How did your Palm Sunday go? Ours was interesting, I think. The kids cut long branches from some overgrown bushes in the backyard; we teased the five year old that hers was as big as she was, to her great delight. We sprinkled them with holy water, and then the eight year old sprinkled them, and all of us, with the holy water again. Twice blessed. We marched around the entire backyard, waving our branches singing “All Glory, Laud, and Honor.” We went inside, read the Gospel, recited the Sorrowful Mysteries (a decade a child), and made a spiritual communion. The afternoon was warm and sunny, befitting a Palm Sunday (didn’t you find it to be true, as a child, that Palm Sunday was lovely, and Good Friday dark and stormy?), and we went outside to sit and watch the kids run around in the front yard, an unheard luxury; after all, when do we ever have the luxury, on a Sunday afternoon, for both us parents to sit in the front yard and watch the kids, without laundry, and lesson plans, and dishes, piling up?
It is a weird feeling, to be afloat like this ... it is what it feels like, unmoored, lost in time, reflecting on what we would be doing ... a subjunctive kind of mood, trapped between the what is and what should be. I should have just finished up a busy time of the school year, grateful for the break from schedule that Holy Week usually provides, as school work and school planning pause, while gearing up for Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and the family stresses of Easter. All that is gone. I think about how fortunate we have been, with our Masses and our Triduum and our Good Friday services. I think about how, for so much of our Catholic history, though we have the habit of idealizing the past, our foremothers did not have the luxury of these things either, and what they must have done to mark these feasts for their families. I think of priests, writing from the coal camps of eastern Kentucky, saying that they did not have High Mass, because they did not have the choir to sing, or the deacons or subdeacons to serve. Of the women who didn’t even have a church, and who worked to create a church, like the Catholic mothers of Barbourville, who worried about their children growing without instruction in the faith, writing to the bishop so as to create the space for a priest to be assigned and a church built in their town. Of my grandmother, who moved to eastern Kentucky in the 1950s and who managed to raise her sons Catholic without a priest or a church, spending her life celebrating Mass in people’s houses whenever the visiting priest from Paintsville made his circuit around to Prestonsburg. We have a long lineage of creating church from what we can, to make what we need it to be.
Maria von Trapp has some nice ideas for Holy Week, though they do seem to be determined by some elements that I personally do not have access to, such as servants who can make lots of soups and make sure that the house receives its Holy Week cleaning (evidently, what Monday and Tuesday of Holy Week are for, in case you weren’t sure); a chapel, and family priest, on call and on the grounds; and a family of professional level singers. I can’t imagine why I don’t have these things! We need a book in the vein of Julia Child’s first cookbook, which was subtitled Cooking for the Servantless Woman; how about, Holy Week for the Servantless Woman? Nonetheless, I think that there are some ideas to be gleaned from her account.
I think that this one could work for either Spy Wednesday or Good Friday, a combination of a Tenebrae service and a Stations of the Cross. I honestly thought I had read this idea somewhere, but as I look through my materials, it is not exactly there, so I may have taken a couple of ideas and fused them together. Wednesday is often celebrated as a Tenebrae service, beginning with a church fully lit up and then with lights gradually extinguished until the church remains in darkness and silence, a symbolism that I truly love. Of course, Stations of the Cross is the traditional prayer of Lent, one I am really missing this year, as we have not been able to go to a Stations at all this year. Kerri Baunach had a wonderful idea; she said that she printed out Stations, which her boys colored, and then they put them up around the house, and they did the Stations that way. I did really like that idea. (Sidenote: I have long been plotting to get permanent outside Stations put up in my backyard; however, they cost into the thousands of dollars, so it has not happened yet. One of these years. Sigh). I combined Kerri’s colored Stations idea with something that my family does for the Rosary; we have a flip book of pictures, one for each mystery of the rosary, so as we pray the mystery we have the corresponding picture open in the flipbook. So, color and make a Stations of the Cross flipbook, and use it as you pray the Stations.
Or you could do this: start with lighting fourteen candles. As you say a Station, extinguish a corresponding candle, until all the candles are extinguished, and the stations said. This could work for Wednesday, for Tenebrae, or Good Friday, as you say the Stations of the Cross in lieu of the Mass of the Pre-Sanctified. Now, I would probably just find fourteen candles and candlesticks, I gotta say. But I did find this for those ambitious or talented people out there: make a candelabrum for the Stations of the Cross. Mary Reed Newland suggests fourteen candles in one long candelabrum, or two short ones of seven each. She made them in this manner: with two shoes boxes with six holes apiece for the candles, or with plaster of paris poured into two empty Kleenex boxes and the candles held in place (a few minutes). After 24 hours, remove the Kleenex boxes, and, voila, candelabrum! Paint as desired. Newland recommends starting the Stations with all fourteen candles lit, saying, with the naming of each station, this prayer: “We adore Thee, O Christ, and we praise Thee, Because by Thy holy Cross Thou hast redeemed the world,” followed by an Our Father, a Hail Mary, and a Glory Be, then putting out the candles, until all fourteen are extinguished and the room is in darkness.
I also liked this idea for Good Friday. For some reason, this has been an element of missing Triduum that has really bothered me this year. Something that has really been a key element of Triduum, and Good Friday in particular, is the empty tabernacle at the end of the Mass of the Pre-Sanctified; this emptiness, and the missing bells, is chilling and really bring home for me the empty tomb and the missing Christ. So I found a suggestion of building your own empty tomb, or at least, having your children build an empty tomb, with whatever “they could find at hand—stones, mosses, sticks, acorns,” very appealing.
Of course, I say all of this with the caveat: these are some ideas I found appealing, as I have been thinking through the process of marking Holy Week without the traditional practices of the church. They are meant to be supplemental to the prayers of the church, which I think are well found in such resources as the "Holy Week at Home" pamphlet from Liturgical Press. I hope and pray that they help you as you think your way through this time.
Coming tomorrow: ideas for Holy Thursday Seder meal and Easter Vigil.
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