What is in Kelvin's Head?

  • Change your life

    [This post is reposted from a previous year. No-one who has ever kept the triduum with me has ever told me that what I promised fell short of their experience].

    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.

    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.

    I blogged a bit about it [one] year, and it might be worth pointing people to those blog posts:

    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.

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

9 responses to “The Lament Question”

  1. kimberly Avatar
    kimberly

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

    you’ll have me playing the funeral ikos next.

    Reply
  2. kimberly Avatar
    kimberly

    the other answer is about possibility being revealed in limits.

    Reply
  3. kelvin Avatar
    kelvin

    Its not just me though, and not just fours.

    Reply
  4. Aaron Orear Avatar
    Aaron Orear

    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)

    Reply
  5. Erp Avatar
    Erp

    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.

    Reply
  6. RosemaryHannah Avatar
    RosemaryHannah

    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.

    Reply
  7. Elizabeth Avatar
    Elizabeth

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

    Reply
  8. Ritualist Robert Avatar
    Ritualist Robert

    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.

    Reply
  9. Steve Avatar
    Steve

    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.

    Reply

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