In the book O Pioneers by Nebraska novelist Willa Cather, one of the characters opines:

“There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.”

Sometimes when I use this quote while teaching I ask the participants to offer aloud what they think those two or three repeating stories are and I write what they say on the white board until there is no more room. And when we take account of all these scribbled words that no doubt are gleaned from the narratives of their own lives, they always seem to be condensable to three primary themes: love, loss, and liberation.

Liturgists tell us that Triduum (three days) is not so much four separate liturgies called Holy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter Sunday but rather one hyphenated and continuous liturgy. This one liturgy marks the High Holy Days of the Christian community of faith. And the one liturgy recounts and re-members us to the one mystery – the paschal mystery – which is told as an earthy and sacred story that features the three primal themes of love, loss, and liberation.

Like all good tales, and all true tales, the story we tell during these days both reveals and conceals truths, holds the tension of opposites in a holy communion as the feast holds within it the memory of the fast and as the fast holds within it the memory and yearning of the feast, just as true sadness always conceals joy and as real joy always carries within it the experience and awareness of sadness, and just as love holds the loss that holds the liberation.

The paschal mystery, unlike puzzles or unsolved problems or riddles, insists on holding together what we often knowingly and unknowingly insist on keeping apart—the sorrowful, joyful, and glorious mysteries of life. The fullness of these days, the fullness of the tripartite story we participate in again because its mystery is nothing we can solve or compute but only enter into or not enter into, is not merely a series of historical events we recall from Sunday school classes or CCD but rather, to borrow from the writer Frederick Buechner, the gospel that is the “tragedy, comedy, and fairy tale” of life and of our lives on earth in God.

When Christianity has run amok it is often traceable to allowing the pendulum of religion (or faith or spirituality) to swing so far in one direction that the blessed tension is no longer held and as a result it becomes a caricature whether that caricature is one long unending torturous Good Friday with no notion or commotion of the upending movement of Easter – “Death where is your sting?”– or the celebration of an Easter that is so divorced from the many little and large ways Christ is being crucified today in our midst that it is too anemic to even get us out of bed let alone to roll away the stones that keep us from enjoying, participating in, or perpetuating resurrection.

Triduum

Holy Thursday to Good Friday, Good Friday to Easter Saturday, Holy Saturday to Easter Sunday brings together the intimate, necessary, and dynamic relationship between the transformative experiences of love, loss, and liberation that thread the vivifying movement of the paschal mystery and the story of our life in God.

Holy Thursday

Holy Thursday offers us two evocative images that like an iconic diptych open up for us the meaning and experience of love –love freely given and love humbly received. The action Jesus performs with bread and wine, and the action he performs with water, bowl, and towel. Love broken so that it can be shared and love poured out so that it both grounds us like the weight of wine in stone jars and uplifts us with joy that resists containment.

Holy Thursday invites us to commit ourselves to a Love that is as real as bread, as extravagant as wine poured forth, and as self-implicating, other-embracing, up-close-and-personal, unsanitary, and salvific as washing feet not connected to one’s own legs. The motive, animating, and transforming force of the Easter event begins and ends in love. The mystery, manners, and movement of these three days which distill the whole of Christian life is being in love.

Good Friday

Good Friday, with its oxymoronic tongue pressed firmly against its cheek, invites or pulls or pushes us into the audacious truth not only that loss is as potentially transformative as love but that the Good is often carried in the chrysalis of the Bad, even in the horrific, not like a quaint sentiment tucked inside a Hallmark card but as a father who was a doctor in a totalitarian country who having escaped to this country now unceremoniously works two menial labor jobs in order to offer a freer life for his children.

The sacrifice of life (sacre–facere, literally to make holy) is the making holy of life by choosing to side with love, by choosing to stand courageously for love in the face of fear and threat and the potential loss that comes with our allegiance to love. To be a Christ-ian is to pledge allegiance to love and to live out that allegiance in the many unseen choices and common deeds of each day. To expose ourselves to the choice of joining Jesus today and tomorrow and next week and next month in the ten thousand places and ten thousand faces where Jesus lives and suffers among us here and now is to surrender to the “magnificent defeat” as did the man on the cross who was executed for disturbing the peace—a fabricated peace, the pax Romana—with a love that moved freely and deliberately beyond borders.

Easter

Winter is over. The seeds of hope long buried reach for the light that elicits the fragrant release of life. Buds appear on the once naked branches. Easter springs forth. Loss gives way to liberation and liberation always appears as the fullness of life. Joining the litany of life, love, compassion, and oneness, there is no other divine way of being for which humans –images of God– long than freedom. The Trinity, as the beloved community who is God, is the community of mutually reverential and enlivening freedoms in which all creation is invited to move, blossom, and flourish.

A ferry boat capsizes in the South Korean sea leaving nearly three hundred young people trapped in the bowels of the submerged ship while their upset families are held hostage by the worry and fear brought on by the unknown fate of their loved ones. Thousands of miles away we feel the crushing pressure of unfreedom. There is nothing more terrifying, diminishing, or demanding than the suffocating loss of freedom. Trapped by the plethora of freedom-killing –isms that plague every continent on earth– self-loathing, guilt, greed, violence, bitterness, sin, avarice, injustice, paralysis, resentment, illness, exploitation, fear, or anger– the sacred drama we reenact each Easter, is the tenacity of life and the audacity of love which is the liberating dream of God we are invited to help make real “on earth as it is in heaven.”

In the spiral of the paschal mystery, in the dying and rising of Christ, what goes around comes around so that the Christ-event that happened once and for all time becomes a living reminder as we experience not once but many times throughout our lives the movement of love and loss and liberation that breaks our hearts open again and again, cultivates within us a sympathy for all people, places, and things, and opens the way to being in love.

In Joy,

Dan