the triduum has quietly arrived...

Today marks the start of the Christian Triduum - the three holy days before Easter Sunday - that give shape and form to the blessings of God experienced in Jesus. The journey begins tonight with Holy Thursday - or what the Reformed tradition calls Maundy Thursday, from the Latin maundaaum for commandment. My high-church siblings in the Spirit get it right, starting with washing one another's feet, celebrating Eucharist, and then stripping the altar until the Feast of the Resurrection on Easter Sunday. This is followed on Friday with a service venerating the Cross and Saturday with the earliest night liturgy: the Easter Vigil.

My low-church friends tend to avoid footwashing like the plague, but have now added an ancient monastic set of readings and actions from the 9th CE called Tenebrae. This was only added to the Reformed realm in the early 20th century, but has become wildly beloved even as the most scripted liturgical act in our repertoire. Initially, Tenebrae took place in monastic communities during matins and lauds - the first two community prayer cycles after midnight at the start of the Triduum. It began with 15 candles but has now been simplified in contemporary Protestant churches to between 8 and 12. The readings in the Reformed version have also changed to foreshadow Christ's crucifixion on Friday. There is drama and grit to this service, and I would hate to lose it, even though I much prefer the order of my liturgical sisters and brothers. As Carl Jung put it: "The symbols of the Catholic liturgy offer the unconscious such a wealth of possibilities that they act as an incomparable diet for the psyche."

No matter how one observes the Triduum, however, it is a time for deep and sober reflection. I look forward to doing this in community - a genuinely counter-cultural commitment - in this age of hyper-individualized bottom lines and obsessive multitasking. What a shallow culture we've created with neither time nor encouragement to ponder and discern. We rush off to war without counting the cost; we speed-dial and date; we relentlessly binge-watch our favorite video distractions; and forsake the dinner table for a bag of burgers and fries in the car. Nevertheless, the Triduum quietly creeps into being and patiently invites us into alternative ways of thinking, speaking, and living. The poet, Jane Kenyon, put it like this:

I am the blossom pressed in a book,
found again after two hundred years. . . .

I am the maker, the lover, and the keeper....

When the young girl who starves
sits down to a table
she will sit beside me. . . .

I am food on the prisoner's plate. . . .

I am water rushing to the wellhead,
filling the pitcher until it spills. . . .

I am the patient gardener
of the dry and weedy garden. . . .

I am the stone step,
the latch, and the working hinge. . . .

I am the heart contracted by joy. . . .
the longest hair, white
before the rest. . . .

I am there in the basket of fruit
presented to the widow. . . .

I am the musk rose opening
unattended, the fern on the boggy summit. . . .

I am the one whose love
overcomes you, already with you
when you think to call my name... .

Tonight, wither Catholic or Reformed, in a high-church haze of incense or a low-church encunter with Tenebrae, I give thanks that some will pause to call your name,