Author Archives: John Cutrone

Easter from King’s (and from St. Bernard’s)

On this second consecutive Easter spent keeping our distance from others, Seth and I, we traveled via Britbox on Holy Saturday Night for an Easter Vigil of our own through a BBC program called Easter from King’s, the King’s being King’s Chapel, Cambridge. Kind of like the Nine Lessons and Carols each Christmas from King’s Chapel, only this is Easter, and this program takes us through Holy Week, ending in the triumph of Easter Sunday.

I got to hear the Pange Lingua, but in English, which is not the same as hearing it or singing it in Latin (especially when it comes to the “genitore, genitoque” part). And still the song I expected to hear never came. Can you guess the one? It is “Jesus Christ is Risen Today,” the grand centuries-old hymn we hear at almost every traditional Easter service, usually at the end, to close the Mass. It had its heyday in the 1700s, when it was translated into English, but remains to this day perhaps the most recognized hymn of Easter… and perhaps that was its downfall tonight––maybe it was just too pedestrian for Easter from King’s.

Be that as it may, our Lenten journey is over and Eastertide is here. And while I never got “Jesus Christ is Risen Today” from the choristers at King’s Chapel, I do come bearing an Easter gift of my own that does deliver the hymn, in its own way: It’s a Convivio Dispatch from Lake Worth from a few years back, one of our most popular Dispatches ever. The scene is Easter Vigil Mass on Holy Saturday Night––one of the most beautiful ceremonies you’ll witness, to be sure, but a marathon event and a true test of stamina, not for the weak of spirit or of strength. Father Seamus was there, as was Sister Kathleen, the Reluctant Organist. And I was there, too. And when you’re done reading the Dispatch, watch the clip of the choristers at King’s Chapel below it. Their singing is a thing of beauty, and it is easy to imagine oneself somewhat closer to God through their collective voice. Happy Easter.

 

CONVIVIO DISPATCH:
Holy Saturday Night

It’s Holy Saturday, the night that officially closes the somber and reflective week known as Holy Week. We Catholics cap it off with the hours-long Easter Vigil Mass, a test of will for anyone, to be sure. But it is this Mass that is the high point of the liturgical year, a grand spectacle to usher in the miracle of Easter.

Tonight’s long Easter Vigil Mass at St. Bernard’s lacked a little something, though, and the general sense was that this year’s transition from Darkness to Light, from Somber to Joy, from Death to Life, was not quite as dramatic as it was in years past. And we can all pretty much place this sense of inadequacy on the statue of the Risen Lord at the back of the church. The concept each year is the same: We begin after sunset in a dark chuch, and once the good news is proclaimed, the lights and the organ grow gradually brighter and louder, while the bells ring triumphantly, as all the marble statues are released from the purple shrouds that have covered them since Holy Thursday.

But the statue of the Risen Lord, which hangs some four feet above the doorway opposite the altar, is perhaps better known amongst the congregation as the Statue That Fell Upon the Head of the Usher, which happened as the unfortunate man was using a pole to release it from its purple shroud on another Easter Vigil night, three or four years ago. It’s happened just that one time, but still, the ushers grow increasingly timid with each passing year, and what used to be done with great zeal and flourish is now done rather gingerly and with palpable fear. The lights are all on and Sister Kathleen, the reluctant organist, has gone well past crescendo and so has no choice but to settle into quiet notes––notes that feel a bit like they’ve worn their welcome––and Father Seamus watches and prays from the altar, and the congregation turns and winces and looks away because they don’t want to watch what’s happening with the pole and the purple cloth but they turn again to watch anyway, lest they miss what might happen if it happens, and there is more wincing, and then finally one usher goes in for a folding chair, one of the chairs behind the back pew for the potential overflow Easter crowd. He gets the chair to stand on it, so as to have more control over the situation, or perhaps to lessen the blow should the statue fall again by reducing the distance and velocity it would travel downward toward his head––but then he hesitates, too, and Sister Kathleen by now just flat out stops playing as the air grows heavier and heavier. Finally the other ushers just gather together and go for it in a great show of Christian strength and solidarity. They push the pole up under the purple cloak and lift it from the head of Christ and the statue rocks back and forth on its hook and there is, from somewhere in the pews, an audible gasp.

But the statue of the Risen Lord settles down again, and all is well for another year, no ushers are in need of stitches, none have been clobbered into unconsciousness.

Jesus Christ is risen today!
Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah!
And the ushers are all okay!
Hallelujah!

Video Clip: bbc.co.uk – © copyright 2021 BBC

Easter Triduum, or Your April Book of Days

April has begun. It begins, of course, with All Fools’ Day, April Fools. There is an old Welsh saying: If every fool wore a crown, we should all be kings. The tricks and practical jokes traditionally end at noon, but not everyone understands this and so I think it’s a good day to remain generally wary and on guard. The origins of this day are tough to pin down. There is a Norse god named Loki whose feast day is today, and Loki happens to be a trickster god. So that could be it. But there also is the fact that March 25 was once New Year’s Day, making the First of April the Octave of New Year and the end of the new year revels, and it is thought that perhaps the foolishness of the date goes back to very old new year customs.

Being the First of the month, it’s also time for the April edition of the ongoing Convivio Book of Days calendar. We offer it to you as a printable PDF. The calendar makes a fine companion to this blog. Enjoy it with our compliments.

This year, what begins as All Fools’ Day ends as Holy Thursday, or Maundy Thursday, the night when we are invited to visit churches that will remain unlocked all night long, welcoming portals inviting us to be present with Jesus in his hours of tribulation as Good Friday approaches. Like last year, though, we will remain home, but typically it is a night when we visit three churches, as my grandmother Assunta taught us, though some people visit seven. I love this night, typically. It is such a bridge for me across time and space with the ones I love and the ones I miss, as I sit in the close and holy darkness of these quiet churches, meditating, praying, simply being. The moon is always present as I journey from church to church, a constant companion. This year, perhaps, a simple fire in the back yard may be the most appropriate way to mark the night. The moon will still be present, and where two or three are gathered… well, you know the story. But here ends the Lenten season, and here begins the Easter or Paschal Triduum: Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday: the Last Supper, the Passion, and the Resurrection through the Easter Vigil on Saturday night.

There is much more to read about these closing days of this week known as Holy Week, and you may do so in the previous chapter of this blog. (Just click “Previous Post” when you get to the bottom of this one, or click here.) Cover star for this month’s Convivio Book of Days calendar is a painting called “Easter Morning,” by Caspar David Friedrich, from 1833. The trees have yet to leaf out in this painting, but by the end of this month certainly the rivers will be a’running and the vernal push will be rising through sap from root to bud as trees erupt in new green leaves. And sometimes we need a reminder like this: of how so much wonder can happen over the course of a month.

Image: “Easter Morning” by Caspar David Friedrich, oil on canvas, 1833, [Public domain], via WikiPaintings.

Mysterium: Holy Week

Saturday was a full day: I spent it pressure washing Mom’s patio––a full afternoon wet and soggy, hunched over a power nozzle, blasting mildew off of bricks. Every hour or so, I’d put down the nozzle, pour the murky water out of my shoes, and pick up the nozzle and start again. Toward nightfall, we ate, and after supper I could not keep my eyes open, so I went to a chaise lounge on the patio’s edge to rest my weary bones. I was sound asleep before I knew it. Just a short nap, a bit of refreshment while the coffee was brewing. I awoke just a few minutes later and before me in the night sky, beyond the pines and the clouds beyond them, was the waxing moon, bright and clear. And though over dinner we talked about baking for Easter, it didn’t really sink in until I saw that big moon. The moon’s presence before me was my portal, my concrete reminder of where we are in the round of the year: with its presence, we enter into Holy Week.

Indeed, Passover began with the setting sun on Saturday, just as I was dragging myself in from my day’s work. Passover and Holy Week are, I think, constant companions, for the Passover seder was the setting for Holy Thursday (or Maundy Thursday), which leads us to Good Friday and Easter Sunday. What I know about Passover is not much and mostly is in relation to my Catholic upbringing and to Passover’s connexion to the Easter story. I know that Passover commemorates the liberation of the Israelites from their slavery in Egypt, and I know what a friend told me once, which has always resonated with me about the holiday: “We are traveling through the desert with our ancestors via a table filled with metaphor and symbolism.” The meal is the seder, the same meal that Jesus celebrated with his disciples in the upper room on that Holy Thursday night before he died. Pesach is the Hebrew name for Passover, and, as words go, Pesach informs the name for Easter in many languages: in Italian, for instance, Easter is called Pasqua. In French, it is Pâques, in Portuguese, Páscoa, and in Spanish, Pascua. (The English word “Easter” does not share this etymological relation to Pesach. Our word for the holiday comes down from the Old English Eostre, related to the German Ostern and an Anglo-Saxon goddess whose feast day was celebrated around the Spring Equinox. But my apologies––I often find myself winding down weird linguistic roads.)

The Sunday that sets Holy Week in motion is Palm Sunday, or Passion Sunday. Father Brice at St. Paul’s used to say that “more people come to church when we give stuff away,” and it is one of those days when you do leave with a gift: the gift of palms, which some folks then take home and fashion into crosses. And while that part is nice, I’ve always felt a bit conflicted about Palm Sunday. I never understand what emotion I should be feeling, and it feels sometimes like the Cliff Notes version of Holy Week, condensed for busy people. And so I’ve never been terribly fond of the day.

It is Holy Thursday I love. It is one of the most beautiful nights of the year: a quiet and unassuming holiday/holyday, remarkable in its consistency, for the moon is always big and beautiful this night, hauntingly present, a constant companion as we make our pilgrimage in an old tradition that would have us visit three churches over the course of the evening. My grandmother, Assunta, taught me that custom, but, for some reason, not until the Holy Week after Grandpa had died. I think suddenly these old traditions meant more to her. I discovered then that the world is different at night. Churches glowing from within, moonlight reflecting on columns and limestone figures. Astonishingly quiet, serene stillness.

The actual Holy Thursday mass in most churches comes around sunset. It is the Mass of the Lord’s Supper, commemorating that Passover seder, the last supper so often depicted by artists. Jesus began by washing the feet of his disciples, a humble act accompanied by the suggestion that we, too, should not be above doing even the lowest things for others. At supper, he broke bread and passed the cup of wine: the central act of every Mass.

This year, like last, I won’t be going to any church gatherings for Holy Week and Easter. But typically, the Holy Thursday Mass I attend is a trilingual one, in English, Spanish, and Creole. It’s long and it’s crowded but I love it. It is the one Mass each year in our congregation where folks from so many diverse communities finally come together. For years I would seek out and sit next to an old Creole woman who reminded me of my grandmother, but I haven’t seen her for many years now, and I suspect she’s long gone now. And so I sit there with people I do not necessarily know and I think of my grandmother and the old Creole woman who had no idea she was so important to me.

The First Reading is in one language, the Second Reading in another, and the Gospel in the last of them. If you don’t know the language being spoken, you read along on your own. And as crowded as it is, still there are two choirs: one singing in English, the other in Creole, coming together, too, for this one night each year. The Creole songs are long and mysterious. One of them is sung to the tune of “My Old Kentucky Home.” They sing in Creole while I remember what I can from Stephen Foster’s song and each year they sing that song, I think of the small scrap of paper found in Stephen Foster’s pocket after he died. On it, he had scribbled five touching words: Dear friends and gentle hearts. That’s exactly how I feel each year on this night.

The Mass ends with the transfer of the Blessed Sacrament to the chapel while the congregation sings the Pange Lingua, acapella. Its more proper name is Pange Lingua Gloriosi Corporis Mysterium, an old hymn written in Latin by St. Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century. “Mysterium” is very appropriate, for this is a night wrapped in mystery and beauty, both of which truly begin once the Pange Lingua is done. There is no real end to the Mass. A small bit of chaos ensues as church workers begin to prepare for the Good Friday services the next day. People get up and leave, others mill about, and it’s noisy hustle and hubbub for a good 20 minutes until, eventually, the noise fades away as the church empties to just a few hardy souls who are there to sit. Some are in prayer, some are in reflection. Most, perhaps, are like me: doing some of all those things but also just being part of something bigger than ourselves, as it should be, in the company of others.

The tradition varies, apparently. The one that Grandma passed down to us is to visit three churches on this night. But I’ve heard of some people visiting seven churches. Both are magical numbers: 3 for the Trinity, of course, and for the three aspects of the Goddess (virgin, mother, crone), amongst other things, and 7 for more things than you might imagine: the seven sacraments, the seven days of creation, the seven sorrows of Mary, seven loaves and fishes… Still, three churches is plenty. Grandma may have been pious but she was not a martyr.

Our pilgrimage each year typically takes Seth and me from the trilingual Mass at St. Anne’s, the small old church surrounded by the tall buildings of Downtown West Palm Beach, across the lagoon to the much grander St. Edward’s in Palm Beach, which rivals the Vatican, then down the road to Bethesda by the Sea, where each year we wander the grounds, looking at the gargoyles and the crypts and the fountain, and we look for the boar in the stained glass window that shines onto the courtyard. We make these rounds each year on this night, sitting, kneeling, and me, I remember all those who have gone before us doing this very same thing. This is the value of ceremony and tradition to me: this connexion across time and space. And no matter where I go this night, the moon is there tagging along, trusted companion, never tiring, illuminating the night and the trees as much as the churches themselves illuminate their stained glass windows shining out from within. No one after lighting a lamp puts it under the bushel basket, but on the lamp stand, and it gives light to all in the house.

Image: “Christ on the Mount of Olives” by Paul Gauguin. Oil on canvas, 1889 [Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons].

 

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