The original date of publication for this essay is Sunday, April 4th. It is the 38th of what’s intended to be a year’s worth of essays, published on Sundays. That intention, like everything, is subject to change.
Last week’s essay: On Maundy Thursday and the Oregon Coast
Easter services sometimes ring hollow to me. I enjoy the triumph—hearing the organ start pumping out the Easter Hymn always gets me fired up—but sometimes the triumph feels overrepresented against the mystery. Is it a triumphant morning? Of course. But it’s a mysterious one too, and coming off of the sorrow and the sacrifice of Good Friday, jumping straight into those victorious chords leaves a bit of a disconnect—I feel I’ve missed something.
And so I enjoyed Easter Vigil Mass last night at my wife’s parish.
One of the joys of my wife’s parish during Holy Week is that the premier services, Thursday night and Saturday night, are bilingual, making them two of the most prominent occasions when the whole of the church’s community worships together. I don’t know about others in the room, but my high school Spanish lessons have faded to where I have to work to understand the Spanish readings and the Spanish portions of the homily, and while I sometimes don’t try hard enough, the result of the words washing over me, coming through in brief, understood snippets, is a feeling of that mystery. It isn’t the broadest part of the mystery. But it bore mentioning.
The service started in darkness but for the fire behind the altar, on par in size with that of a small firepit. It was striking to see such a fire inside a building. Its presence was jarring. It was safe, yes, but it was not something we’re accustomed to seeing. It told us, with its presence, that something different was happening.
Soon, the Easter candle was lit from the flame, and soon, altar servers scurried around, masked, sharing the flame through incense as thick as the robes, their soft voices murmuring “you’re welcome” when we thanked them. In those early moments, as the light slowly grew throughout the socially distanced congregation, last Easter came to mind, and with it a reminder of far we’ve come, and of how many people in the church had suffered, and of how many were now vaccinated, and of how here we were, many of us, together again, growing towards being together again as an all of us.
It was a long service, as the Easter Vigil tends to be. There were chants to be chanted, songs to be sung, readings to be read aloud. There were baptisms. There were confirmations. I thought, at one point, of how if a neighbor could hear the sounds of the church at that moment, they might think the proceedings cultish—ancient and reverent and out of place on a busy Saturday night in a returning-to-life Austin. Ancient and reverent and mysterious.
When I was a senior at Notre Dame, I stayed on campus for Easter weekend. I’d heard so much of the services at the basilica. I wanted to experience them in person.
The Saturday night service at Notre Dame, as I believe will again soon be the case (if not already this year), was a Tenebrae service. The Lamentations of Jeremiah were sung. The candles were gradually extinguished. When the church was dark, the knocking started—row upon row of congregants pounding on the pew or the chair in front of them, the church ringing with a furious clatter. Soon, the Easter candle would be brought back in, and the lights would come on, and the chairs would stand chaotic and scattered, sleeping children sprawled around them, the loosened bonds of Hell brought ever so slightly to life in the sprawled wreckage. But in that moment, in the dark, in the knocking, I looked back into the chapel beside me and saw, silhouetted against the window, the statue of Basil Moreau, looking lifelike and terrifying and grand and mysterious. The silhouette stayed with me as the service ended, as the lights came on, as we walked back out into the night—carrying with us the strangeness we had seen.
It is a strangeness we carry with us from Easter, just as Mary Magdalene did that morning, from the empty tomb. It’s a mystery. It leads to triumph, just as it did, but first…first there are so many questions. And there is such awe to be felt. Awe that doesn’t fit in an Easter basket.
Last night, as the service grew, and more lights came on, and the alleluia was sung more and more with more and more vigor, I got that transition from Good Friday that I wanted. Out of darkness, into light. Not just straight into light, as though Friday’s darkness never happened, but gradually, with some time to process it all, and with the buffer of night afterwards. To drive home. To sit up for a bit. To think upon the empty tomb. To think upon the mystery.
Note: I misremembered that 2016 service, and conflated the Thursday night Tenebrae with the Saturday Night Vigil. My apologies for the error.
Next week’s essay: On Austin—My Austin
“Easter services sometimes ring hollow to me. …but sometimes the triumph feels overrepresented against the mystery.”
Excellent.