Holy Week – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane
Some years I find Lent and the arrival of Easter just kind of happens without much ceremony or pomp. In our culture Christmas is the more notable holiday, the one that we travel for and take time off work for. Christmas is what defines our academic calendar, our Winter Break is essentially just the time we get off for Christmas and New Year’s. Yet theologically Easter is the more important of the two holidays.
This past Sunday during the Palm Sunday Mass at my local parish, I found myself deeply moved by the traditional recitation of the Passion Story from St. Matthew’s Gospel. From where I sat in the back row of the choir I could feel the trio of voices, two of our parishioners and our pastor, echoing off the walls of the church and moving about the packed congregation. I’ve been preparing for Holy Week a bit longer than usual this year because I’ve got a small part in the Masses on Palm Sunday, Holy Thursday, and during the Easter Vigil with the choir, so perhaps that contributed as well. Still, at a time when I’m unsure about my own faith in a way that would seem strange to my younger self a decade ago, Holy Week this year really does have a great deal of deeper meaning to me than I expected five weeks ago.
This week culminates in the Easter Triduum, three days of interconnected liturgies beginning on Holy Thursday with the commemoration of Jesus’s Last Supper, continuing on Good Friday with the Passion Service, and concluding at sunset on Holy Saturday with the Easter Vigil Mass. I’ve long found the Holy Thursday Mass to be my favorite, not just of the Triduum but of the entire year. For me, the mystery of the Eucharist is perhaps the most inspiring and compelling part of my faith that has continued regardless of the doubt and skepticism with which I’ve approached so many other aspects of reconsidering what I believe. One of the greatest lessons I ever heard in all my now 27 years of schooling was from Dr. Daniel Stramara, Professor of Theology at Rockhurst University, who explained that in the old Nicene Church of the Roman Empire, while in the Latin Rite the old Roman legalistic tradition persists in seeking answers to every question under the Sun, in the Greek Rite the prevailing opinion was open to mystery, to not having all the answers. I know I won’t really understand how “the biscuit turns into Jesus” to quote Craig Ferguson, one of my favorite comedians and all-time favorite late night host, yet that’s okay with me. It remains a mystery, and I trust in the long Tradition of our sacraments that there is deeper meaning in the Eucharist.
Good Friday was once described to me by my high school theology teacher Sebastian D’Amico as the one day of the year when we Catholics don’t celebrate, after all the Mass is a celebration of our faith. Good Friday is a somber day. Traditionally I’ve tended to attend the 3 pm Stations of the Cross service rather than the Passion Service later in the evening. The Stations of the Cross is a series of prayers which follow the path of Jesus from the Last Supper to the Crucifixion and eventually to the Resurrection that you’re taught very early on in Catholic school. Still, in the last decade I’ve probably returned for the Passion Service that evening on more occasions than not. Some years that service is so deeply moving, while in others I leave it feeling frustrated or downtrodden. I think of Good Friday as a sort of wild card in that way, it’s a day that has huge significance. It reminds me of other days in the year that mark the anniversaries of the deaths of relatives and loved ones, and historical figures who I have a great fondness for, curiously including President Lincoln who was shot on Good Friday 1865 of all days and died on the following morning on Holy Saturday.
With that segue Holy Saturday is a newer commemoration for me. I didn’t start going to the Easter Vigil Mass on an annual basis until just 2018 but have since found it a tremendously rewarding experience. The same mystery involved in the humble awe of Holy Thursday and the mournful remembrance of Good Friday trumpets itself on Holy Saturday in all the splendor of 2,000 years of liturgical tradition and precedent. I’m excited to serve my parish in this year’s Vigil Mass as one voice in the choir.
The first of the nine readings said at that Mass always comes from Genesis 1, the Creation stories, which I will likely write about here in the Wednesday Blog at some point. I think of the Biblical Creation in the context of the opening verse of St. John’s Gospel, “in the beginning was the Word,” which with all its original Greek meaning also speaks to me of the idea that this vision of Creation first occurred through the voice, perhaps even as Tolkien wrote in his Silmarillion through song. Now of course, I don’t believe that the Universe was created in six days, I accept the idea of the Big Bang and cosmic evolution. There was a recent awe-inspiring episode of NOVA that talked about the raw energy that came before and propelled the Big Bang, which to me seems like a profound reflection of our own older traditional beliefs of the beginning, of Creation, though I’m not saying we can prove the existence of God, that again is best left to a whole separate week.
I’m looking forward to the rest of Holy Week this year, and I hope it will be a time of reflection and inspiration.
Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane 