I'm taking off tomorrow morning for St. Stephen's in Sacramento to spend the Triduum in liturgical heaven. It'll be all the old-school traditional Latin Mass, with Tenebrae chanted every morning. :D Four of us are going on this road trip-- now how did I get to know three other people as fanatical as I? We'll pretty much live all weekend at the church and drive back home after the high Mass on Easter Sunday.
I'm going to miss being at St. Peter Chanel though. That's for sure. It's been three years since I was received into the Catholic Church there at the Easter vigil, and I vividly remember that first Triduum when I was an almost-Catholic; it was such a blessed, amazing, otherworldly time. Can't really describe it.
For that matter I certainly still remember Holy Week services at the Protestant churches I grew up in. It was one time of year we Evangelicals would get a bit liturgical, and I always used to feel the significance of it and feel especially close to God. Too bad one can't do everything. I suppose the older you get the more stuff you have to be nostalgic about.
I'm going to quit this post before I start quoting C.S. Lewis' poem about how the past is irretrievably lost to us but not to God-- too late, I'm quoting it:
...Where fled
Dreams at the dawn, or colours when the light is sped?
We are thy colours, fugitive, never restored,
Never repeated again. Thou only art the Lord,
Thou only art holy. In the shadowy vast
Of thine Osirian wings Thou dost enfold the past.
There sit in throne antediluvian, cruel kings,
There the first nightingale that sang to Eve yet sings,
There are the irrecoverable guiltless years,
There, yet unfallen, Lucifer among his peers....
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