Category Archives: Holy Week

Mar 30 2018
7 Comments
Easter, Easter Triduum, Good Friday, Holy Week, Passover

Light

I’ve been off from work this past week, and it was a wise move, taking off for Holy Week. The days were spent on projects and in preparation. I got to spend time with Seth and with the cat as I finished binding a book that someone had ordered and got to work in earnest once more on the book proposal for the Convivio Book of Days. I started fresh, fresh like spring, and I feel better about the proposal I’ve begun this week, much better than the one I began last fall. My friend Cricket gave me a bag of coffee as inspiration for my writing, and all that’s left is enough for one cup: the cup of coffee I will have when I send her the finished proposal.

We also got to help my mom and sister with Easter baking and we got to go on our annual Holy Thursday night pilgrimage of three churches. It was Seth and me on that pilgrimage and we were out late into the moonlit night. So beautiful. And this year I got to do something I had never done before: I went to church for Good Friday. And that was fine, church was. But the sermon made me uncomfortable and I felt a bit disconnected, until it was all over, when we all left the old church in silence, as we are to do on Good Friday. But as we left, I could hear the sounds of the Creole choir, also from our church. The Creole congregation were in the midst of the Stations of the Cross, outdoors on the sidewalk in front of the older church building, the one from the late 1800s. Their music drew me in and I gathered round the old church with them, leaning up against a live oak tree. They were at the final station. There was wailing and sorrow and there was singing I had never heard before but which sounded so familiar. They made their way then to the main church, the larger, newer one, the one built in 1913. They entered, singing, and I went on my way, content, happier for having run into this extension of myself.

Saturday night, I’ll be back, for the Easter Vigil. It is the hours-long Mass that brings in Eastertide. It can begin only after darkness has fallen, for it is then the third day, which used to confuse me a lot until I realized that different cultures have different ways of reckoning time. No one way is right, for time is such a fluid thing and yet an invention of our making. It will be the beginning of Easter and the second night of Passover, too. We will be there, sitting, standing, kneeling, singing, praying, in a service that will begin in darkness and end in light––a central theme to the Easter Vigil. A fire is kindled and the one light is the source that illuminates all the candles in the church: the candles on the altar, the candles we hold cupped in our hands. We are reminded that light overcomes darkness. We are invited to be that light.

 

Mar 26 2018
4 Comments
Holy Week

Lamentations

Palm Sunday has come and gone and with it, we’ve entered Holy Week. We will begin our preparations for our Easter celebration, buying provisions and baking, but at the same time we enter into the greater solemnity of the days toward that end. In our house, the soundtrack for this week is “Lamentations: Holy Week in Provence” by the Boston Camerata. It is beautiful music, and it feels appropriate for the mix of emotions this week brings. The week will bring us Good Friday, of course, but before it, Holy Thursday, or Maundy Thursday, one of the most beautiful nights each year, when Seth and I make our pilgrimage to three churches in the late hours of night, a custom taught us by my grandmother, Assunta, who also taught us to light candles in each church we visit, though on Holy Thursday, usually you cannot, for often the saints are covered in purple cloth and the only candles lit are the ones that were lit for the night watch. There is a palpable melancholy in the air that night, as we sit and visit and wait. But I like melancholy sometimes. At the night watch on Holy Thursday, all that’s asked of us is to be present, and there is something so lovely about that.

And so this is my wish for us all for this week: simply to be present in our preparations for the celebration of spring and renewal that is to come and open to the beauty. Be it in melancholy or in joy, or hopefully in some melding of the two. This week teaches us, perhaps better than any, that it is necessary to set the stage for joy if we are going to be authentic about singing its praises, and this is something I value immensely.

 

Image: A nighttime image taken one Holy Thursday pilgrimage on the courtyard at St. Edward’s, Palm Beach.

 

Apr 14 2017
19 Comments
Easter Triduum, Good Friday, Holy Thursday, Holy Week, Maundy Thursday

Bethesda by the Sea

I am writing this in a church, which probably is not very reverent of me. It is the overnight watch, as Holy Thursday dissolves into Good Friday. The Easter Triduum. Apologies for my irreverence, and also for years of leading you astray, as I’ve told you for years now that lent, that somber season that leads to Easter, ends with the Easter Vigil Mass on Holy Saturday. Well, that’s not true. It ends, I’ve learnt just tonight, with the Triduum of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday. And so I apologize for years of misinformation.

While I’m pretty good with the secular stuff, I am certainly not your best source for liturgical information. Although I love churches (especially old ones), I have not been a very good churchgoer for a while now. My last time in a church was for Dad’s funeral mass last February, before lent even began, and not since last Easter before that. But I love ceremony and I love tradition, and I love this night. It was my grandma Assunta who taught us the tradition of visiting three churches on Holy Thursday, though three may have been a tradition of her own––visiting seven is more traditional, an Italian tradition coming out of the seven basilicas of Rome and the seven stations of the cross. But we do what we know and three is what I have always known. And there are meditations that we are supposed to reflect upon while we are in those churches. But me, I am a visitor. I like to visit and sit in the company of those I love, and so this is what I do here, too. It may be just me and a few other souls in this dark church tonight, but in my heart all the ones I love are with me, too. My whole family. No one is missing. This is especially important to me this year.

The doors of this church will remain unlocked through the night. The church is open this night because, in the Christian tradition, Jesus asks us to keep watch with him this night in his agony. He knows already what the day ahead will bring. And so we watch, we keep vigil. Just as I did with my dad, not that long ago. The candles are lit, the statues are covered. I sit with my thoughts, and I type these words. Irreverent or not, I’ve brought you all here with me, too. It seems right to me, it seems good, in a holy place where our hearts are open, and where they open further, that we should all be together, sustained by angels, for all our joys and sorrows.

Image: Outside the Church of Bethesda by the Sea in Palm Beach, in the courtyard, is this statue, which greets me each Holy Thursday on my journey. “Now there is at Jerusalem by the sheep gate a pool which is called in the Hebrew tongue Bethesda.”

← Older posts
Newer posts →