Triduum open thread

"We know of that Good Friday which Christianity holds to have been that of the Cross. But the non-Christian, the atheist, knows of it as well. This is to say that he knows of the injustice, of the interminable suffering, of the waste, of the brute enigma of ending, which so largely make up not only the historical dimension of the human condition, but the everyday fabric of our personal lives. We know, ineluctably, of the pain, of the failure of love, of the solitude which are our history and private fate.

We know also about Sunday. To the Christian, that day signifies an intimation, both assured and precarious, both evident and beyond comprehension, of resurrection, of a justice and a love that conquered death...The lineaments of that Sunday carry the name of hope (there is no word less deconstructible).

But ours is the long day's journey of the Saturday."

-George Steiner

>>>>
But the non-Christian, the atheist, knows of it as well. This is to say that he knows of the injustice, of the interminable suffering, of the waste, of the brute enigma of ending, which so largely make up not only the historical dimension of the human condition, but the everyday fabric of our personal lives. We know, ineluctably, of the pain, of the failure of love, of the solitude which are our history and private fate.
>>>>

Maybe things are different for Mr. Steiner, but my life is nowhere near as bad as the life he describes.

injustice? interminable suffering? failure of love?

Wow, that must be rough...

Perhaps the greatest tragedy, John E., is that there is no Easter Resurrection for the atheist. There is no unbearable joy, no peace that passes all understanding.

Such is the stubborn life for those who reject the gift of the Cross.

John E., if God speaks anywhere, it is into our personal lives that he speaks. But to try to express in even the most insightful and sophisticated theological terms the meaning of what God speaks through the events of our lives is as precarious a business as to try to explain the sound of rain on the roof or the spectacle of the setting sun.

But he speaks nonetheless, and the reason that his words are impossible to capture in human language is that they are ultimately, always incarnate words. They are words fleshed out in the everydayness no less than in the crisis of our own experience.

-Fredrick Buechner, paraphrased

Ecce lignum crucis in quo salus mundi pependit. Venite adoremus.

Popule meus, quid feci tibi? Aut in quo contristavi te? Responde mihi.
Quia eduxi te de terra Aegypti: parasti crucem Salvatori tuo!

Hagios o Theos. Sanctus Deus.
Hagios ischyros. Sanctus Fortis.
Hagios Athanatos eleison himas. Sanctus Immortalis miserere nobis.

Quia eduxi te per desertum quadraginta annis, et manna cibavi te, et introduxi te in terram satis bonam: parasti crucem Salvatori tuo!

Hagios ....

Quid ultra debui facere tibi, et non feci? Ego quidem plantavi te vineam electam meam speciosissimam: et tu facta es mihi nimis amara: aceto namque sitim meam potasti, et lancea perforasti latus Salvatori tuo.

Hagios o Theos....

Here in the Good Friday antiphon and improperia are vestiges of some of the most ancient forms of the Roman liturgy, so ancient in fact that the Miserere is in Greek as well as Latin. The Roman liturgy antedates any of the extant Byzantine liturgies and is thus incorrectly described as "Tridentine".

I would post the English translation but I wish to spare His Holiness Benedict XVI the embarrassment of having to make yet another apology to Abe Foxman and his ever vigilant self-annointed censors of Catholic prayer. Instead I will merely ask that in the redemptive spirit of the season, that when Abe lifts his voice in thanksgiving that he was not born a Gentile, he on balance thank the good Lord on my behalf that I was.

I will now return to my reading of the Stabat Mater dolorosa, after which I will review the several suras of the Koran exalting the Lord's Mother (who appeared in a Portuguese village named for the daughter of the Prophet of Islam) followed by a comparative reading of the Talmud passages treating of the hairdresser Miriam.

Stabat Mater dolorosa
iuxta Crucem lacrimosa
dum pendebat Filius.
....
Eia, Mater, fons amoris
me sentire vim doloris
fac, ut tecum lugeam.

You presume much, sigaliris.

Sigaliris, the problem with "sound bite" expressions of faith is that life experience, the sum total of the highs and lows that facilitate growth, must necessarily be edited out for the sake of brevity.

Such is the paradox of experience in the gutter and on the mountaintop, boiled down into too few many words, that barely hints at the treacherous road travelled toward Golgotha - toward that place where this seeker finally realized, there is nothing else.

Chill, girlfrien'.

Sigaliris, the Church is not Jesus. He is real. Please don't lose faith in Him because of whatever the Church means to you. I will pray for you to see the beauty, truth and goodness of God. Blessings to you this Easter!

John E.

So let me see if I understand you correctly.

Because you insisted on God giving you some kind of sign of his existence, and because you got tired of waiting for such a sign, you concluded that he must not be there, in spite of all the people who have had such signs? I guess all those people must be deluded because God did not give in to your insistence when you think he should have.

I think that somewhere very far back, in spite of you being raised in a Christian home, you missed some very important concepts about religion, such as patience and humility and faith.

Its not patience if you decide in a huff that you have waited long enough. Its not humility when you decide that God must answer you in order for you to believe in him. Its not faith to demand proof as a condition of belief.

I think that many people get onto a kind of death loop in their thinking about God. One question, one prayer, one test rises above the others and then becomes an obsession. Without satisfaction, the loop grows ever tighter until it becomes a death spiral. Finally belief comes crashing down because you didnt get the one answer, the way you wanted it, in the way that you wanted it, when you expected or even demanded to get it. The one issue comes to block out everything else. Nothing can be good unless it is either answered or the whole idea tossed out.

Now that your belief has long ago crashed down because you happened to get onto such a death spiral, you seem to have shut your mind tight against any possible re-examination or re-approachment. You have sealed all the cracks. You have all the snappy answers ready to go. Your case is airtight, that is, no other input can ever again make its way in to you from the outside. Only ideas which are in perfect keeping with what you already have are acceptable or worthy of real consideration. The only thing left now is to scoff and sniff at all those people who still believe and to direct your efforts towards bursting their delusional bubble.

You obviously have a good life. You have convinced yourself that you are a better person for being happy with less than others. That you are a more moral person because you dont need religion to be a good person. But it never seems to occur to any atheist that their sense of smug superiority is the very thing that mars any attempt to be a really good person in spite of whatever other good you may do. The athiests attempt to strip the universe down to its bedrock, to kill off all the "fairy tales" etc can be nothing other than destructive rather than positive. The goal of the militant atheist like yourself (and yes when you haunt a believer's blog to argue consistently against belief in God then you are a militant of some stripe) is to so strip the world for everyone and replace it with a minimalized world thats so much better, more honest for it and to convince everyone that the world is only so good so we all better find a way to love it it that way like the atheists do or else we are asking for too much that we are being unreasonable and childish to want or to think that there is even more.

Its true that the world or universe without God is good. The athiest can be happy, moral and awed by existence. But the difference between your happiness and ours, is that when you look at the stars all you see is stars. When we look at them, we see stars and also love. Your stripped down universe may make you happy but it can never give you joy even if you insist that it does. The reason is that joy means something different from happiness or satisfaction. The difference between happiness and joy is the difference between looking at the cosmos and being impressed with it and looking at it knowing that it was made for you out of an inexhaustible well of selfless love. Knowing that the cosmos is founded in and is saturated with so much love that evil, as awful as it is, cannot possibly overcome it, is what real joy is all about. It is a joy of fullness, of richness, of exceeding goodness overflowing as opposed to the happiness or contentment one finds in being satisfied with some sort of bare minimum.

My joy makes all the difference in my life. I am not just happy. I am not just content. I am lit up like the Eastern seaboard at night. I am freakin jazzed with joy.

My wish for you is that you will open yourself again one of these days and continue your journey and your growth in faith. Let those ideas actually get in without you sanitizing them first. I was like you once, but somehow by God's grace, I never was able to seal out him completely out. Yet I know there is hope for even those who have managed it. You can always open the door again. That will always be in your power.

Ok all, so that is my Good Friday sermon, haha. I always get this way when I fast. :-)

Whoops, obviously the 4:36 posting was from me...

John E.

Sig, your post makes me think of the ending of "Middlemarch" for some reason. I mean that as a compliment.

(The tribute to Dorothea is perhaps the most beautiful expression of the accumuluated impact of decent loving people on the people around them. Not heroic deeds; no dragons to slay; no monastic orders to reform; no heroic act of courage or profound work of art or civilization-altering innovation. Yet things could be much worse for you and I but for all these people. I don't have the novel in front of me so I'm paraphrasing like mad, but those not familiar with the work ought to get the idea.

Hopefully the Teresas of today have more fields of action available to them than Dorothea.....personally, I feel like my role model is more the good Rev. Farebrother, but that's a post I should write about sometime elsewhere I think.)

Anyway, getting back onto topic, one thing that struck me in the Passion reading is the sorrow and doubt in that "My God, My God why have you forsaken me?" For us to believe that Christ is both man and God, and without sin, we must then see that final sliver of doubt itself as a non-sinful part of the human situation. Peace to all.