This Is the Night
I never had much of a connection to Holy Saturday growing up. My family didn’t do anything during the day to honor it, and we did not go to the vigil Mass as it was considered either too long or too late. When I became a teenager, these reasons became my own.
It wasn’t until I was a senior in college that I began to truly appreciate the tradition of the Church. There’s something about the Triduum that makes even the liturgically sloppiest parish do a decent job of emphasizing the sacred, and so my then-newfound appreciation of tradition made me most excited for Easter Vigil, which is still my favorite liturgy of the year.
Yet it was only to be for a few years that I would get to attend after that. We attempted Easter Vigil my oldest child’s first two Easters. The first was fine; the second was difficult. Having a son crying throughout made it impossible to appreciate the beauty that was around me. I realize this is not the point of being at Mass, but it’s something my all-too-human side still craves.
We have not attended the Vigil since that year, and my second child clinched the deal. And, thus, I’m back where I started regarding Holy Saturday and the Vigil. Yet I’ve tried to remedy this in a couple ways. First, I try to do an entertainment fast on Holy Saturday in order to spend the day as though in the silence of Christ’s tomb. I also try to ring in the vigil with the Office of Readings. This year I also meditated upon Mary and John at their new home together, contemplating what they did and what ran through their minds after the death of Jesus (I got this meditation from A Closer Walk With Christ by Raymond Gawronski, SJ). Finally, I like to listen to the Exsultet, one of my favorite songs, in Latin, which I’m currently doing. These are the practices of the monasticism of the heart, of making certain sacrifices in regards to some of the richness of the liturgy so that I can still be with the family God has given me as my primary means of sanctification. When my oldest child is a few years older, the plan is to take him to the entire Triduum rather than just the convenient liturgies.
The irony is that we often do not appreciate what the Church offers until we’re in our college years or beyond, and then we only have a few years to enter most deeply into the liturgy before we become distracted by the discipline of our children at Mass. These children we try to raise to respect and appreciate the liturgy, but they often don’t until they’re in their college years or beyond, and so the cycle goes. Thus, we only have a few years where meditative perfection as people living in the world is possible, or at least, where we can get the most sensually out of Mass. But, then, that seems to prove that such is not the ultimate point of our worship.
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