Today is Good Friday, which, for Christians, is as close as we get to a day of reckoning — on earth, anyway. Catholic tradition asks us to fall silent from noon to 3, as those are the hours during which Jesus suffered on the cross for the sins of mankind, and meditate on how we can become better people.
I did this several times while I was at Sacred Heart School in Lynn and under the influence of the Sisters of St. Joseph.
This is also the day we look back 40 days, to Ash Wednesday, to when we made all these grandiose promises, and either smugly conclude we met the challenge or sheepishly admit we did not. I won’t tell you to which category I belong.
The Bible tells us that Jesus knew he was going to die, knew how, and allowed it to happen to fulfill an Old Testament prophecy. We’re also told we’re not supposed to be able to understand any of this, and that’s a good thing because I sure don’t.
Nor do I understand Easter. Oh, I think I get the whole rising from the dead part, far-fetched as it might sound to a non-believer. I just don’t understand the math. Christ died on a Friday afternoon and rose from the dead early Sunday morning. His disciples came to visit the grave and found the stone blocking the entrance rolled back and his body gone.
Somehow, that comes out to “the third day,” according to scripture, but wait. Friday night … all day Saturday … crack of dawn Sunday morning … oh, never mind. It’s way beside the point anyway.
In the insular Roman Catholic world of my youth, the Easter Triduum — Holy Thursday, Good Friday and Holy Saturday included — was the biggest of the big deals. My mother was in the Sacred Heart choir, and she recruited a bunch of kids in my seventh-grade class to be adjuncts to the main body of singers. So we got to experience the whole thing on a much higher level — literally, because we were in the choir lift high above courtside.
If we weren’t singing, we — the altar boys — would gather en masse and process into the church as an old-fashioned pipe organ that sounded as if the Phantom of the Opera himself was at the keyboards pulsed right through you and down to your toes.
And on Holy Saturday, after an exhausting three-hour ordeal that included what I call up-downs (scripture readings and post-reading prayers) the whole shebang ended with a rousing version of “Jesus Christ Has Risen Today,” as if it was the finale of a Wagnerian opera.
I distinctly remember that on one particular Holy Thursday, I got home just in time to hear Johnny Most’s famous “Havlicek stole the ball” call.
Then there was the time someone I know brought his own bag of Peanut M&Ms to Mass with him on the Easter vigil so he could dig in the minute he got out of church and his 40-day Lenten commitment to do without had officially ended.
You know what’s funny? Every year I balk at going to these pre-Easter marathon vigils. They’re too long, my back, legs and knees ache from sitting and standing (and standing and sitting), and as I get older I’m less and less enthralled with people — and especially priests — who drone on and on.
Not this year.
These traditions that have been around longer than I have (and that’s pretty darn long) have been snatched away from us by this coronavirus. And I know that, at least on this count, I have no business feeling cheated. But I do.
I have family I won’t see, including a 97-year-old mother-in-law. Easter is also my son’s birthday and we won’t be able to celebrate that together.
The only thing you can do is grin and bear it. And I mean grin. As I do my social distancing, my mind takes me to strange places.
For example, does anyone remember the song “Easter Parade?” It’s from a Bing Crosby movie called “Holiday Inn,” and it talks of all the ladies who dress to the nines for the “Easter Parade,” which is really a stroll up Fifth Avenue in New York.
Well, Bingle, I’ve seen the footage. Fifth Avenue is dark. All of Manhattan is dark. New York is the epicenter of this U.S. pandemic, and the ladies strolling up the avenue these days are all wearing masks and hazmat suits.
And what about the Easter Bunny? You know. The guy who gives us all those Peeps in our baskets every year that we either feed to the dog (and watch him spaz out from the sugar rush) or that we just surreptitiously throw away.
How’s the Easter Bunny handling this? Does he have a mask on? Is he wearing gloves so those chocolate eggs don’t get contaminated? How often does he change them?
Has he conceded to the seriousness of the threat and kept the jelly beans in a sealed bag? I can remember when I got mine, the jelly beans were all mixed in with the thick green artificial grass and you’d have to dig through it to find every last one of them.
Does his Uber driver observe the rules of sanitation? Does he observe the proper social distancing? Questions … questions, aside from the obvious one of how rabbits came to lay eggs.
I know one thing won’t change. Ever since Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice composed “Jesus Christ, Superstar,” I’ve set aside a time every year, at some point during the Easter Triduum, to listen to it, uninterrupted. It was pretty much the soundtrack to my senior year of high school, and I always associate it with what was a frenetic time in my life. Those days are obviously gone, but the music isn’t.
Happy Easter.
