~ Dante Alighieri,
Inferno<\/i>, Canto I, tr. Seamus Heaney<\/div>\nIt\u2019s the last morning of Lent. Tonight, at the Mass of the Lord\u2019s Supper, the great three days of the Sacred Triduum commence. This is the most precious and wonderful season of the liturgical year, both for the Church and for me personally. Even before the liturgical ceremonies of the Triduum were restored to their proper order\u2013one Vatican II gift to the Church that hardly anyone can argue with, except maybe the sedevacantists who don\u2019t admit there was a Vatican II\u2013this was a solemn and moving weekend. From the intoxicating perfume of the stock petals we white-veiled little girls scattered before the Blessed Sacrament on the way to the altar of repose, chanting the Tantum ergo<\/i> in clouds of incense, to the bare silence of the stripped altar and veiled crucifix on Good Friday (O my people, what have you done to me?)<\/i>, to the chanting of the sequences on Holy Saturday night (My friend had a vineyard on a fertile hillside . . .)<\/i> to the glorious pealing of bells and singing of Regina coeli<\/i> at dawn on Easter Sunday, there was a drama that communicated the significance of these days to even the youngest child.<\/p>\n
I am glad, though, to have the restored order, with the centrality of the Great Vigil and its connection to the sacraments of initiation. The first time we celebrated the renewed Vigil in my home parish (Immaculate Heart of Mary, in Hollywood CA) I was 21 and a lector. Because we had no deacon, I read the English text of the Exsultet<\/i> while a schola chanted the Latin. It wasn\u2019t liturgically correct, but we were wading in, and it raised holy goosebumps throughout the congregation.<\/p>\n
A couple of years later, I was turned away by the new pastor at the church door when I arrived to read on a Sunday morning because, he said, \u201cWe have enough men who can read, so we don\u2019t need your kind any more.\u201d It was the start of me and my kind\u2019s drift away from regular practice, and the Triduum began to hold too many difficult associations. I stood with the members of the Women\u2019s Ordination Conference in silent vigil outside the cathedral Chrism Mass on Holy Thursday. I helped organize and read at Vigils in the parishes and schools where a good priest friend was stationed, and envied the neophytes their sense of belonging. I worked with the pioneering members of the North American Conference on the Catechumenate\u2013Christiane Brusselmans, Fr Jim Dunning, Fr Gene Walsh\u2013on the annual institutes for catechists, and found in the liturgical celebrations of those weeks some of what I had lost, but it never moved me enough to come back.<\/p>\n
Until two years ago\u2013when, like Dante in the first lines of the Commedia<\/i>, I came to myself in a dark wood. I was more than midway through the journey of my life when I began my reversion. But then, we are always at a midpoint, at a literal cross-road, when the call to Repent and believe in the Gospel<\/i> comes. The journey of our life is traveled in microcosm every year in the liturgical calendar, as the journey of our salvation is relived in these three holiest days. Dante relives it in the Commedia<\/i>, which begins on this day, Holy Thursday, in 1300 and continues through to Easter Monday. The poet\u2019s travels through the depths of hell, up the mountain of purgatory, and into the highest spheres of heaven, guided by the classical wisdom of Virgil and the profound love of Beatrice, bestower of blessings, make the perfect spiritual reading for the Triduum.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not just the liturgical timing, however, that makes Dante the perfect companion for this journey. It\u2019s the message at the heart of the Commedia<\/i>, the lesson we try to teach ourselves so painfully and stumblingly each Lent. In Canto III of the Paradiso, Dante speaks with a young nun who is among those who, while joyful, are set at the outer ring of heaven because their earthly commitment to God was not as wholehearted as it might have been. Dante asks whether they ever wish God would draw them closer. Beaming with content, the young nun answers that to do so would be to question the Source of that content:<\/p>\n
\u201cShould we desire a higher sphere than ours,
\nthen our desires would be discordant with
\nthe will of Him who has assigned us here,
\nbut you\u2019ll see no such discord in these spheres;
\nto live in love is\u2013here\u2013necessity,
\nif you think on love\u2019s nature carefully.
\nThe essence of this blessed life consists
\nin keeping to the boundaries of God\u2019s will,
\nthrough which our wills become one single will;
\nso that, as we are ranged from step to step
\nthroughout his kingdom, all this kingdom wills
\nthat which will please the King whose will is rule.
\nAnd in His will there is our peace: that sea
\nto which all beings move\u2013the beings He
\ncreates or nature makes\u2013such is His will.\u201d
\n(tr. Allen Mandelbaum)<\/p>\n
This has been my most conscious and intentional Lent in a long, long time, or maybe ever. And I have made some tiny steps toward surrendering my will to God\u2019s, with the help of many Beatrices who guide and nudge and smack me into line along the way\u2013my family, my friends in life and in cyberspace, the readers of and commenters on this blog. But I still feel the shadows of the dense and gnarled wood. I am conscious, so conscious, of how far from the direct path I have wandered. Yesterday I confessed that dissatisfaction with falling short\u2013a dissatisfaction that is, itself, a kind of sinful pride\u2013and my confessor, in a feat of reading hearts as insightful as any the Cure of Ars was known for, assigned me as my penance to spend time before the Blessed Sacrament giving thanks for all that God has done for me. Only after making room for gratitude, he said, would I be able to address, one slow step at a time, my catalog of faults.<\/p>\n
And so I did, and do, give thanks that I am both on the road and already home for this year\u2019s Triduum. Tonight, waiting an hour with Jesus in the garden of Gethsemene that is the altar of repose, I will make my prayer his:<\/p>\n
E \u2019n la sua volontade \u00e8 nostra pace:
\nIn His will is our peace.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, ch\u00e9 la diritta via era smarrita. Ahi quanto a dir qual era \u00e8 cosa dura esta selva selvaggia e aspra e forte che nel pensier rinova la paura! In the middle of the journey of our life I found myself astray in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1086,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-63","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n
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