The confused season

This is normally a special time of year for me. Having just completed the Easter Triduum, Maunday Thursday to Easter Sunday but this year all the bits were jumbled up.

Coming from a liturgical tradition, my experience was Maunday Thursday focused on the Last Supper and the servant attitude of Jesus in washing the feet of his disciples.The church was then stripped of all adornment and people left in silence beginning the vigil there and then. My old church had people standing the vigil right through the night. Then on Good Friday, we faced the suffering time of Christ with a starkness and almost raw experiences with a silent procession and a three hour service of reflection and readings. Then the vigil until sunrise Easter Sunday with a fire lit at dawn, and then a eucharist/communion.

Everything was a bit jumbled up this year. I was in music rehearsal Maunday Thursday. Both Good Friday services I attended had communion which felt really odd. Then neither service really didn't have much reflection on the passion and suffering of Christ. Then Easter Sunday somehow something was really wrong. It was the first Easter for a long time where I finished two services with no strong feelings in my person. I felt no cause to celebrate that the most important festival of the Christian calendar had jus been celebrated. Somehow this year I missed the rollercoaster of emotions of a triumphal march into Jerusalem to betrayal, denial and just plain fickleness in the people of Jerusalem. I missed the deep despair of Gethsemane, a sense of injustice, the agony of mistreatment and abuse, the emptiness and apparent worthlessness of an empty cross and a stone cold tomb, then a group of bereaved women, an empty tomb and first light and glimpses of Resurrection. I missed the spiritual rush of emotions of this season of the year. What happened to me?

Someone asked me today whether I would teach on What is worship! The trouble is we don't really know, I'm not sure I do anymore. Except that it includes an encounter with the absolute, the Wholly other, with God himself. What does that mean? I believe firstly that we run the gamut of the whole range of human emotions and secondly that we are changed!