What is in Kelvin's Head?

In just three days…

12/04/2025

Every year I make a promise to people. I say that if they keep the triduum with me at St Mary’s then it will change their life and change their faith. I think that keeping the Triduum helps make sense of all that we do in church for the rest of the year. In just three days, you can learn things about the faith and why Christians believe the things that they do that are much harder to learn during the rest of the year.

The Triduum is the three days from Maundy Thursday to Easter Day. Although the various services take place over several days, it is really one big feast, which is what makes it so extraordinary when you keep it in one place and experience the whole thing. It really is life changing stuff.

A few years ago, I blogged about it, and it might be worth pointing people to those blog posts. There’s a few things we do a bit differently and I’ve changed my mind about one or two things too, but these blog posts do capture the essence of what we are up to.

Maundy Thursday
Veneration of the Cross
Three Hour Devotions
Good Friday Evening
Holy Saturday – all hands on deck!
The Vigil

I’d say you’d kept the Triduum with me if you come to the Maundy Thursday evening service, two of the three services on Good Friday (try for the three hours if you can), the clean and polish on Saturday and the early fire Vigil and the main Festival Mass on Sunday.

On Good Friday in the evening there will be a simple sung service of Night Prayer called Compline. On the Saturday evening we’re going to try something completely new. My colleague Maggie McTernan and I often go to a folk singaround in a local pub. We’re going to be leading a session of singing on the Saturday evening of Songs of Hope and Lament. People can bring a song to sing or simply come and listen to the singers and join in the choruses. (Only rule – no alleluias until Easter Day).

This year we are having a revival on Easter Sunday and there will be a number of people who will be baptised at the Easter Fire Vigil.

This is all open to anyone. You are just as welcome to participate if you have been at St Mary’s all your life or if you’ve never been. Some people come to keep these days here with us because their own church isn’t keeping them like this and they’ll be going back to their own church once Holy Week is done. That’s fine too. I’m also happy to answer questions as we go through these days about what it is all for. (The Saturday morning is a good time to talk).

It really is life-changing if you do it all and there are people around who will testify to just that.

Easter, Good Friday, Holy Week, Maundy Thursday, singaround, triduum, vigil

9 responses to “The Lament Question”

kimberly

12/08/2009

ask it in the singular, and the answer is: because you’re a four.

you’ll have me playing the funeral ikos next.

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kimberly

12/08/2009

the other answer is about possibility being revealed in limits.

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kelvin

12/08/2009

Its not just me though, and not just fours.

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Aaron Orear

12/08/2009

I think because sorrow touches the core of the human condition – we are mortal but can perceive immortality. “He has made everything suitable for its time; moreover he has put a sense of past and future into their minds, yet they cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.” (Eccl. 3:11)

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Erp

12/08/2009

I understand Aristotle talks about catharsis and various philosophers have followed up on that idea.

Perhaps it arouses sadness both from the art itself but also from our own sources festering within and allows us to let go. We feel better for the letting go, the lessening of our own internal sadness, and so perceive the art as beautiful.

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RosemaryHannah

12/08/2009

Kimberly was there before me. However, even I, a nine, can sometimes see the beauty in sad things. For me they do two things (may be more but two are most obvious). The first is the catharsis thing. The second is to make me less lonely. Look, here am I weeping, but all around me people sit in the same sorrow. It is not just my sorrow – I am not alone.

I have long thought there is another answer, one I do not properly understand but I have (I think – and who am I to think it). Deep in God there is a huge well of sorrow. Unless we experience sorrow we cannot understand God. When we sorrow we tap into that well, and become closer to him.

And being a nice cheerful nine, I will now add that I live in hope that having sorrowed with him, we will share also and even more fully in the joy which swallows the sorrow. Delete this last paragraph from your mind on reading, it will only spoil the joy of the sorrow.

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Elizabeth

13/08/2009

Edgar Allan Poe said the most beautiful thing in the world is a beautiful, dead woman. Nice, eh?

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Ritualist Robert

14/08/2009

Surely it’s because the concept of beauty is independent from concepts such as ‘sadness’ and ‘happiness’ – just as a G major chord might be loud or soft, but that volume has no effect on its G major-ness.

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Steve

14/08/2009

I remember Augustine saying (don’t ask me where) that for a picture to be beautiful it requires dark colours as well as bright.

There is also a hint of an answer in this poem by Edwin Muir:

Yet still from Eden springs the root
As clean as on the starting day.
Time takes the foliage and the fruit
And burns the archetypal leaf
To shapes of terror and of grief
Scattered along the winter way.
But famished field and blackened tree
Bear flowers in Eden never known.

Blossoms of grief and charity
Bloom in these darkened fields alone.
What had Eden ever to say
Of hope and faith and pity and love
Until was buried all its day
And memory found its treasure trove?
Strange blessings never in Paradise
Fall from these beclouded skies.

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