Easter Passed

Nothing happens in the church on Easter Monday, so I had a pleasing day off yesterday. Nevertheless I'm somewhat reluctant to go out of the door back into the fray this morning! This doesn't mean that Holy Week and Easter were not splendid occasions at Swanvale Halt this year, which they were. Across the Triduum attendances at all our services were up - albeit sometimes up only by ones and twos - and the crunch point with the children's Tenebrae which we did for the first time last year was very pleasingly passed with double the number of people we had for that dry run, meaning that about sixty people marked the Passion in pretty traditional ways on Good Friday. At the Dawn Mass on Easter Day several people remarked how we were starting to get the hang of it (after four years!) - 'it felt a bit strange the first time we did it', said one of the servers, 'but it just seems normal now'. There were some very moving moments: the Liturgy of the Passion on Good Friday sticks in my mind, people lining up to venerate the Cross while the Choir sang the haunting version of the Reproaches written by our late organist at Lamford -

 'O my people, what have I done to you? How have I offended you? Answer me' 

Somehow the sense of God's lament, so personal and so intense, came over more strongly to me than ever before, along with the sense that these people, the people I know and pray for, are his people, the ones for whom he cares with a passion that I can only glimpse the outline of.

Of course hardly anyone comes to everything: that's not the point, it seems to me, the point being for a church community to provide across the course of Holy Week and the Sacred Triduum some opportunity for everyone to enter into the reality of God's nature as both crucified and risen, both sides of who he eternally is, and what we are called to be.

I did also participate in a liturgical observance so peculiar it will have to feature in an entirely separate post ... !