Adapting Holy Week for the Domestic Church: Holy Saturday & Easter Vigil

How did your Holy Thursday go? Where you able to do any kind of Seder meal, abbreviated or not?  Eileen and I attempted the unleavened bread; as we went, it brought up many questions. We mixed and kneaded, and asked ourselves--temperature seems to be important as various points, such as the instruction that warm water be used--of course, how warm is warm?--so what about the butter? Having it warm(er) makes it easier to mix, but no temperature is specified. So could we warm it up, for ease of mixing, or keep it cool? Of course, the author could be working on the assumption that the butter would be warm(ish), if, she, like my husband does, keeps butter at room temperature anyway. The best instruction, of course, after the kneading, was to put the bread under a "hot bowl" for half an hour. What kind of bowl? How do you keep it warm for half a hour? What temperature is "warm," and how do you distinguish between 'hot' and 'warm,' and does it honestly matter? So many questions! But we tried it, and we produced something that feels like we recreated Pillsbury's pre-made crossaints at the stage when you remove them from the can but before you roll them up into crescents. So we had our Seder "meal," with unleavened bread, wine, and horseradish mixed with a little bit of olive oil for our version of bitter herbs. We were going to attempt a more traditional rest of the meal, for the adults, at least. Since it was Thursday, our traditional pizza night, we ordered Little Caesars for the kids. Unfortunately, (or fortunately, I leave it to you), Door Dash was confused, and we ended up with, instead of a pepperoni pizza and a cheese pizza, three different kinds of pepperoni pizza (thin crust, deep dish, and regular crust). I did not know that all of the kinds of pepperoni existed. In light of this bonanza, and the fact that we won't be eating the leftovers today, it was pizza night for everyone! Not the most traditional of Seders, I feel. But it did feel harried and of the moment, so I feel that the spirit was kept, if nothing else. Ready to eat and run, indeed.

The blessings were good--blessing of bread and wine together, around the table, by candlelight. Kids complained of the taste of the bread, of course, but we had a discussion of what we were doing, and I was pleasantly surprised by how well the kids seemed to understand. Especially the nine year old and the eight year old (my first communicant this year), who answered questions very thoroughly about the Last Supper/first Mass, about the bread and wine becoming the Body and Blood of our Lord, and the words of Consecration said by Jesus and then, of course, said at every Mass. That was a blessing too.

So now we are in Good Friday mode and getting ready for our Good Friday commemoration. It makes me wish that we had at some time purchased a wooden clanger; it is this sound, more than any other element, that always brings Good Friday home to me in a visceral, chills down in the spine sort of way. The replacement of the welcoming bells with the dolorous thud of the wooden blocks. But we have plans. Christopher is going to teach the kids the Stabat Mater; I look forward to seeing how that will go. The kids are downstairs currently coloring pages with the Stations of the Cross; at 3:00, we will feature them in our makeshift Stations. We will have fourteen candles lit, and we will show the kids' Stations as we pray each Station, and extinguish the lit candles until we reach the end, and no light is left.

It feels like that is where we are caught right now, in that limbo between where the light is out and we are looking to the light resuming on Easter. This pandemic, like all crises, serves many purposes--it reveals the cracks, the things we try to hid and paper over, and gives us the chance, in a way we don't have in ordinary time, to ask big questions and try to create big answers. It is such a time for our society, and for our church. Why, with this rich society, and the society that devotes so much money and resources to the medical system, are we so terribly unprepared to deal with this emergency; why do we not have the doctors, nurses, and supplies we need? Why do we cut essential things to the bone? It shows what we value as a society, where we spend our money; where has all our money gone, when we don't have the PPE that we need?

It also calls on us to ask what it means to be church itself, when the sacraments are being kept from us, supposedly for our own good. But the church is there to provide the sacraments; at the most basic level, that is the point of the church. But fear has locked the doors, and even when practices are developed to let us have the Mass, with precautions taken, such as drive-in Masses, we are denied even these comforts. I have long feared this development, seeing that if such a situation arose, our leaders would take the choice of fear, rather than standing up for us. There is a divide in the church, I see, that we don't talk about, and what all the other arguments we have are proxies for, fundamental differences that boil down to the question of: what is the purpose and meaning of church? Is it justice--what our society deems and calls justice--or is it charity--caritas, love--of which justice is the handmaiden? Justice, after all, can only flow from charity, the highest purpose; if we aim for justice, we will not achieve charity. If we aim for charity, though, we can achieve justice. What is the center of our lives? Does the church offer us God's grace in the sacraments, or does it serve the goals of the society it finds itself in? We have to ask ourselves that question. We need to discuss how to answer that question. And we need to determine how we build that church, because when the initial, present, crisis is done, we are going to be in a deeper, longer crisis, where the old answers won't hold anymore, because we have seen the cracks and we know we can't paper over them anymore. Our job, as women, mothers, laity, is to see the church that we need to have, to hold that image in front of our church leaders, and work with them to create that church.

In light of living the church which we want to create, then, here are ideas for Holy Saturday and Easter Vigil. Holy Saturday itself feels pretty self-explanatory; preparation, decorations, removal of purple cloth on all of the icons and pictures (we de-purple the house!), the annual dying of the Easter eggs. But for the Vigil: no Mass, no Easter water, no welcoming rite of baptism. Maria von Trapp makes me feel emptiness, as the majority of her ideas for Easter Vigil revolve around the liturgy itself, with the lighting of the Paschal candle, and all the candles, the baptismal service with lessons, Litany of the Saints, and blessing of the Easter water, followed by midnight Mass.

Light, though, of course, is the predominant metaphor for this day, the Light of the World reborn. We are putting out the lights in our Good Friday Stations of the Cross, and so for our Easter Vigil, we welcome light back in. To my husband's sorrow, I think that we will have to have a blessed fire in the backyard. Do you have a fire pit handy? We got one last summer; it is quite inelegant, a little metal bowl placed on bricks, with a couple of metals benches surrounding it. I wanted a fire pit for a while, and while it is not fancy, it gets the job done nicely. I have taught the nine year old the joys of fire building, and he is getting quite proficient on his own. And we have learned, through many years of vicissitudes in trying to celebrate St. John's Eve, with a blessed bonfire (the whole point of the feast, right?), that it is possible to have a blessed bonfire with a layman if necessary. (I will include the blessing for a fire at the end of this post.) So, a blessed fire, burning our impromptu branches from Palm Sunday (they were blessed with holy water, so burned they must be). We can recite a Litany of the Saints. We can read the Gospel and lessons if small children are patient enough. Maria von Trapp points out that Easter fires are traditional celebrations in Europe, "innumerable bonfires ... lit in honor of the Risen Lord." (She also mentions the Boellerschiessen, where the young men shoot their "old fashioned heavy rifles" and the "echo takes up those cannon-like detonations," but unless you are really isolated up in the mountains, maybe skip this particular celebration.) Mary Reed Newland suggests reading the Gospel, renewing of baptismal vows that are normally part of the liturgy, the blessing of fire and of the paschal candle. I think having the blessed fire, reading the Gospel, reciting the Litany of Saints and maybe, the renewal of the baptismal vows, sounds lovely.

I am also very tempted to create my own Paschal candle; we will see what Christopher will let me get away with. Mary Reed Newland offers these suggestions: cutting the design into a candle, with a cross with the alpha and omega signs on top and bottom and the numerals of the year written out, (so 2020), one number per quadrant of the cross. She suggests, after the cutting, painting them with red oil paint. At the four points of the cross and at its center, pierce with a hot skewer and insert a clove (looks like nails). I include the blessing for the paschal candle below as well.

Blessing for a New Fire
V. The Lord be with you.
R. And with thy spirit.
Let us pray. O God, who through Thy Son, the corner stone, hast bestowed on the faithful the fire of Thy glory, sanctify this new fire produced from a flint for our use; and grant that by this paschal festival we many be so inflamed with heavenly desires, that with pure minds we may come to the feast of perpetual light. Through the same Christ Our Lord.
R. Amen
(Sprinkle fire with holy water)

Blessing of the Paschal Candle
V. The Lord be with you.
R. And with thy spirit.
Let us pray. May the abundant infusion of Thy blessing descend upon this lighted Candle, we beseech Thee, almighty God: and do Thou, O invisible regenerator, look down on it, shining in the night; that not only the sacrifice that is offered this night may shine by the secret mixture of Thy light; but also into whatsoever place anything of this mystically blessed object shall be brought, there the power of Thy majesty may be present, and all the malice of satanic deceit may be driven out. Through Christ our Lord.
R. Amen
(Sprinkle candle with holy water).

I hope these reflections help you in celebrating Holy Saturday and the Easter Vigil in your domestic church, as we work together on our common task of building the church. Please let me know how it goes!

Adapting Holy Week for the Domestic Church: Holy Thursday Thoughts

Christopher is downstairs watching the Tenebrae service streaming from St. John Cantius right now.  I am struck by several thoughts on this. One, it seems miraculous that he could be watching this beautiful service in this beautiful church so far away from us. And it seems so sad; watching something on the screen seems so distancing, so isolating, so removed from the true purpose of what you are watching, which is to have this connection with God, which would seem to require being present in a way that you can't be if you are only experiencing it on the screen. And I feel afraid, afraid of the screens, of how easy they are, how seductive they are, and how ultimately alienating they can be, as we accept this false reality. Combined with the fear of other people that we have now, we can fully justify an acceptance of this fake reality, and that it will become the default reality for us in the future. I fear the loss of the community that I have worked so hard for several years to create for my children, I have been walking around with that knot of anxiety in my stomach today about that. Will our communities still be there at the end of this? Will we be able to overcome our fears and still gather together? I prepare my Holy Thursday reflections with that fear, with the prayer that our Holy Thursday rituals can bring us together.

And those thoughts tie into other of thoughts today, of Dorothy Day, of her loneliness and her search for connection and love and meaning. Her autobiography was even entitled "The Long Loneliness," in case you miss the point of her search. I have been thinking about Dorothy Day today, and I don't really have a fully formed thought on her, or, rather, I have many many thoughts about her, but nothing fully coherent.

These thoughts began to swirl around after I read an article in the online version of the New Yorker; a new book and a new documentary on Day are being released soon, and the article reviewed Day's life in that context. Certain elements of the articles struck me. The author was bemused by what she saw as the inherent contradictions of Day's beliefs. On the one hand, pacifist, women's rights, champion of the poor, critic of capitalism; but on the other hand, firm supporter of the church's teachings on sexuality, including abortion and homosexuality, a firm believer in the teaching authority of the church, a firm practitioner of the prayers and the liturgy of the church. My thought was: there is no inherent contradiction in Day's thoughts. Only in today's political system--and that is the key phrase--only in this moment, and only in this particular political structure--are these beliefs viewed as being in opposition. They aren't, and they shouldn't be. In this time of crisis, when everything is now up in the air, maybe it is time to think about the society we have and the society we want to have. I feel close to Dorothy Day today: her search for community and connection echoes my own fears of loss of community and connection.

Which brings us to Holy Thursday! Holy Thursday just feels tricky, right; the part of Holy Week that is most about the institution of the priesthood; how do you mark that without a priest, without a Mass? My sources suggest a Passover meal, or a Seder, to mark the day. I have to make a confession at this point: I have a very limited skill set. I am not artistic, not good at arts and crafts, and I am not a cook. A meal like a Seder is a daunting task, not helped by the fact that I am very limited at the present moment at my ability to go out, go shopping, and get the supplies needed for such a meal.

However, I take heart from two suggestions from Maria von Trapp (she, of course, who had her own house priest to bless her Seder meal). She points out, as her priest blesses the meal, that his tray includes the unleavened bread and wine glasses. He blesses the bread and the wine, before passing them around. Von Trapp points out that "people in the time of Christ used to clear the table after a good meal and bring some special wine and bread, and in the 'breaking of the bread' they would signify their love for the departing one ... To share bread and wine together in this fashion, therefore, was not it itself startling to the Apostles, but the occasion was memorable on this first Holy Thursday because it was Our Lord's own great farewell." She goes to add that, "Every Holy Thursday spent like this knits a family closer together, careful to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace, one body and one Spirit ... one Lord, one faith." So, in that spirit, we will break the bread and share the wine together on Holy Thursday. And, Maria included a recipe for unleavened bread that Eileen and I are feeling ambitious enough to attempt. I will let you know how it goes. I include for you Maria von Trapp's recipe for unleavened bread, you know, just in case you can't get out to the store to find it for yourself.

1 and 1/2 cups flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 egg, slightly beaten
1/2 cup butter
1/3 cup warm water

Mix salt, flour, egg, and butter. Add the water, mix the dough quickly with a knife, and then knead on a board, stretching it up and down to make it elastic until it leaves the board clean. Toss on a small, well floured board. Cover with a hot bowl and keep warm a half hour or longer. Then cut into squares of desired size and bake in a 350 degree oven until done.

If you are feeling really ambitious, and have the elements on hand, you can include more elements of a Seder meal, including a bowl with 'bitter herbs' (parsley, chives, and celery greens), another bowl with a sauce (I don't have recipe for said sauce), and the aforementioned unleavened bread. The entrée is the roasted lamb, eaten with the bitter herbs and sauce.

I will keep you posted on how the bread turns out.  And, next up: ideas for Easter Vigil (backyard fire, anyone?)

Adapting Holy Week for the Domestic Church: Spy Wednesday, Good Friday, Stations of the Cross

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.

Adapting Holy Week for the Domestic Church: Palm Sunday

I have been thinking a lot lately about women’s work and women’s role in sustaining the faith,
keeping it alive, and ensuring that it gets passed down to the next generation. In many ways, I keep
seeing parallels between our current situation and the situation of the early Church in Kentucky. 

While the circumstances are very different between the early Church and ourselves, similarities to our
current situation abound: there was no regular access to the sacraments, and there was not ready
access to vowed religious for teaching and instruction. Women, such as Grace Newton Simpson,
noted for her strong theological mindset and willingness to stand up for herself against all comers,
including bishops and priests, did the work of holding faith alive for their families, ensuring that their
children were instructed in the faith and of keeping traditions alive. The historic accounts of the early
Kentucky church are alive with the accounts of these strong women who were noted for their faith,
works, and tenacity. 

The challenge facing them, which they met with such aplomb, is similar for us today, even though the
solutions we need are very different I feel this is the challenge facing us at the present moment; I
have seen it coming for a long time, in fact, but this present moment has created an urgency to the
problem that I had not anticipated.

We have to ask ourselves, as these Kentucky pioneer women did, how can we keep the traditions
and the faith alive in circumstances that are less than ideal? How can we come together when we are
kept apart from one another? It seems particularly heartbreaking this week, the holiest week of the
year, as we are unable to come together in the celebration of the Triduum. I do think that this requires
a reframing and understanding of the role of women in the church. The sacraments are the lifeblood
of the church, it is true; but women build the body through which that lifeblood flows. The question
before us today is how do we build that body now.

So, I thought I would look into some traditions and adapt them for our domestic churches. There are
many wonderful suggestions out there already; I offer these in this blog post in the spirit of my own
interests, which tends to want to imbue the home with liturgical touches, as well as my own
indifference to arts and crafts projects. Today, some thoughts for Palm Sunday:

First, even though it is already past, I thought I would throw it in: last Sunday was Passion Sunday. In
light of the last sentence of the Gospel, recounting that “Jesus hid himself” away, the tradition was to
cover all icons and art works depicting Jesus, His Mother, or the saints, in the church, with purple
cloth—this is a really easy one to do at home, and really helps set the tone for the last weeks of Lent.
Turn pictures and icons to the wall; cover statues and crucifixes with purple cloth. My kids really enjoy
going through the house and covering everything up.

For Palm Sunday: I felt that I wanted to do something liturgical-minded to mark the day. I ran across
this idea in a book, by Maria von Trapp, entitled Around the Year with the von Trapp Family. She
discusses that during her childhood, in Austria, they did not have ready access to palms. So, they
made use of the plants of early spring that were available; she mentions pussy willows and
evergreens in particular. Her family would make several little bouquets out of these plants—one for
the vegetable garden, one for the flower garden, one for each field, as well as many single twigs
placed around the house.Her family would take them to church and get them blessed with holy water,
carry them home in a procession, and then take them around the property as a blessing on the home,
while saying the rosary.

Now, we can’t do that exactly, as we can’t get the bouquets blessed in church right now, but I thought,
to adapt the practice, we could find available plants here, in Kentucky, as Maria did in Austria; bless
them with holy water—many of us have our own holy water, blessed and brought from church; and
then go as a family around our homes, saying the rosary, or singing alleluia, while placing them
around our living areas, which are in deep need of blessing as they serve as our refuge and
protection from sickness. So we have our own Palm Sunday procession!

I am including here as well a couple of links: 

Sarah Wilson sent along a link for a very cute Palm Sunday craft project as well as a coloring page.

Mike Allen shared a pamphlet from Liturgical Press with some prayers and rituals for the home for
Holy Week.

Coming shortly: ideas for the rest of Holy Week.