Out and about the weekend just past: Χριστος ἀνεστη

Holy Week and Easter are always very busy times for me.  It seems like I've traveled a great deal since Palm Sunday, when I played at Holy Trinity, Port Melbourne.

Last Thursday I went up to the Cistercians at Tarrwarra Abbey, where I played the organ for their Triduum liturgies.  This is the second year I've been there for the great three days.  One of the liberating things is being able to walk in without being expected to contribute to assembling the musical structure of the services beyond organ music at the appropriate moments.

There is a givenness about monastic liturgy that one only encounters in cathedrals and those rare parishes where custom hasn't ossified into habitual rigidity or narrow aestheticism.  I think that givenness derives from the rhythm of the house: so many people go to church for eucharistic liturgies and would be surprised to discover that this is only one part of what goes on.  I suppose years of singing or playing at Evensong tends to shape one's consciousness of the daily office.  Staying in the guesthouse is an opportunity to be part of the daily office with the monks, which provides a much richer background for the big services of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Easter Sunday.

At Tarrwarra the Easter vigil takes place just after the usual time for the office of Vigils, and runs from 4.30am till just after 6.30am.  Until I went up to Tarrawarra last year I had always experienced the Easter vigil as a night service, but now have to admit that that makes less sense on reflection.  Waiting until nightfall on Holy Saturday is all well and good, but a lot of the imagery of the Easter liturgy is about the breaking in of the light, new dawn, rising anew and so forth.  While there is a certain amount of urgency about these images at night time, I think this particular once-a-year liturgy really stops you in your tracks when the dawn breaks as the experience unfolds.  Maybe that's how it's meant to be.

One of the beautiful things about the dawn vigil at Tarrawarra is hearing the magpies wake during the readings and to hear their singing intensify as the dawn breaks, and then to hear the wheeze of hot air balloons passing overhead once the sun is up.  The blend of a slow-rolling liturgy carried out with all the trimmings in a thickening haze of incense with these ambient sounds is one of those moments of poetry in motion.

One of the traditions at Tarrawarra is opening up the fireplaces in the guesthouse so that the first fires for the winter season can be lit on Easter Sunday.  This is one of the highlights of the day, along with the festal breakfast and meeting with many people who come up for Easter who form a sort of community-of-the-community beyond the monks and their near neighbours.  The flow from liturgy to breakfast is absolutely continuous: both begin with the kindling of new fires.  We are drawn to the light and comforted by the warmth, and together we share in the story and make a feast.

After the labours of the early morning, I took to the roads and made my way to St Aloysius, Caulfield.  The Newman Singers were scheduled to sing for the 10.30am Pontifical Solemn Mass, another slow-rolling liturgy with incense and all the trimmings of the traditional Latin Mass, which has a certain givenness about it.  This was the last of the series of big liturgies for the weekend, and the vigil had been held in the night before.  Quite a few people were a bit bemused that this was my second shift for the day, and then mildly horrified to discover how far I'd driven and when I'd woken up.

The mass setting was Joseph Haydn's Missa Brevis Sancti Ioanni de Deo, for which we had strings.  The parish has a very strong musical tradition of chant and polyphony, but no real exposure to much beyond a cappella vocal music in the liturgy.  This week there was the full dose of choir plus organ, choir plus organ and strings, and organ plus strings.  Other music included some of Mozart's Church Sonatas, one of which kept me at work on the piano during the days at Tarrawarra.  Many people responded very positively to the music, with a lot of comments about how the Haydn expressed a really high joy for Easter.

I eventually arrived home one hour short of four days after leaving and took to bed.  Easter Monday was fairly quiet, and Easter Tuesday brought a little more energy.  A few more days and it will be time to start thinking about Christmas...