Justin Appel

Dear Friends,

Today is Wednesday of Holy Week, sometimes called Spy Wednesday.

I have been thinking about the liturgies we do at Saint Philip’s, which have their own character and content during Holy Week and which lead inexorably to the great climax of the Easter Vigil. In a way, these liturgies and the narrative movement of the passion story began on Palm Sunday, which itself has a dual nature: both a triumphal gesture of royal welcome as we remember Jesus’ entrance into Jerusalem in the Liturgy of the Palms, and also the exceedingly long Passion Gospel lesson, which is chanted by several voices. I found this service moving and full of drama, brought to a kind of conflicted apex in the stirring entrance hymn, Ride on, ride on in majesty.

This is what I’ve been thinking about our Holy Week liturgies.

They are long, as Western liturgies go, and perhaps a bit tedious at times, while exuberant at other times. This, it seems to me, is just as it should be.

When liturgies run long, they put us into a state of mental and physical torpor and even exhaustion, which in turn, empties our minds, and allows us to simply be. In my own experience of lengthy liturgies, the feeling of real exhaustion can lead to a sort of trance-like state, that so-called “liminal state” on the edge of ordinary experience where, in the company of texts, symbols, and ritual action, we make a transition from Lent to Easter.

What am I saying? That this tediousness is good, and something to be embraced during the services this week.

I hope you go to Tenebrae tonight, which happens at Saint Philip’s at 7:00 pm—and where we will sit in increasing darkness, and contemplate the silence of the grave.

Yours in Christ,

—Justin