Living the Paschal Triduum

When I was a boy, my mother wouldn’t allowed me to play with the other children on our street on two days of the year.  I knew that these days were important – after all, they had names: Good Friday and Holy Saturday. 

I suspect that this was a cultural hand-me-down from her Irish Catholic heritage.  So often, these cultural traditions are rooted in good theory but, after some time, they become an unquestioned expectation of social norms.

As such, I never received an explanation other than, “It’s Good Friday/Holy Saturday,” which, to my young mind, seemed a weak justification for curtailing my play time. 

I do wish that she had been able to offer a fuller explanation because now, in the greying years of my life, I believe that she was on to something.

It comes down to our attitude to the liturgical manifestations of our Faith.

One of the oft-repeated phrases to come out of Vatican II is that we, the laity, should have a full, active and conscious participation in the Eucharist.  This is in contrast to the experience of most Catholics prior to the Second Vatican Council, when we were generally expected to be no more than passive attendees of Holy Mass. 

But, as several of our previous reflections have noted, there needs to be a coherence between what we do within the walls of our churches and what we do in our lived lives outside of those churches.  To put it bluntly, for our faith to grow and be true, we need to do more in our lives the merely turn up at church.

This is not to say that joining the rest of our Catholic community to celebrate the Sacred Liturgies is not important.  It is, of course, very important.  But what we do in church cannot be the “be all and end” all of our Christian life.

The Paschal Triduum – Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and the Easter Vigil – cannot be held in isolation from the other hours of those days; as Fr Paul Turner notes, they are “means by which the faithful enter these mysteries.”  We cannot compartmentalise them away from the rest of our lives over those three days – we must live those hours of Jesus and his disciples in our own lives.

When you accept this, then all the distractions that secular society throws at us in order to  make the most of the “Easter weekend” are precisely that – distractions.  Suddenly, watching “Shrek Forever After” on Friday or “Doctor Who” on Saturday seems….incongruous.  Somehow, just wrong.

Let us enter fully into the Paschal Triduum: the intimate sharing of the Passover Meal, the utter bewilderment and desolation of Good Friday and Holy Saturday, and the unbounded joy of the Resurrection at the Easter Vigil.