For you: to Holy Week we bring all the world's sorrow and suffering as well as our own, and we know that it is only in the Resurrection that hope for healing abides.

THEY CALLED it Sunday school. But in reality it was no more than day-care for rowdy 5-year-olds. As a teenager, I allowed myself to be talked into managing a summer program on Sunday mornings for the kindergarten crowd, but from the beginning I could tell it was going to be a disaster.

I didn't know the first thing about children, was in fact terrified of them, and had no experience at the head of a classroom. My only credentials seemed to be that I had brothers and sisters. "Don't worry," the program administrator told me soothingly. "All they're going to do is color pictures of Jesus."

And every Sunday morning, week after week, that activity more or less comprised the religion lesson for the day. What else could be done with them, when there was no budget for supplies and no further instruction for the hapless teacher?

Each Sunday the great room of an old Victorian house attached to the parish filled with a mixed group of girls and boys, and most of the time I had only one other teen assistant to help keep the habitual bullies from punching the lights out of the chronic victims. That, and passing out crayons, were the bulk of our responsibilities.

When the coloring sheets were thoroughly scribbled on and each child's work admired, we had a brief snack of parish-sponsored milk and cookies, and then the children were released into the yard to run off the sugar. The very first week I noticed the girl who didn't spring from her seat with joyful relief and dash to the door with the test of them.

She stayed bowed over her desk, her face hidden by long, stringy hair that had not been combed or washed recently. But she wasn't coloring. The crayons were untouched in the pencil tray of her desk, and the picture of Jesus surrounded by happy children lay undisturbed in front of her. "Jane," I said carefully, grateful to have remembered her name from the roster. "Don't you want to go outside?" She didn't answer of look up. "Don't you want to color?" There was no movement or sound. I could have been talking to a stuffed doll.

I went to the doorway and motioned to the assistant that she should monitor the play in the sunny yard, which suited her fine. I closed the door and sat down in a rocking chair near Jane's desk. Through the veil of her hair I could see streaks of tears silently tracing her cheeks. "Jane?" I repeated helplessly. She didn't reply.

HERE WAS A PREVIEW OF THE SUMMER: THE BOYS FOUGHT, the girls colored, they are their snacks and ran into the yard the moment we opened the door. Jane did not participate in anything, didn't interact with the other children or the group leaders. Mostly she sat hidden behind her disheveled hair, her clothes looking like she might have slept in them. Often she cried without making a sound. I sat inside with her during recess, stared all around the room at scribbled pictures of Jesus, and prayed for divine guidance.

The day arrived when I finally went over to her desk and lifted the poor creature into my arms. She weighed next to nothing, and her body language was limp and doll-like, neither resistant nor compliant. I brought her to the rocking chair and sat down, holding her against me, and rocked as carefully as if I had a lapful of dynamite. She dampened my shirt with her tears but said nothing. Eventually, the sentry of her inner world relaxed its guard, and then Jane clung to me.

The parent who came to retrieve Jane each week was uncommunicative, like his daughter. And I was 14 and ignorant. I didn't know the first thing about intervention, agencies of referral, or what might be done. I could tell this child was needy, hungry, and neglected, but so were a lot of the kids in the program, yet they didn't seem as broken as Jane. I didn't know what to do, so I did only what I knew how to do: I held onto her.

For the rest of the summer, for a half hour on Sundays, I held a scrawny little girl and rocked her while she cried her heart out. I didn't learn her secrets. And I couldn't even seem to touch the bottom of her despair.

When the summer ended, I was glad to put Sunday school behind me. It had been an exercise in futility all around, as far as I could see. I confess I put Jane out of my mind as quickly as possible. The memory of her need and my inadequacy was too difficult to entertain. It wasn't until several years later, when I was nearly finished with high school, that I happened to be walking down a street on the wrong side of town, and I heard a small voice speak at my elbow: "Miss Rose."

I blinked. It had been awhile since anyone had called me that, and for good reason: It wasn't my name. The summer I had run the Sunday school program, I was replacing a teacher by the name of Miss Rose who had evidently been there forever. The children persisted in calling me by her name, as did their parents, out of habit.

I looked down, and there was Jane, barely taller, just as skinny, hardly looking like she'd aged a day since I'd seen her last. With one difference: She was radiating a joy that made her seem, on that dirty back street, angelic.

I didn't know which was more amazing, to see Jane again, to hear her speak, or to see her smiling. She reached down to the ground and picked up a small white stone and held it out to me. "For you," she said simply. "For you."

Over the decades, six states, and 27 addresses since that day, I have surrendered truckloads of valuables that had to be left behind. But I have never let that stone out of my possession.

IN ANCIENT ROME, IT WAS THE PRACTICE TO USE A WHITE STONE to mark feast days on the public calendar. The stone raised to prominence a date to keep in memory as both sacred and significant. Having arrived once more at our own Holy Week and Triduum, we appreciate how time can be transformed by what we choose to hold in memory.

In the public proclamation of the Passion stories each year, we remember the innocent suffering of Jesus but also the dramatic turning point of salvation for all of human history. In the Passion narratives we hear more than a terrible miscarriage of mortal justice, the execution of a blameless man, the weakness of his friends, the fickleness of his supporters, the cruel expedience of politics, and the silence of God in the face of it all. Pervading these dark days of tragedy is the dawn of truth and a glory so radiant as to bring midday to midnight and transform death into a phantom without substance.

And in case we make the mistake of thinking that all of this is merely a page from history that has no bearing on the present, Jesus speaks from the supper table, from the cross, and from the open tomb with the same simple words we hold in sacred memory: "For you," he says. "For you."

We mark the coming season of Easter in white as those ancient Romans did their feast days, as a reminder of its great holiness. We remember, too, the whiteness in which we were draped in Baptism and the eternal whiteness of those who wash themselves in the blood of the Lamb of Revelation. "O wash me and I shall be clean. Cleanse me and I shall be whiter than snow," as the psalmist declares. History itself is now marked with a white stone every day since that first Easter Sunday until the end of time because time, once marred by our failures and losses, is redeemed by compassion without limits.

During Holy Week, we recall that the word passion means suffering. Compassion, then, means to suffer together, and so we understand that the Passion of Jesus is not just about him but has something vital to do with us. We do not mark these days as an impersonal memorial of what Jesus once went through, an episode of long-ago agony.

To Passion week we bring along our own anguish, our personal humiliations and fears, our betrayals, losses, and loneliness. We drag our crosses through this week, knowing that Jesus goes on ahead of us. He chose to suffer because we cannot avoid suffering. And in the glorious sequel to his Passion lies the answer to ours.

THE PASSION OF THE WORLD AT LARGE, T00, FINDS A COMPANION in the narrative of the Passion story. Is there injustice? Jesus was no stranger to the unrighteous wielding of power. Is there war and political oppression? Israel was overrun by an unfriendly empire and knew the routine humiliations of domination.

Does the worldly use of religious belief play a hand in the violence around us? Jesus watched as his own religious leaders crafted a case against him and put him to death on a piety of lies. Do the innocent suffer in silence while good people turn away politely? The Crucifixion stands in history as an everlasting testimony to this experience.

Meanwhile in our private misery and the universal tragedies of human history, we feel mostly helpless to respond. Our resources are limited. Our good intentions are sown with ignorance. We wring our hands at the enormity of the world's evil. There will be poor always, Jesus himself once admitted, and try as we might, we will never touch the bottom of the world's despair. Because of this impotence, we may step aside altogether and let sin claim its victims. But Jesus chose to step into the middle of the horror and absorb the consequences.

His compassion was more than an expression of divine sympathy, even more than a heroic sharing in our suffering. By rolling away a stone, Jesus pushed sin, suffering, and death out of humanity's path altogether. Of all days marked with a stone on the calendar of history, the one marked by the displaced stone at the tomb is by far the most sacred.

Through our commemoration of Holy Week, we confront the tomb at the end of every mortal life and rejoice to see that the tomb has a door, and the door is open. The way of compassion has made this door available to us. If we choose the Christian way, we are choosing compassion--that is, the companionship of those who suffer--but not in impotence, because the power of Christ is so much more than the scribbled images of Jesus we've retained since childhood. We may not be smart enough, strong enough, or brave enough to destroy the effects of sin, but united with Christ, even death becomes a passport on the road to new life.

The stone rolled from the tomb marks the great feast of God's compassion on the calendar of eternity. "For you," Jesus says, and nothing could be more personal, as he remits the sin of the world with his flesh and blood.

We are fearful to get this personal with suffering and to open ourselves to its dangerous demands on us. But the only way to know compassion is to participate in the passion of the world, and we are never so secure as when we do. For throughout all of time, God rocks a world full of heartbreak with utmost gentleness, and in the abundance of eternity, wipes away every tear.

The Passion of Jesus: Luke 22:14-23:56

ALICE CAMILLE, author of Seven Last Words, a meditation on the sayings of Jesus from the cross (ACTA Publications), and a collaborator on the homily service Prepare the Word (TrueQuest Communications).