THOUGHTS ON THE TRIDUUM, APRIL 17-20, 2014
HOLY THURSDAY:
Let all mortal flesh keep silence
And stand with fear and trembling,
Pondering nothing earthly minded,
For the King of kings and given for food to the faithful.
He is preceded by angels’ choirs,
By every Principality and Power,
By the many-eyed Cherubim and the six-winged Seraphim,
Who cover their faces, chanting:
“Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia.”
This is not a criminal going to his punishment
with the instrument of his own death laid cruelly on his shoulders,
but the King of kings and the Lord of lords, making a solemn, royal procession with his cross.
--Alexander Bogolepov; Hymn from the Liturgy of St. James, 5th century
REFLECTION ON THE WASHING OF THE FEET
We’re willing to do a lot of things for Jesus Christ, but when it comes to having our feet washed, we’re skittish as colts. We hate having our feet washed. Maybe we’re shy or we feel clumsy, maybe we think our feet are smelly, and maybe our feet are just,honestly, so laugh-out-loud silly we don’t want them to be seen by anyone to whom we’re not legally married. But I suspect the foot-washing business is uncomfortable for more complex reasons. It exposes much more than our vulnerable tootsies: It exposes our vulnerable souls. It’s a hard thing, to sit in humility and be waited on. We’re more comfortable with abstract prayers about the notion of service than we are with the thing itself.
Which is probably one of the many reasons why Jesus wants us to do this. At that Last Supper, he refused to accept any excuses. This is what you have to do, he told Peter, if you want to follow me. Christianity is not really an abstract religion, although some of us try to make it so. I suspect many are uncomfortable with Catholic ritual simply because the way we worship is so physical and visible and three-dimensional – so unapologetically earthy. It was an Irish saint who said we should worship our Lord by playing the five-stringed harp, with the five strings being the five senses God gave us. And so we come into church and dip our fingers in holy water, and cross ourselves with the very same hands with which we do everything else. We genuflect and we stand and we sit, and we kneel on creaky arthritic knees; we sing off-key and we speak and we listen; we light candles and sneeze at the incense, and we fill our churches with statues and banners and colors that change every season. And the climax of everything is what we do in the Eucharist: When we walk up to the altar on those embarrassing feet of ours, and hold out our human, often work-worn hands – the very hands we eat with every day -- and look in the eyes of a fellow human being, who holds up the Body of our Lord, and we take that mystical physical Host in our hands. And then we drink from a common cup that once held wine but now holds the whole universe – a cup that has become the Blood of Christ. You just can’t get around the physical fact of the Eucharist: This is a sacrament in which we eat and drink God. Wow. If we are never been shocked by this, it’s because we’re not paying attention.
Sometimes, though, our church has paid a little too much of the wrong kind of attention. Then, the Eucharist becomes something too precious to fall in the hands of ordinary wretches like us. For many years, laypeople weren’t allowed to touch the host with our own hands; nor could we drink from the cup of Christ. The church hedged the sacrament around with a kind of spiritual barbed wire, and decade by decade became more restrictive about who was worthy to receive it. Which is a bit odd, it seems to me, when you consider that every single person, including the Pope, begins the rite by admitting that “Lord, I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof.”
Look again at the Jesus of the Gospels: This is a man who is the opposite of exclusive, who eats and drinks and prays and hangs out with all kinds of regular folks. This is not the pale, prissy aristocrat who hovered several feet off the ground in the wispy watercolors in my childhood missal. This is a man who worked hard for a living, whose hands were calloused and strong from years of carpentry. On Holy Thursday, he washed the feet of friends who had walked across the whole country with him in blistering heat and dust and sweat. He cured blindness by mixing soil with his own spit and smearing it on someone’s eyes. And when he rose from the dead, he dealt with people’s disbelief in the most down-to-earth way you can imagine: He said, “Look at my hands and my feet… Touch me and see, because a ghost does not have flesh and blood the way I do.” And when his followers still hesitated, hovering nervously around him with their mouths hanging open and their eyes popping out of their heads, he said, almost impatiently: “Have you anything here to eat?” The opposite of ethereal and dainty, this Savior and brother of ours!
I love the earthiness we find throughout the Bible. How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of the one who bears good news! Isaiah said. He’s talking about our feet, of all things! If I do not wash your feet, you can have no part in me, Jesus says. I love how matter-of-fact and practical Jesus is: When he brings the little girl back to life in Mark 5, he just says, “Little girl, get up!” And while everyone around him is still oohing and awing, he adds, quite practically, “Give her something to eat.”Mysticism soars to great heights in the Bible, but it stands on the ground on human feet, and eats real bread and cooks fresh fish and drinks real water and wine.
What it comes down to is this: This world is made by God, and it is holy and hallowed and real. And when Jesus walked the earth, he was holy and hallowed and real as well: A human being who came to teach us to live and love and come close to God despite our human problems. When we eat God’s Body and drink God’s Blood, grace pours into us in a bright healing flood. And when we wash each other’s feet, we do what Jesus asked us to do: We show that we want to walk as Jesus walked. We go up to the altar of God on smelly, funny-looking human feet: And those feet of ours become beautiful -- because God loves us, and because we bear Good News. In Jesus’ name. --- Diane Sylvain
GOOD FRIDAY:
Were you there when they crucified my Lord?
Were you there when they crucified my Lord?
Oh, oh, oh …
Sometimes, it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble. …
Where you there when they crucified my Lord?
- Traditional Spiritual
REFLECTION ON GOOD FRIDAY
It’s always darkest before the dawn, as the old saying goes -- one of those painful, hopeful clichés that, for better or worse, is also true. It is always darkest before the dawn. But sometimes that darkness is even darker than you had ever imagined. Sometimes it’s seems like it’s already gotten worse than your scariest nightmares – and still it keeps getting darker, the shadows keep coming. It’s not just that it’s so dark you can’t see your hand in front of your face, because this isn’t physical darkness we’re talking about. This is spiritual darkness – when it’s so dark you can’t see your terrified soul in front of your self.
And that’s how dark it was dark in Jerusalem, two thousand years ago. But for those who were huddled at the foot of the cross, or watching it fearfully through tears from what they hoped was a safe enough distance, the darkness outside was nowhere as deep as the darkness inside their poor hearts. For they had just seen Jesus die, and as far as they knew, that was it: the end of the story. The most beautiful life they had ever encountered – and they watched it end on a bloody, splintery, stupid Roman cross, watched it end in wretched torment to the sound of ugly mockery, in front of brutal and ignorant soldiers, who threw dice for his clothing, if you can imagine – gambling for it at the very feet of the man whose blood was on, the man who had worn it and who was now dying slowly above them.
We are luckier than the disciples were, in some ways – because we know now, as they did not, that despite appearances, this really wasn’t the end– that something miraculous lay hidden inside the silence of the tomb, waiting to burst into glorious life with the dawn of Easter morning. But that makes it’s even more important for us to pause now and kneel at the foot of the Cross, before we race on to Easter. Too often we try to dodge the darkness of Good Friday, trotting anxiously past it as quickly as possible, doing our best to avert our eyes from its challenge. Because it hurts to confront Good Friday. And it is human nature to want to hit that fast-forward button during unpleasant occasions – to hasten past the terrible things as swiftly as we can.
But on Good Friday, we Catholics are not allowed to do run away from the terrible pain and the sorrow and the pity. On Good Friday, we are forced to stop and think about things that we’d rather not think about. Jesus wasn’t like one of those old-time Greek or Roman gods, who disguised themselves as human long enough to fool around down on earth for a bit, and then hot-foot it back to Olympus the second they got bored, without ever mussing their hair or breaking a sweat. No: Jesus was the Son of Man -- a human being -- as well as the Son of God. When Jesus cried, he cried salt tears; when he ate and drank, he ate crusty bread and drank red wine; his carpenter’s hands were strong and callused, with broken nails and a muscular grip, and his feet were dusty from tromping the rocky hills of the land of his birth. Yes, he was also a whole lot more than a man, but he was also, truly, a man as well, and the man he was still moves through the Gospels today, alive on every page -- strong and tender, sharp and funny, wise and fierce, and kind and real.
And this man had loved the life he was about to lose so painfully, and he loved the people with whom he shared that life -- frightened and silly and stubborn though they could be, even the ones who ran like rabbits when the crisis came. He forgave them, of course, because he knew them so deeply and yet loved them so well. He understood them, you see, as he understands us, and that has made all the difference. He knew – none better -- that they were just beginning to learn about what it means toreally love and be brave and steadfast. He was their Teacher from start to finish, and the lesson he taught on Calvary was the hardest of all. And it broke their hearts into a thousand pieces, as they watched him suffer and horribly die. It was the darkest, hardest thing they’d ever had to endure -- but it was in the midst of it that they finally learned the meaning of love and courage.
It is the longest, loudest silence in the world, when you wait for someone you love to breathe one more time – and they don’t. By the grace and mercy of the God who made us, that terrible silence no longer lasts forever. Jesus’ friends didn’t know that yet, as they stood beneath the looming, lowering cross. But by the blessing of the God who made us, this was not the end of the story, after all. Yes, it is darkest before the dawn – but the dawn always comes at last, if you wait for it. And sometimes the darkest, stormiest night is followed by the loveliest sunrise. That is how the morning of the day we now call Easter would prove. That darkest of nights would be illuminated by a light that nothing can ever extinguish, or even understand – the light of God, in the light of Easter morning.
It might be the strangest thing to have ever happened on this amazing , extraordinary planet. Despite everything that happened that day, despite all the blood and the sweat and the terror and tears, this Friday turned out to deserve the name we have given it. Because that Friday became God’s Friday -- and so it was a Good Friday, after all. In Jesus’ name. --- Diane Sylvain
EASTER VIGIL: EXSULTET
We alternate verses; Side A is the left side of the church, facing the altar, Side B is the right side.
REFRAIN (SUNG): Most holy night, most blessed of nights, When Christ broke the chains of the darkness! God’s mighty love is stronger than death. Christ our Light shines forever!
SIDE A: Rejoice, O heavenly powers! Sing choirs of angels! Exult, all creation around God's throne!
Jesus Christ, our King is risen! Sound the trumpet of salvation!
SIDE B: Rejoice, O earth, in shining splendor, radiant in the brightness of your King!
Christ has conquered! Glory fills you! Darkness vanishes forever!
ALL: Rejoice, O Mother Church! Exult in glory! The risen Savior shines upon you!
Let this place resound with joy, echoing the mighty song of all God's people!
FATHER CHRYSOGONUS (This or other opening prayer)
Therefore, dearest friends,
standing in the awesome glory of this holy light,
invoke with me, I ask you,
the mercy of God almighty,
that he, who has been pleased to number me,
though unworthy, among the Levites,
may pour into me his light unshadowed,
that I may sing this candle's perfect praises.
PRIEST: The Lord be with you.
People: And with your spirit.
PRIEST: Lift up your hearts.
People: We lift them up to the Lord.
PRIEST: Let us give thanks to the Lord our God.
People: It is right and just.
SIDE A: It is truly right that with full hearts and minds and voices we should praise the unseen God, the all powerful Father, and his only Son, our Lord Jesus Christ.
SIDE B: For Christ has ransomed us with his blood, and paid for us the price of Adam's sin to our eternal Father!
REFRAIN (SUNG): Most holy night, most blessed of nights, When Christ broke the chains of the darkness! God’s mighty love is stronger than death. Christ our Light shines forever!
SIDE A: This is our Passover feast,
when Christ, the true Lamb, is slain, whose blood consecrates the homes of all believers.
SIDE B: This is the night when first you saved our fathers: you freed the people of Israel from their slavery
and led them dry-shod through the sea.
SIDE A: This is the night when the pillar of fire destroyed the darkness of sin!
SIDE B: This is the night
when Christians everywhere, washed clean of sin and freed from all defilement,
are restored to grace and grow together in holiness.
SIDE A: This is the night when Jesus Christ broke the chains of death and rose triumphant from the grave.
REFRAIN (SUNG): Most holy night, most blessed of nights, When Christ broke the chains of the darkness! God’s mighty love is stronger than death. Christ our Light shines forever!
SIDE A: What good would life have been to us, had Christ not come as our Redeemer? Father, how wonderful your care for us! How boundless your merciful love! To ransom a slave you gave away your Son.
SIDE B: O happy fault, O necessary sin of Adam, which gained for us so great a Redeemer! Most blessed of all nights, chosen by God to see Christ rising from the dead! Of this night scripture says: "The night will be clear as day: it will become my light, my joy."
REFLECTION FOR EASTER VIGIL
Fire, and water, and candlelight. Incense, and music, and ringing bells. Wine and bread and the people of God, gathered together to feast tonight at this Table of Plenty.
Tonight we are invited to take part in a banquet that began a very long time ago, under the burning turning stars of an ancient endless desert sky. Tonight we listen to words first spoken many centuries ago in a strange land far across the ocean from here, chanted around their desert campfires by a wise and wandering people. Oh, tonight we drink from a very deep well, one dug thousands of years ago; we dip our buckets into Time itself, and pour out water that still sings of its own creation. The Easter Vigil liturgy was born in starlight, and its words are stronger than the hardest granite stone; it is alive with the moving breath of the sky and the greening springtime’s glory.
Sometimes nonbelievers see our Catholic way of worship as a peculiar, almost pagan, form of religion, filled to the brim with superstitious excess: All those statues and candles and smells and bells, or (as one of my evangelical friends once diplomatically put it) just plain ol’ wacky “Papist mumbo-jumbo,”. With the very best intentions, some modern-day Christians want to peel that “excess” away, and “purify” our worship by detaching it from what they see as the leftover patina of tradition, overgrown by the weeds of a landscape full of messy material things. But as C.S. Lewis wrote somewhere, you can’t be holier than God. And God must be rather fond of matter; after all, God did create it.
There’s Celtic Christian saying that we praise our God by playing the five-stringed harp – and that the five strings of that harp are our own five senses. And so tonight we will feed our eyes with color and fire and light; tonight we will make and hear and sing all kinds of music. We will listen to bells and voices, we will chant and read and sing and pray. We will inhale the incense that rises like prayer and the scent of the flowers that fill the church. We will taste the bread that becomes God’s body, and drink the wine that is God’s own blood. And we will worship God using our clumsy, lovable, battered and beautiful, physical, mammalian, bipedal human bodies, walking and standing and kneeling and genuflecting, blessing ourselves with the sign of the cross, and holding each other’s hands at the sign of peace.
Why shouldn’t we honor the way we are made, worshiping God with the things that God created? What if it gets a little bit messy at times? Yes, the candles will melt and drip, leaving unwelcome blobs of wax, and the wine has been known to dribble and slop, leaving bright red splotches on our white altarcloths -- and I guarantee that even the sweetest singers will be croaking like frogs by the time we finish our worship tonight. But this is how the Creator made us, this is how we are meant to be, fragile and funny and upright talking critters. So let’s not pretend to be anything else. We are neither angels or demons; and we are certainly not computers or the dry, perfect machinery of robots; we are human beings, created by a God who loves us and made somehow in the image of that God. And therefore let us praise our Maker with the hands and voices and bodies and spirits He gave us, using our quick clever fingers to open our hymnbooks and walking up the aisle to the altar on our funny-looking human feet, singing Allellua on this holiest of nights with deep-hearted, rich and fully human joy. Let’s celebrate life in these temporary bodies that house such unlikely and immortal and astonishing souls.
Sometimes we think, when we light our candles, “Too bad that they have to burn down so quickly.” But I think that’s the wrong attitude to take; instead, we ought to rejoice in their flickering light, and delight in its short-lived beauty. After all, we’re a lot like candles ourselves, burning brightly now, but doomed to die; you might say every one of us melts down to nothing in the end. But God is the one who fired our wicks, and God knows what he is doing. So let us rejoice in the light we’re given, and share its beauty on earth as long as we can, passing its light on to one another as we did with our candles at the start of this Easter Vigil. For Christ is risen – he is risen indeed! Let us shout.: ALLELUIA!. --- Diane Sylvain
EASTER SUNDAY
REFLECTION ON GOOD FRIDAY
Late last Monday night, or maybe it was actually Tuesday morning, I wandered up and down the dark street in front of my Paonia house and watched the slow occurrence of a miracle, or at least what seemed like one at the time – an eclipse of the moon. And not just an ordinary eclipse: If you didn’t see it yourself, I’m sure you saw some gorgeous photographs, and maybe heard some of the dire predictions that accompanied them: about how this particular “blood moon” meant that the Lord was Coming any minute now and the End of Days was not just Nigh, but Now, so buckle your seatbelt. Me, I wasn’t worried, and not just because I figure if you’re going to call yourself a follower of Jesus, you ought to at least listen to what he said, and one of the things he said very clearly was that we shouldn’t go around predicting the Second Coming, because, as he warns quite bluntly, “No one knows the day or the hour.” But it’s not just that that prevented me from seeing the eclipse as a sign of Doom: It’s that I take things like this eclipse, and pretty much every other sign of activity in the universe, as a reminder that the Lord is HERE, right now and with us, already. Not just coming to judge us at some future date – He is already here, not hidden away behind the clouds. The details of so-called End of Days are frankly none of our business; what we ought to care about is the Beginning of Days – meaning what happens today, right now, this very minute. Today is the first day of the rest of your life, as the saying goes. How are you going to live it? “Tell me,” poet Mary Oliver asks, “what do you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?” Jesus is speaking to us now and always, beckoning us to follow. What are we going to do when he turns his searching gaze on us? Every day we are given the chance to begin our lives again. What will we do, when Jesus knocks on the hard wooden door of our hearts?
That is one of the things I thought about during the eclipse, not because I set out to think about Religious Stuff, but because the very universe seemed to be asking me a big question. The other thing I thought about was the Death and Resurrection of our Lord. The eclipse began slowly, you see, very quietly, with just a dark-brown shadow nibbling away at the edge of the moon. The movement Jesus inspired began slowly, too – a disciple here, another one there, person by person and day by day. It grew, in fact, until it must have seemed as big and bright as the moon, right before the eclipse. But then the shadows began to grow and spread across that bright lovely movement, the doubts and the anger and the accusations that would culminate in the betrayal and crucifixion of Jesus. Just so the shadow spread across the bright surface of the moon, like the shadows of Tenebrae. And then the color began to change – moving from a deep rich vivid orange into a rather ominous red that really did remind me of blood – not bright fresh blood, but the old dark stuff that lies underneath a wound that hasn’t yet healed. It was beautiful and it was terrible; I did not have to listen to evangelical doomsayers to know I was witnessing an astronomical wonder.
And then, all at once, the eclipse was total – the moon completely shrouded in a strange deep color that I have no name for. For, as Matthew put it in his telling of the Passion: “Darkness came over the whole land.” The moon was more like an absence than a presence, a sort of deep bright hole in the velvet sky, and all around it the stars seemed to leap out of hiding, while Mars hovered gleaming nearby, like a watchful Centurion. It all lasted for long enough to seem like a very long time, and yet the whole business only took a couple of hours. It lasted nowhere as long as the Eclipse of Jesus we remember this weekend – the three days our Lord spent in the darkness of the tomb. And although the return of the full moon was glorious, it was nothing like the Resurrection of the Lord.
All metaphors fail when we try to talk about the Resurrection. It is not a thing that can be described, or explained, or understood. All we can do is experience it – open our eyes and hearts, and let the light pour in.
At the Trappist monastery I like to visit, there is a tall slender stained glass window in the chapel: Mary holding the Christ-child in her arms. One winter morning, as we gathered around the altar for the Eucharist, I glanced up at it. There had been a steady week of clouds and snow, and today was the first clear day. So the sunlight streaming through that window was dazzling: but it was more than just the sun that dazzled my eyes. It was as if the light of God had half-blinded me. The early morning light was so brilliant that I could see nothing else in the chapel, at all – no walls, no ceiling, no floors, no people, no anything. Just Mary and her child. It was as if the entire world around me had vanished, and the window hung there, alone in the air.
And it was less a window than a doorway into light.
There is a full moon every month, and yet we never notice it unless there is something extra – like an eclipse – to remind us of its beauty. And God is always present, but we close our eyes to the wonder of his light. We pull the blankets over our heads and mutter and go back to sleep. Easter reminds us that it’s high time we woke up and paid attention. It’s possible to doze through an eclipse, but no one can sleep through the Resurrection. For Christ is Risen – he is risen indeed! Have a joyous Easter. In Jesus’ name. – Diane Sylvain