I was brought up in a ‘middling’ but serious form of Anglicanism: neither particularly high nor noticeably low. Lent, Holy Week and Easter were observed solemnly, and our mediaeval parish church was always decked in gorgeous white flowers for Easter. The seasons of the Church became part of my life in childhood and grew in importance during my adolescence, when I was confirmed – after a due period of instruction.
But it was in Greece, in 1984, that I first grasped, in something resembling its totality, the real possibility of Easter and its season of preparation. I was sixteen and on my first visit to Greece. We spent Holy Week and Easter on the island of Aegina. The island was carpeted with wildflowers and we walked extensively. As Holy Week progressed, I realised we were getting caught up in something I had never exactly experienced before: a whole community observing the Christian rituals together. Aegina Town has three large and beautiful churches, and we were in all of them at various times. For Good Friday, we headed to the Panagitsa, the lovely church dedicated to the Virgin on the harbour front. There the epitaphios (the representation of the Lord’s funeral bier) was sumptuous: its frame encrusted with seasonal wildflowers and carried aloft into the streets, with the bells tolling mournfully and the people following the procession. On Holy Saturday, I was surprised to find the tavernas largely closed at lunch and in the early evening; we ate alone in the apparently sole place that was open. Everyone else was observing the fast of the triduum. Later we were in the cathedral for the Easter vigil and the proclamation of the Resurrection at midnight. Since then, I have been present at many Greek Easter proclamations, but I shall never forget the excitement, the heat, the chaos, the joy of that first one.
The bidding prayer for the Anglican service of imposition of ashes at the start of Lent exhorts us to observe a ‘holy Lent, by self-examination and repentance; by prayer, fasting, and self-denial; and by reading and meditating on God’s holy word’. These are demanding words, addressed to and binding on each observant Christian and requiring acts of individual preparation and penitence. But the exhortation is too tough for us to carry it out entirely on our own. And so the Church helps us throughout Lent by offering collective worship that gathers in its intensity and enables us to participate together first as a penitential community and then as a congregation living together the Easter triumph. It is a collective experience that challenges, encourages, cajoles, sustains and ultimately rewards the efforts of the individual soul.
I had planned to spend this holy season amid great congregations. I was intending to be at the Brompton Oratory with Catholic friends for Palm Sunday today; at Southwark Cathedral for Maundy Thursday; at Westminster Abbey for Good Friday; and at my local parish church, All Saints, for Easter Sunday. This is the first time for many years that none of this will happen – for me or for others, and it feels like a bereavement all of its own – particularly the loss of Good Friday and Easter Day: music, readings, prayers, acts of penitence, adoration, rejoicing. Like many others, I will have to do without the great congregational consolations and find substitutes in isolation: live transmission of private acts of worship; CDs and streaming of the passion oratorios; the great settings (Palestrina, Victoria) of the Gospel reading, the Improperia; the hymns of celebration.
Throughout Holy Week, I shall be reading from the Select Meditations of Thomas Traherne, a seventeenth-century poet, theologian and Anglican priest. The meditations are both intensely personal, reflecting intimately on Traherne’s relationship with God, and yet wonderfully outward-looking: with expositions on the Godhead, the beauty of the natural world, the Church, the nation, Traherne’s own ministry. The individual meditations are arranged into four 'centuries' (i.e. collections of 100) and are mostly short (sometimes as short as four lines), occasionally written in the form of poetry and, even in prose, always expressed with magnificent poetic sensibility. I may tweet some of them, as we go through Holy Week.
As we stay at home, protecting ourselves, our families, our heroic health workers and the integrity of our health service, we have more time than usual to think and reflect. It’s not necessarily comfortable to have this time, but it can be well spent! I hope that everyone who reads this will stay safe and enjoy a Happy Easter.
John
Palm Sunday 2020
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