2 minute read
"Taking Triduum to the people" by Monica Hall
"Best. Service. Ever.” Said with her mouth full of a white buttercream-frosted sugar cookie as she walked out the door after the Vigil on Holy Saturday. She had no idea it took over 100 hours of intentional preparation for the service that night. A 74-year-old Midwestern woman just experienced the heavens and earth collide in the best worship service of her life—in the hours of the women running to the empty tomb.
Until 2005, I did not know The Great Three Days even existed. Like a tree falling in the woods, and no one hearing it—is it real? It’s a grave reflection for the church that the greatest three days of good news is missing. (Maybe we need to staple a “Have You Seen Triduum? –Call this number if seen; Good News is worried” poster on telephone poles.)
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Admittedly, if Jen Lord would not have brought me alongside the planning, the intention, the preparation, the meaning of it all—I would have passed the stapled missing sign on the telephone pole without flinching, unaware of heavenly worry.
The meaning of Triduum and its intention for the church is more than ritual. The Book of Common Worship has the entire service print-ready, so there is little reason for ignoring it. The toil of preparation for it all is grueling— much like The Great Three Days. It is emotionally draining, physically demanding, and pastors, perpetually living in the exhausted mode, are ill equipped to prepare 20-30 church members for spiritual vulnerability.
Nevertheless, in 2010, in Woodward, Oklahoma, a small and energetic church decided to trust the planning for The Great Three Days and promised to go all in. So many questions, so many “why’s,” so many “my Catholic friends say we are going to be here past midnight …” But here was the result: “The experience of our church this past week has never been like this ... it makes me wonder how the practices of this week will flourish in our lives.”
The teaching and preparation of leadership is a crucial part of leading others to experience a church that dies and rises again. Good News no longer missing—but lived.
Monica Hall (MDiv’08) is interim general presbyter for the Presbytery of Wyoming and a current Doctor of Ministry student at Austin Seminary.
