EPISODE 213 – TRIDUUM

POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW

“Triduum” is the term the Catholic Church uses to refer to the sequence of liturgies between Holy Thursday and Easter Sunday. It’s a somewhat confusing term, in that the term indicates the three big Holy Week liturgies – Holy Thursday, Good Friday and the Easter Vigil -- but some Catholics consider Easter Sunday the end of the sequence. Quadrivium, anyone?

Then again, Christians believe Jesus rose from the dead three days after he died, and yet in terms of the way we worship it’s two days tops (and if you celebrate Easter at the Vigil it’s just a little more than one).

Personally, I wish that we had an official, solid day and night between Good Friday and the celebration of Easter. In fact, I think in not having it we miss what might for many of us be the most important beat.

Okay yes, I did just suggest that there’s something more important than Jesus’ total offering of himself out of love for us or the fact that three days later God brought him back from the dead and in that we learned that all that Jesus had preached was actually for reals and we can place our trust in God.

As you know, I am want to flirt with hyperbole. Here’s my point: most of us know what it’s like to experience something truly awful: A death. A break up. A bottoming out. Something that doesn’t just make us sad but reveals that we’ve been operating out of a lot of assumptions and beliefs that are just not EXPLETIVE OF YOUR CHOICE DELETED true. That on some level we’re just pathetic and naïve little children who have been living a lie.

Who am I kidding, you live long enough and you get the fun fun fun experience of riding that rollercoaster more than once.

That’s what Good Friday is all about. “Hey, you know that guy you used to hang out with who did all those cool things and said God was his dad and was so clearly the one who was going to save everybody? Yeah, we just publicly humiliated him and then tortured him and then nailed him to a cross and now he’s dead. LOL.“

In the words of Billy Crystal channeling Edward G. Robinson: “Where’s your Messiah now, see?”

Or in the hilarious stylings of cartoonist Jim Benton:

And you know what – both in the Gospel story and in real life – the following day, everything is not suddenly all better. In fact, most of us wake up that next day (and the next and the next) hoping against hope that it was all some crazy nightmare. Calgon take us away.

But it isn’t and Calgon can’t because life is the nightmare and that’s what Holy Saturday actually is, life in the world after all our hopes have been shattered. It’s realizing that Samuel Beckett was doing documentaries not plays. (I call Pozzo.)

You rarely hear anyone talk about the Harrowing of Hell. That’s the (non-biblical) story that after Jesus died he spent three days in Hell liberating every good person that was down there only because they came before his time and so didn’t know about him (which includes pretty much everybody in the Old Testament and everyone other good person who ever existed and yes when you scratch the surface makes absolutely no sense, but again, the Triduum is four days and Jesus somehow spends three days in the tomb over 36 hours and people just this Thursday insisted on referring to a weapon of mass destruction as “the mother of all bombs” so I feel like we’ve got other problems to which we should probably dedicate our energies, and no one really talks about the Harrowing anyway, so also there’s that).

Personally, I don’t think we need to add a prison break to our story of the Passion (though I would accept a heist, if it involves Jesus, Moses, Abraham, Jacob, Sarah, Ruth, Plato, Confucius, the Buddha, Isaac and Matt Damon, and Sarah almost blows the whole thing because she’s always laughing at the worst times). But I wish we’d reclaim that Triduum idea of harrowing in its real sense of the suffering we experience not when all is lost, but after.

Because it’s a major part of the human experience of life. It just is.

Also, it helps us understand Easter and God. One of the greatest things I ever learned in theology was the idea that God is the one who finds a way where there is no way. Not where it doesn’t seem like there will be a way, or where we’re just not totally sure, could you check back tomorrow. No: the realm where there is no happy ending. There is no red pill. It’s just going to be like this. Definitively. Sorry.

And then God shows up and pulls out a purple crayon and suddenly we’re in another world on a sail boat headed to an awesome castle and it’s all going to be great. Because He’s God. In fact, that’s what it means to be God. Walking through walls is his call sign, bro.

So I don’t know – if you’re looking for something to try this Triduum, maybe take some time Saturday to sit in the lack of it all, in the how it’s all going wrong and it’s never going to get better. Look at pictures of the melting ice caps. Read about kids being sold in sex slavery, or the latest spat of violence in Israel and Palestine, or young mothers who died of cancer. Spend some time on Twitter – trust me, it will not take you long.

And the point isn’t to get morose or bitter, but just to allow ourselves to be in touch with that part of our existence that often rides along beneath the surface without us ever facing other than when the nightmare scenario happens -- that sense of futility and powerlessness and the total absence of God.
Live in that truth. And wait for God to walk through our collapsed buildings and bring us into new life.

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Or, if that sounds awful and like trying to make yourself cry, you could also check out “The Leftovers”, which begins its third and final season on HBO on Easter Sunday -- which is absolutely not a coincidence, because the show is all about the experience of living Holy Saturday and waiting desperately – and usually despite oneself – for the possibility of relief.

If you don’t know the show, here’s the premise: Three years ago, 3% of the world’s population vanished, just like that. Babies, old people, moms and dads. That nice old woman down the street, but also that punk kid who was always torturing the neighborhood cats, BAM, gone. Raptured, or something – nobody knows what. There’s no explanation. They’re just no longer on the planet.

(Here's the opening credits from Season 2, which capture the conceit of the show in a really wonderful way.)

The story focuses on the people in a small town in New York who, like everyone else around the world, are slowly coming undone as a result of that loss. For some, it’s the moment that revealed that everything we believe is nonsense and we can should do whatever we want because nothing has any meaning anyway. For others, it’s a call to a greater faith. And to one fascinating cult-like group called the Guilty Remnant, it’s a call to action. While others try to regain some sense of rhythm and normalcy, the Guilty Remnant spend their time disrupting those attempts in every way that they can (and my God are some of their ways brutal). Apparently a lot of the audience didn’t like the GR, and they place a smaller role in the second season. But for me, they are the religious heart of the show, the group that try to stop people from returning to some form of slumber.

It’s a show about grief and loss and how to make sense of the world when the randomness is revealed. It’s about people trying to face the truth and slowly, slowly, slowly discovering the possibility of a life of hope that is not only scary but meaningful precisely because it is so damn fragile.

Apparently this third and final season has the characters we’ve met headed to Australia to try and survive the flood that’s going to wipe out everyone. And not only can I confirm Australia is the right place to go in that or any awful potentially-awful circumstance (even if most of the Australian population lives on the coast and most of the continent is desert), but I highly recommend it even if you’re not in trouble, because the people are great and they have a form of football that is so much better than the American and also while God visits all of us everywhere he actually lives in the Outback.

“Leftovers” is a wonderful show, is what I’m saying. (Also, visit Australia.) A great meditation on Passion, absence and Easter.

It also occasionally features Justin Theroux's abs,
which frankly are a little disturbing.
You're 45, Justin. Time to let go.

++ LINKS ++

Speaking of watching things you love (or I love, anyway) die, here’s a story that adds a whole other layer of weirdness to the apparent heat death of a major American business to which I’ve been a loyal customer since I was 16 years old.

Speaking of Damon Lindelof, if you’re a “Lost” fan it turns out they originally conceived of a ridiculously different ending to the show (that still did not involve explaining the outrigger canoes); hearing why they didn’t do it also helps explain what for me was probably the one real misstep of the show.

*Ahem*

And speaking of hope and beauty and life coming out of sorrow, this clip from this week’s Star Wars Celebration is pretty special.

Finally, the dog in the picture at the top is actually my parents’ dog Maverick. (I know, I don’t understand it, either. That’s just how they are with him.)

I posted it not only because it’s just the craziest picture ever, but because I cannot shake the feeling – strike that, the certainty -- that the person in the Easter Bunny costume is actually my mother. She says it’s not true, but if you knew her, you’d know, whether it is her or not, it is definitely her.

Be good to yourself. Remember, a new life doesn’t have to start with anything big. It can just be a nice walk at sunset.