A Great Silence on Earth Today
Many know the extraordinary ancient homily that is read at “Tenebrae” on Holy Saturday. Just having read it in our parish church, I am struck anew by its depth and audacity. Those unfamiliar with it will, I hope, be as moved by it as I always am. It begins:
Something strange is happening – there is a great silence on earth today, a great silence and stillness. The whole earth keeps silence because the King is asleep. The earth trembled and is still because God has fallen asleep in the flesh and he has raised up all who have slept ever since the world began. God has died in the flesh and hell trembles with fear.
He has gone to search for our first parent, as for a lost sheep. Greatly desiring to visit those who live in darkness and in the shadow of death, he has gone to free from sorrow the captives Adam and Eve, he who is both God and the son of Eve. The Lord approached them bearing the cross, the weapon that had won him the victory. At the sight of him Adam, the first man he had created, struck his breast in terror and cried out to everyone: “My Lord be with you all”. Christ answered him: “And with your spirit”. He took him by the hand and raised him up, saying: “Awake, O sleeper, and rise from the dead, and Christ will give you light”.
The rest is here.
Thanks for posting this. Lovely!
I miss Tenebrae services. I have never been to a Catholic one; the local church doesn’t do them, I think to keep the burdens of Holy Week light for our elderly priest.
Not to deflect attention from Catholic worship, but we did have a Tenebrae service in the Anglican Church on Thursday night of Holy Week after sundown. What I remember most was that there was an inverted V-shaped candelabra lit before the service started, and a a candle was snuffed out after each reading. The church remained dark for Good Friday, and then the Paschal candle relit the church at the Easter Vigil.
From the Great Silence to the Great Night. The height of the liturgical year when all is transformed forever.
Rejoice, heavenly powers! Sing, choirs of angels!
Exult, all creation around God’s throne!
Jesus Christ, our King, is risen!
Sound the trumpet of salvation!
Rejoice, O earth, in shining splendor,
radiant in the brightness of your King!
Christ has conquered! Glory fills you!
Darkness vanishes for ever!
Rejoice, O Mother Church! Exult in glory!
The risen Savior shines upon you!
Let this place resound with joy,
echoing the mighty song of all God’s people!
It is truly right
that with full hearts and minds and voices
we should praise the unseen God, the all-powerful Father,
and his only Son, our Lord Jesus Christ.
For Christ has ransomed us with his blood,
and paid for us the price of Adam’s sin to our eternal Father!
This is our passover feast,
when Christ, the true Lamb, is slain,
whose blood consecrates the homes of all believers.
This is the night
when first you saved our fathers:
you freed the people of Israel from their slavery
and led them dry-shod through the sea.
This is the night
when the pillar of fire destroyed the darkness of sin!
This is the night
when Christians everywhere,
washed clean of sin and freed from all defilement,
are restored to grace and grow together in holiness.
This is the night
when Jesus Christ broke the chains of death
and rose triumphant from the grave.
What good would life have been to us,
had Christ not come as our Redeemer?
Father, how wonderful your care for us!
How boundless your merciful love!
To ransom a slave you gave away your Son.
O happy fault,
O necessary sin of Adam,
which gained for us so great a Redeemer!
Most blessed of all nights,
chosen by God to see Christ rising from the dead!
Of this night scripture says:
“The night will be as clear as day:
it will become my light, my joy.”
The power of this holy night dispels all evil,
washes guilt away, restores lost innocence,
brings mourners joy;
it casts out hatred, brings us peace,
and humbles earthly pride.
Night truly blessed when heaven is wedded to earth
and man is reconciled with God!
I returned a couple of hours ago from the Easter Vigil.
The baptisms of young people in their twenties (seven this evening) is an enormous encouragement to my own jaded and troubled life of Faith. You can live too long, and it doesn’t help to have lived in close proximity to what I can only term “the ecclesiastical system.” Alas, not always a great inspiration.
As well, there were among the concelebrants two who are ninety, Father Edward Bodnar, long a classics professor (Ph.,D., Princeton) at Georgetown, and Father Ladislas Orsy. We began at 8 and ended at 10:30. And there were those two faithful priests, now over seventy years in the Society.
In addition to the baptisms, so sublime and yet so simple, the water and the words. I always get chills when I hear sung, “O truly necessary sin of Adam.” and, soon after, when I hear proclaimed, “He made the stars.”
And this year I mourned to think that after nearly forty years I was hearing for the last time the present text of the Exsultet, movingly quoted above by Bill Mazzella, as well as the the preface of Easter, the collects, the solemn blessing. The 1973 texts for Holy Week are markedly more memorable than the collects for the rest of the year. A different hand at work. As well, the Eucharistic Prayers, the prefaces, and solemn blessings in the 1973 Sacramentary. Prayer, indeed English prayer!
Though I sing well enough, I do tend to show off a bit, my otherwise reserved personality cast aside. But then I thought, “Go for it. It may be the last time.”
Easter joy!
The baptisms … ARE
We had two adult baptisms, of people in their 30s or 40s, and four confirmations beside them. My son came to church for once, and I saw him listen to the readings and sing the responses. The priest talked about Christ coming for all, and the need to be inclusive of all. I had a kind word for him after the Vigil, setting aside strains for once. The general goodwill was palpable in the church.
The Vigil started at 7 p.m. Father used to wait until sundown like the diocese said, but then he found out that the diocese starts its vigil at 7 p.m., so he moved the time up. It was still light when we got out.
There were seven catechumens–a single mother with four kids, someone’s wife, and someone’s sister. Given the 90 percent drop-out rate after RCIA, my money’s on the wife being the one most likely to show up for next year’s Vigil. Of course, one prays for these people and welcomes them anyway.
The cantor doing the Litany of Saints couldn’t be heard over the organ. I have no idea whom we were asked to pray for us, so I inserted my own favorites.
The lectors did a good job except that one said that Pharoah’s army bogged down in the sand and could not “excape.”
I invited The Boy to go with us, and–surprise!–he did. Even managed to find a respectable pair of jeans and a shirt that wasn’t black. He had on a plastic wristband that said “Hope.” Not sure where that came from, but amen to that.
I thought about him getting baptized in that same church when he was four. He busted his baptismal candle from fiddling with it, but this year I had sense enough not to reminisce about that aloud.
It was announced at the end of Mass that the Blue Team managed to make it to the Holy Land during the “Walk to Jerusalem” contest. The Yellow team drowned just off the U.S. east coast. We were shamed about not having met our dicoesan appeal pledge, the first time in years. I don’t think the Church Ladies really understand how tough times are for most of us, but I put in some extra.
My Lenten project has been reading Flannery O’Connor, and here’s an extract from one of her letters that occurred to me during our sad little Vigil:
“I think the Church is the only thing that is going to make the terrible world we are coming to endurable; the only thing that makes the Church endurable is that it is somehow the body of Christ and that on this we are fed. It seems to be a fact that you have to suffer as much from the Church as for it, but if you believe in the divinity of Christ you have to cherish the world at the same time you struggle to endure it.”
Bless O’Connor (and all the rest of you who urged me at one time or another to read her). The readings by St. Augustine provided by Fr. Komonchak this year were also appreciated, but if there’s anyone who can bring an apostate like me back it’s O’Connor’s astringent and often hilarious-yet-dead-serious observations and stories about faith.
Dear John Page –
Don’t mourn the Exsultets too hard. They shall return. Sooner or later, they must. Or something even better will burst the bonds of our current sad, cramped souls.
What a wonderful homily posted here by Fr. Imbelli. Audacious is right. Is its author known?
Several years ago, our parish started celebrating communal Morning Prayer during Triduum. I’ve had the opportunity a couple of times to lead the prayer and to preach on the Saturday. The experience has led me to conclude that one of the things that has largely slipped away from our parish lives, in our focus on the evening Triduum celebrations, is an awareness of Holy Saturday. Liturgically, we (or at least I) tend to glide right from Good Friday into the Vigil.
The homily posted here is a real Holy Saturday homily – just the sort of thing our elect should here as they prepare for the holiest evening of their lives.
“The experience has led me to conclude that one of the things that has largely slipped away from our parish lives, in our focus on the evening Triduum celebrations, is an awareness of Holy Saturday. Liturgically, we (or at least I) tend to glide right from Good Friday into the Vigil.”
Yes, especially when the Vigil is moved to early evening. I understand that people with kids to be received and baptized want to accommodate their bed times. Maybe naps for the younger kiddies?
Also: Isn’t there a practice in some parishes of having keeping the church open and someone in attendance continuously between the end of Good Friday and the start of the Vigil? I remember signing up for a “shift” for this one time. The local Church Ladies scoot everybody out after Good Friday so they can decorate for the Vigil immediately and not have to come back until Saturday night.
God bless their efforts, but it sort of blows away any time for private prayer in the church. Not that one can’t pray at home, but people are less likely to ask you to help find your keys or run out to the store if you’re in church.
Thanks so much for posting this; there is a liturgical and devotional lacuna here that begs to be filled in some way, and a dreary minimalism that sets in, if you let it.