Easter Flowers

It is hard to believe that it is already Holy Week. Perhaps the return of winter weather after sufficient sunshine and warmth over the past weekend add to my disbelief! (I am ready to be warm again!)

My friend C, with whom I share coffee most Monday afternoons, brought me a gift of orchids from her yard this week. They are one of the most stunning plants I have ever seen. She said that they are lymbidiums. Here they are







At the same time, she also cut two of my Iris, which are just beginning to bloom. Not as big as last year's flowers, they are still pretty.



While they are not typical Easter flowers it is good to have something fresh blooming in the house for Holy Week.

Tonight the choir will sing Tenebrae, tomorrow Holy Thursday and then Good Friday. Saturday, the Easter Vigil, and then Sunday. I remember snippets from each service, which I have not been able to attend for many years. EWTN will give me the services from the Vatican, if I can just remember to look up the schedule. Wishing seriously for podcasts here, and I suppose that I should go look for some!

I am grateful for the time that I spent singing this music when I was young, for it shaped so much of who I am and my adult life. Very grateful too, for my friend who brought flowers and for other friends who brought palms on Palm Sunday.

Holy Saturday

The music that I have been listening to for the past two nights is by a variety of composers, not Mozart as I had thought. It is gorgeous and I will listen to it again this evening even though it is not specifically for Holy Saturday.

I remember waiting in the cold dark church while the paschal fire was kindled outside on a barbecue and the Paschal candle lit. The passing of the lights to the little candles held by everyone in the congregation is one of the most special rituals of the whole year. Trying to keep the candles straight up and not dripping wax onto one's hands is another very practical memory. The lessons, chanted during the vigil service, are long, reminding us of the long slow journey to salvation through Jesus while we wait, symbolically, for His resurrection. (Somebody usually quips that the length of the readings reminds us also that the pews we sit on are hard--the last penance for Lent!) Then just as sleepiness and waning candle light are about to overcome us lights come on, bells ring, the organ plays--if you are really lucky there might even be a tuba or a krumhorn or two. The celebrant intones, "Gloria in excelsis Deo," the words not sung for the weeks of Lent and the choir responds, "et in terra" and we are rejoicing. This is the shortest Mass of the year, I believe, and some pastors have the good sense to confine themselves to saying, "Rejoice. He is Risen. Alleluia. Happy Easter," rather than to try to take us on a post-midnight (and sometimes post-modernist) theological journey of discovery when what we want to do is sing our heart out and go home to our nice warm beds.

After two days of no Mass, the short Easter Vigil Mass is its own surprise and it ends with a snippet of Matins, "And very early on the first day of the week, they went onto the sepulcher and found it lying empty, Alleluia." They, of course, were the women, who had waited at the foot of the cross on Friday weeping until they could almost not see.

I suppose that one shouldn't have favorite parts of these great services, they do after all have a seamless whole. Still the Gloria and the Matins verses and the singing of Alleluia at the end of everything are my favorite parts of the Easter Vigil.

Deo Gratias, Alleluia. Ite Missa Est, Alleluia. These are two more of my favorite parts. The Liturgy is such a great gift of the heritage of Catholicism. This is a good day to give thanks for it.

Easter is a great gift of hope and joy to us who believe that Jesus has given us Eternal Life. Today we wait, hoping and expecting that tomorrow our joy may be full.

Holy Week, Good Friday

The music continues and the liturgy stirs our hearts and souls. All of the mourning of the human heart is focused on this day. The Improperia of the Good Friday service is one of the last bits of Greek in Roman Catholic liturgy (along with the Kyrie). I loved singing this music when I was young and last night had the moving experience of listening to it on my portable CD player a gift from a very dear friend. Tonight I will listen again and pay attention to the notes that come with the CD. The version of the music I am familiar with is Victoria; I think the CD is a setting by Mozart with a fabulous choir, that of Westminster Abbey.

Listening on the CD is not as good as being able to attend the services, but it is better than no Good Friday music at all. I am so grateful for it.

Soon I will see if the tapes that I have that are over ten years old are still good enough to play through my little tape recorder and then I will put the software for converting tapes to CD onto my desktop and see what I can do to recover some of the choir music for my own use. I hope that they will not mind. The tapes are another group of things that I have been saving for good and it is time to recover the music.

A blessed Good Friday to all.

Holy Thursday

Today the liturgy is again rich in symbolism and music that is only heard once a year. I remember singing Pange Lingua as a child and finding it so beautiful. Holy Thursday commemorates the Last Supper and the Institution of the Sacrament of the Eucharist or Holy Communion as we knew it then. In addition, there is a ritual called the washing of the feet, that I also found embarrassing when I was growing up.

Twelve people, pillars of the community, chosen beforehand (so that they could be sure to have clean feet and clean socks)sat in a row on benches or chairs carefully place across the front of the church and took off one shoe and one sock. The priest and the server proceeded down the row washing one foot of each of the people.

Was this really what Jesus had in mind when He commanded us to wash one another's feet? I don't think so. I think it is literally a command to us to take care of one another in our bodily needs and suffering. Mothers do this daily and never question doing it. Nurses also do it. To untangle the hair of someone who has been unable to brush the snarls out. To help someone wash. To do laundry and change bedding for someone who can no longer do this (or has never been able to do this.) As a disabled person the parameters of what I can do and where I need help have made me think very differently about this than I think I would have if I had been glibly independent all of my life. I really do think that we literally must help each other if we are to have true spiritual and true Christian community. Our culture has tended to professionalize these helping tasks, leaving caring to those who are care-caregivers. Perhaps after the Maundy we need to go forth and find someone who really needs help with washing his or her feet--and hair and person.

On another level, I think that this command is about the earthiness of being human and recognizing our humanity in its grounded bodiliness; being human is by no means about being ethereal. We need food and shelter and a place to sleep, warmth, security and the society of friends. We provide these things for ourselves more independently of others in today's culture--our friends are characters in a tv sitcom and even our real friends become in a way "virtualized" by social utility web-sites that allow us to "network" via images of one another. We still need the human community in all its nitty-grittiness--and even dirty feet.

I continue to leave my television off for this week and am recovering a sense of peace and spaciousness that I had forgotten.

Last night I did indeed listen to the Lamentations of the Prophet Jeremiah. This music, so ancient and so beautiful, touches my deepest personal woundedness, anguish and grieving and at the same time lifts me above it. It is profound and difficult to describe and I am so grateful for it and for the education that I received in it as a child and as a young woman when I had the joy and privilege of singing with a renowned and remarkable choir in Palo Alto California. I will be placing the link in my link list shortly.

Wednesday of Holy Week

I am finding that I almost do not miss the television. The quiet in the house is profound. Right now the loudest sound is the refrigerator and then the slight click, click made by the computer keyboard and the occasional whir of the little hard drive on my laptop.

Tulips grace my kitchen counter, a gift from a friend who came yesterday bring me communion and to wish me a Happy Easter. Today my pastor visited and also brought communion as well as the anointing of the sick. I am so blessed that I am almost happy today and the depression, which normally weighs me down almost as much as my weight, seems to be at bay. Sunshine flooding the house helps, too, of course.

Safeway delivered my groceries and paper products today. Last night as I made the order I felt, for the second time in a month, that I was personally floating the economy out of the recession! Everything is so much more expensive than it used to be. One thing caught my eye--eggs that have been pasteurized. More expensive, but possibly worth it if a salmonella infection can be bypassed. They come in a plastic carton though. I do hope that it is recyclable--and will be tempted to find some use for it. Cute plastic containers and boxes always are hard to part with because I think that I will find some use for them. Recycling takes the edge off of throwing them out--but not completely.

Tonight is Tenebrae, the service in which the Lamentations of Jeremiah feature in the service and the lights are turned out, preparing for the darkness that shrouded the world on the afternoon of Good Friday. I will listen to a recording tonight and be present in thought with those who sing this beautiful service with its splendid music.

Jeremiah is my kind of prophet, too. Reluctant and having to be dragged into his vocation, if I recall at one time he went and hid in a well. Hmmm. Maybe I need to remember more about him and see if there aren't some parallels here.

A blessed mid-week of Holy Week to all.

Tuesday of Holy Week

Today is the third day of Holy Week counting from Sunday. Sunday I decided to try an experiment and not turn on the tv for an entire week. This was prompted in part by the fact that it is Holy Week and it seemed like silence would be a great way to observe it, especially silence from the naysayers nattering negatively about the news and the obnoxious, tasteless, in-my-face and always loud commercials.

In addition, I was watching something on Saturday night that had a particularly, gruesome and unsettling image that I had difficulty shaking before I went to sleep. It prompted a bad dream of its own--very different, but still not the way to wake up on a Sunday morning. The benefit of having had an old tv with a crummy picture was that I was using it like radio and didn't see the disturbing images.

So far I have slept better (and longer)without the tv on than with it on. I have knitted in the quiet of my own mind and space unfettered by whatever is going on in the outside world. Today will be day three of my experiment.

It is a good day, this Tuesday, a bit on the chilly side but bright and sunny. The trees are leafing out and the daffodils are gone. In two days it will be officially Spring, but I think the warmth of spring may be late this year even here in California.

Finally, my doctor, bless her came through and everything was done electronically that needed to be done. Now if I could send in my blood electronically to be tested....Or better yet have the kind of scanner that Dr. Crusher had on STNG, and just upload to the computer the way that we upload photos. Virtual medicine for a virtual world. Someday we may eat that way too! (That is a penitential thought!)

Palm Sunday

Today, Palm Sunday, marks the beginning of the most solemn week in the Christian liturgical year. So many special services mark this week that it is almost necessary to take vacation to participate in them all and even more necessary to do so if you are choir member. I remember that singing the liturgy for Holy Week took about twenty-four hours, including rehearsal time and was worth every second of it.

Palm Sunday and Holy Thursday are marked by processions. Good Friday has the prostration of the ministers before the service begins. (Maybe we should require this of politicians before they are sworn in.) Tenebrae ends in darkness that will end with the kindling of the new fire, the lighting of the Paschal candle and the passing of the light from person to person as the candles are lit at the Easter Vigil on Holy Saturday night. One of the two times of the year when services are traditionally held in the dark of the night (the other being Christmas Eve Midnight Mass) this makes the liturgy especially poignant and set apart. It also brings in the music of matins, one of the monastic hours which lay people do not usually hear. "And very early on the first day of the week, they went onto the sepulchre and found it lying empty, alleluia", is the verse that I particularly remember and will sing myself until I am hoarse.

The ancient symbolism is ever new and so packed and rich that it can never grow old or be completely explored in one life-time. Our need to believe in the after life, especially after middle-age when most likely we have lost our own parents and are looking at our own mortality is fulfilled in these liturgies which proclaim Christ's death freely taken on to free us from sin and death and His most glorious resurrection in which we hope for our own.

When I was growing up, we would turn the television off on Wednesday night and not turn it on again until Sunday night (we were Maverick fans and there was no VCR in those days--let alone Tivo). I think I will try to do this this week and see what it does to my schedule, my mind and my dreams.

A blessed and fruitful Holy week to everyone. I am grateful for the time I spent singing in a choir, for growing up Catholic before Vatican II and for my parents who gave me their faith and their traditions. This is a good week for remembrance as well as prayer.