THE SILENCE

                      

 


When I first attended a seriously Anglo-Catholic church, St Mary Magdalen in Toronto, I shall never forget the effect of the veiled images and especially the empty tabernacle on Holy Saturday. An astonishing sense of desolation. Nobody home. Abandonment. We know it's not so, really, but oh, the feeling of grief. The world, sure, lives as if there were no God; but then, thousands of Romans and even Jews went about their business normally on a certain Friday. But this is what it would be like if there really was no God. Tabernacles empty. Nobody home. Only us, on a spinning ball.

Maranatha . . . . . .

IN THESE EMPTY DAYS

I think I've posted this before, but I'm always struck by the moments between the Ascension and 

Whitsun (Pentecost) - rather like Holy Saturday, when the statues are still veiled and the Tabernacle 

on the altar open and empty. A brief time of - well, almost fright, a sudden chill of aloneness. We 

know better, but even so. I had been reading the glorious Latin hymns and their haunting tetrameters, 

and found myself writing something that sounded like the translation of one. So here it is: a translation without an original:

PATRIS AEDEM REDIENS

Returning to his Father's house,

The rising Son our sunset wrought:

leaving us grey and comfortless

to face the day, survive the night

Before he came we had the Law,

harsh, but secure: fulfilling it

he took away our rod and staff

and gave the fearful gift of Love

No rules, no simple precepts now:

decision dwells deep in the heart;

how shall we live with such a weight,

being our own Law, every day?

Peace: for the Father's deathless love

remembers us when we forget;

the Son who sits at his right hand

is mindful of our loneliness

Third Person of the Trinity,

the Holy Spirit, Paraclete,

prepares himself to come to us,

and plunges to our careless world

Welcome among us, Comforter,

strengthen us now from deep within, 

pray in us, rule our hands and lives,

illuminate our wakeful mind

Breathe in our breath, see through our eyes,

speak with our tongue, and let the world

stare at our newness every day,

and praise thy presence in our love.

STRANGE RISING

Fra Angelico, 'The Resurrection'

A strange and unusual Triduum paschale – Good Friday without Bach’s St Matthew Passion for once, but also without computer, tablet or screen of any kind, doing physical things in house and garden, meditating and praying while doing them, rather like Brother Lawrence. A halt at 3 pm for a special prayer as the Temple veil tears and the new Temple is inaugurated, bloodstained, hanging on the Cross.

Holy Saturday, a glorious Spring day, again full of busy-ness but full of prayer also – the strange emptyness of that day filled with blossoms and sunshine, yet always the knowledge of the open, empty Tabernacle that always fills me with wordless anguish.

That evening an invitation to supper, accepted because the veillée paschale at the Cathedral last year had left us cold in every sense, and an Easter morning service seemed preferable. The adorable, generous and appreciative hosts overdid the hospitality with groaning platters of seafood and Gewürtztraminer, and kept us talking – about the Church, amongst other things – till midnight. During the deep, still night a sudden wind sprang up, blew open the windows and died down, as if the Resurrection were taking place at that very moment. Then it rained, the gutters gurgling happily with the new life. And in the morning there was no energy of any kind, and once again the tradition had to be abandoned for care to Brother Ass. And yet this Easter has been one of the most profound I can remember.

The reason I post this very personal note is because there may be a lesson in it. For those of us who love traditions, rituals, ceremony and solemnity, it may upon occasion be very salutary to see what remains when one removes them. (Normally, my struggle goes the other way, as our world is removing them or eviscerating them at an alarming rate in any case.) In my case, what remained, I found, was prayer and a quietly penetrating sense of love.

In the course of this two thoughts occurred to me which I will share here. One: in all the prayers I have heard and joined in for the victims of the recent terrorist attacks, I have not once in any Church or Christian context heard a single prayer for the attackers. And yet we are expected, are we not, to pray for our enemies? Two: in every Mass, after the Institution, the priest prays for the Church; invariably he prays for Pope Francis, then goes on to the bishop and clergy; but not once have I heard Pope Benedict included in this prayer. He is still alive, he is still Pope. If I work at it, I can perhaps imagine a reasoning behind it; but I find it shameful.

And finally, I have said it before but will say it again: the finest accompaniment to Holy Week for an educated lay person that I know is that same Pope Benedict’s Jesus of Nazareth, volume 2: Holy Week, from the Entry into Jerusalem to the Resurrection. He is a great man, ending his life gently in a saintly manner; and I pray for him, and give thanks for him, daily.

UNDER THE PREPARATION, SILENCE. WOMEN.

Holy Saturday is a deeply strange day. In my youth, as a Dutch liberal Protestant, it wasn’t anything much: just the day between Bach’s St Matthew Passion on Good Friday and the sunny festivity of Easter morning, with painted eggs on the breakfast table, flowers everywhere, and church at 10 or 11. So Saturday was mainly the day you prepared Sunday.

The first time  I saw something different was in Toronto, where I had discovered the marvellously medieval Church of St Mary Magdalene, with its bare almost undecorated interior, its two superb choirs (it had been Healey Willan’s church), and its punctilious and quite beautiful liturgy, full of incense and austere plainchant.

They, I found, had something called an “Easter Vigil”. All news to me. So one year I went, and was astonished. What took my breath away was coming into the church on Saturday and finding, first of all, that ordinary parishioners had been kneeling and praying there uninterruptedly since the day before; and then all the statues veiled in purple and (the real shock) on the altar the Tabernacle, open and empty. Never had (or have) I felt so piercingly the sense of abandonment that the first followers must have felt on the day after the Crucifixion.

So Holy Saturday is a time of thinking about that, I find. Of course it’s also the preparations for Easter, cleaning the house, hiding the eggs for the children, ironing that new dress, etc. – a creeping joy. But at the same time that weird sense of emptiness, and thinking back to the way it must have been for them.

Was it a shock? Well, for the ones closest to Jesus it wasn’t as if they hadn’t been told what was going to happen. But that’s the way life works: you are told what’s going to happen, yet you can’t truly believe it and go on as if. (Look at climate change.) And then it happens. So what did they do? First, they took off. Two, we know, came back: Peter until the cock crowed, John to be there to the end, with Mary and the other women. The others we don’t hear of till well afterwards. Joseph of Arimathea was there, and took care of the burial, decent man. John took care of Mother Mary. But on the Saturday, the only people still there, sitting by the tomb, were women. Mary of Magdala, and Mary of Bethany, Lazarus’ sister.

What were their thoughts? Did they remember that He had spoken of resurrection? And if so, were they the only ones who did? All the same, they must have wondered. The death had been so awful: the He could die at all, first; that He had to die in the most beastly and humiliating manner; that He had suffered so excruciatingly; that He – He, the Meshiach! – had cried out that heart-rending opening of Psalm 22; that He had been laid to rest, an emaciated corpse, sadly shrouded in a freshly-hewn tomb; and then? Nothing. The Nothing of silence, while the world continued on its metalled ways of appetency.

It was always the women who laid out the dead, and mostly the women who did the mourning. And on Holy Saturday, it’s the women I think of: the women who, with John, were the closest human beings to Jesus the man. Three women called Miriam, or Mary. The one who had been there at that wedding and told the servants to do what He would tell them, to whom He had upon occasion been extremely rude, and who had had to watch her child die; the one who had attached herself to him as a follower and whose legendary past and voluptuous tresses we may or may not believe in; and that quiet listener, that silent intense friend who taken on board everything He had to say and may have been one of the very few who actually understood.

As we get ready the eggs, the flowers, the tablecloths, the leg of lamb or whatever takes its place; as we dress the house and ourselves; whether or not we go to an Easter Vigil tonight, with its silent meditation and then its sudden flame, its bright lights and its glorious music; let us keep in mind the emptiness of the Tabernacle, and the women. Just for today.

I owe the image of the two Marys to Mr T.V. Anthony Raj, aka Tvaraj, a photographer and a devout and curious layman who is my age and has a fine Gospel blog. The women remind me of Leonardo.