Triduum

April 5, 2021

Winter hung on. We stumbled through the move from the apartment to the new house with fewer troubles than some people experience, nothing valuable was wrecked, the power was turned on as scheduled, the neighbors didn’t stand on the sidewalk staring. Not that I’d mind. But then we have no sidewalk. Suddenly it was Easter Week. 

We “attended” Mass on Palm Sunday by watching it on the internet. Easter called us to show up. Last year the churches were shut by covid-19. We tried to set aside the dark memory of the year of pandemic agony. We turned to the eternal Easter message: love, humility, compassion, mercy, hope, the weapons that will defeat evil that returns again and again: 550,000 souls lost to a microbe, a season of political mendacity, spasms of incomprehensible violence.

Hope is the beginning. We pressed forward tinkering with our new living space, prospecting through the garageful of boxes we hauled from the apartment, and before that to the apartment from the Virginia house. We met the neighbor across the street, who welcomed us in her soothing, lilting, regional twang. She grew up near here, she said. She mentioned she long has admired the Japanese maple in our front yard. I turned and looked at it, the branches were bare, but I thought I could see tiny buds. That’s something, I thought.

I kept puttering. The light bulbs in the three-lamp bathroom fixture had been mysteriously snapped off at their sockets; the home inspection missed it. I was able to extract them with pliers after getting a scary electrical jolt that made me yell and throw the pliers up in the air. I realized then I should have turned off the switch.

I looked at the neighbors’ yards to the east, west, and south, saw no one. Not a soul. I hung a few pictures and raked the backyard weeds. I tried hooking up the internet, it didn’t work. I called the company, the fellow checked the account and found the internet had not been connected in the house since 2013. Another message from our seller, the enigmatic Miss Jean. She had decided she didn’t need it. Didn’t need it, so didn’t want it.

Then we left the chores on Holy Thursday, start of the Triduum. We struggled to grasp the truth of the miracle, perhaps this year as much mystery as miracle.  Easter and Passover lift us from grief. The Gospel writers stand against the onslaught of human tragedy, advancing the message of the Resurrection, the central event of history. This year, from John:

“Peter and the other disciple went out and came to the tomb. They both ran, but the other disciple ran faster than Peter and arrived at the tomb first; he bent down and saw the burial cloths there, but did not go in. When Simon Peter arrived after him, he went into the tomb and saw the burial cloths there, and the cloth that had covered his head, not with the burial cloths but rolled up in a separate place. Then the other disciple also went in, the one who had arrived at the tomb first, and he saw and believed. For they did not yet understand the Scripture that he had to rise from the dead.”

We settled in, along with the complicated memories. I owned up to it: we left good people and places that still hold me. On moving day last week I stood in the empty apartment where we lay our heads for five rootless months and wondered again at the choices that landed us in this compact little house with the squared-off property lines in a two-street subdivision, on the fringe of a city we barely know. Then I shook my head and dropped the retrospectives, which now come so easily. We pushed forward to the next things, the things that matter now.  

We worked at anchoring ourselves: changing addresses, visiting the tax office and the Motor Vehicle Department. Sickness took over: appointments, tests, surgery and recovery, more appointments, more tests. In November, in an auditorium at the downtown parish, we watched Mass on a video screen. We visited the pastor before the operation, he helped me through it. A Pentecostal minister stopped by my hospital room for a chat and a prayer, he submitted a report on his visit to the hospital chiefs. I hoped they approved.  

The evangelical Christian church next door to the apartment sported giant banners: “Overcome the Past,” and “You Belong Here.” The first presumably alluded to South Carolina’s segregationist history. The second was a pitch. They, like their competitors, planned major services this weekend, visitors welcome.

People raced back to the churches, as they stampede back to bars and restaurants. Masks are disappearing, hugs and backslaps are everywhere, celebrating the Savior’s hard work in making things “normal” again. It looks that way. Millions now can brag of having at least one vaccine shot. Chocolate bunnies and jellybeans are back on the shelves. Easter once again brought out the pretty dresses and stylish hats.

Dark clouds rushed in on us midweek, bringing chill and a hard rain. The feds are warning of the spread of covid variants. People are getting sick again.

We showed up for Mass with masks. We thought about those half-million now gone, their families, and all the rest: the victims of cancer and mass shootings.  The choir wasn’t there but the prayers were those of past years, of every year. We knelt and witnessed the recreation of the sacrifice, the prayers of the faithful, the solemnity of the Season, the return of hope. We looked ahead to Spring.