity to it. Many have noted the confessional quality of the climactic scene at the Green Chapel, the parallels to the passion, and the emphasis on absolution. But though Gawain is something of a Christological figure in the narrative, what makes the poem a powerful Good Friday read to me is at the point where the comparison crumbles: Gawain fails. Like me and you, Gawain is so poignantly imperfect. And, like me and you, where he expected to find death—and in his shame may have earned it—Gawain instead finds a redemption that restores to him worthiness he could not have achieved otherwise.
There are many translations of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Sara recommends the translation by J. R. R. Tolkien published by Del Rey in 1979. You can purchase a copy here.
Miserere mei, Deus by Gregorio Allegri
Michael Carlowicz, Executive Editor
Photo by Maximilian Brand on Unsplash
The Miserere mei, Deus by Gregorio Allegri is one of the most famous pieces of sacred music ever composed. Written for performance in the Sistine Chapel during Holy Week, the Miserere is so beautiful and otherworldly that, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, people were ready to believe that the piece was a carefully guarded Vatican secret. (One popular myth had the teenaged Mozart “stealing” and transcribing the piece by ear after only one listen.) Though now readily available on streaming platforms, this motet still wields immense emotional power, pricking the soul of the listener with its penitential wailing and the moving text of Psalm 51: “Turn away your face from my sins . . . / A clean heart create for me, O God.” Music as extravagant as this polyphonic Renaissance chant is likely to challenge a believer’s expectations for the solemnity and austerity proper to Passion week. Indeed, such music is as wasteful as pouring a bottle of perfumed oil worth a year’s wages on someone’s feet.
You can listen to Miserere mei, Deus here on Spotify.
Miracle Service by Andy Squyres
Anna Heetderks, Editor
Photo by Sara Holston
Andy Squyres’s 2025 EP Miracle Service has been on a perpetual loop in my head this Lent. Squyres is a California-born, Carolina-based singer-songwriter who came to public musicianship later in life and whose writing reflects the accumulated joys and sorrows of years of marriage, parenthood, loss, and hope. Sonically, Miracle Service is poignant and wonderfully cohesive; lyrically, it’s intricate, wry, and charismatic in the true sense of the word: a stream of vignettes, memories, and pleas offered up to God. Squyres hasn’t come by his faith easily. When I saw him in concert in March, he described the title track (inspired by a church he encountered in rural California advertising a weekly “miracle service”) as a product of what philosophers and theologians have called the “second naivete,” a post-critical state of being where one finds oneself embracing once again the beliefs they deconstructed. “In the age of doubt, all that’s left for us to do is believe,” he sings on “Jeff Buckley,” the EP’s fourth track.
Squyres in Miracle Service longs for the redemption of the physical world (“I feel all creation groaning”), and embodied encounter with the living God—“Dash me on the rock of ages,” he sings on the title track. The third song, “Baja Blast,” exemplifies the collection’s Eucharistic hope:
My best friend died of cancer, and at his funeral
I dropped a piece of Jesus and I ate him like a fool
My tears and snot were mingled with my Savior’s blood
My unsanitary hand dipped into the public cup
I can’t imagine a more fitting Holy Week listen.
Miracle Service was released on June 6, 2025, on Spotify. You can listen to the album here.
Hamnet, directed by Chloe Zhao
Maura Ronayne, Editor
Photo by Veit Hammer on Unsplash
After years of sitting through soulless Disney remakes and Hollywood’s latest content churn, I’ve stubbornly set myself against new movies writ large. Of these aggressively marketed films, I find none so egregious as new period dramas, and none more so than subversive literary adaptations (looking at you, Wuthering Heights). When I first heard of Hamnet, a fictional account of Shakespeare’s family life adapted from a novel of the same name, I was skeptical. Yet this vivid historical drama utterly restored my faith in the possibility of great modern cinema. The film centers around the loss of Hamnet, the young son of William Shakespeare and his wife Agnes. From sweeping nature shots and a haunting score to incredible acting by Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal, it is a masterpiece through and through. With deliberately slow pacing, Hamnet beautifully captures the rawest moments of the human experience, from agonizing childbirth to joyful family life, from the anguish of sickness and death to stifling grief, culminating in healing, redemption, and love. Hamnet isn’t a biography; it’s a story about family, first and foremost, and a film about the piercing and devastating beauty of being human.
Hamnet was released on November 26, 2025. You can view the film in theaters or stream it here.
One Battle After Another, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson
Najma Zahira, Editor
Photo by Kateryna Hliznitsova on Unsplash
As we walk with the Lord in the days before his crucifixion, I’m reflecting on what it means to live a life consistent with your beliefs. The ultimate example is Christ on the cross, of course, but a more recent example in pop culture comes to mind: Benicio Del Toro’s character Sensei St. Carlos in Paul Thomas Anderson’s film One Battle After Another. The film follows Bob Ferguson, a former revolutionary with a violent past, as he searches for his missing daughter when his past comes back to haunt him. The revolutionaries are a sympathetic crew; they see the brokenness of the world and feel called to restore justice, a feeling many of us can relate to. Their violent actions, however, don’t fix the brokenness, but cause it to deepen. Sensei St. Carlos, however, takes a different approach. Through a life of steadfast service to his community—undocumented immigrants in need of shelter, and later our protagonist Bob—he begins to stitch the broken pieces together. Unlike the revolutionaries in their heyday, his life is not one of fanfare and acclaim, but of quiet, consistent service to what is good. Sensei St. Carlos cannot fully repair what is broken, none of us can, but his actions show that each of us have a duty to try, little by little, to bear our cross.
One Battle After Another was released on September 26, 2025. You can view the film in theaters or stream it here.
