Passion Sunday

3:45 am – Time to get up. It is not so bad as it sounds; I go to bed early on Saturday whenever I can. But anything before 4:00 remains hard for me.

5:30 am – Out the door, into the Honda for the trip downtown. The streets are quiet at this hour, which makes the half-hour drive a pleasure.

6:10 am – Begin the work day. I start my Sundays by opening doors, turning on lights, feeling kinship with young Samuel at the House of the LORD in Shiloh (I Sam. 3:15). Then, to the organ bench. These few minutes are precious, and I wish I could get up earlier to have more time. I spend a good bit of time on an extended introduction to “Ride on, ride on in majesty” (tune: “The King's Majesty”). As the congregation enters the church from the procession with palms, singing “All glory, laud and honor,” I kick in with full organ on “The King's Majesty” and must “preludize” until most of the congregation is in the room, then we shall sing.

7:15 am – Matins in the upstairs Chapel, with Fr. Hulme. I choke up while trying to read the First Lesson: Zechariah 9:9-12:

Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion; shout, O daughter of Jerusalem: behold, thy King cometh unto thee: he is just, and having salvation; lowly, and riding upon an ass, and upon a colt, the foal of an ass.

This day is the Scripture fulfilled. All four Gospels describe it, which signifies how important it was. Psalm 24 is fulfilled as well:

Lift up your heads, O gates:
Lift them high, O everlasting doors;
and the King of glory shall come in.

8:00 am – In my office. Final setup for the choir room, a final look at the choral music. Pace the floor; Holy Week is here, and it will require all that we have.

8:45 am – Upstairs to the Parish Hall. A handful of people are there for the 9:00 service; it all feels dispirited. But it improves when children begin to arrive. They play with the palm fronds, they raise the energy level of the room. Now it is all right. It feels like a crowd on a parade route, waiting for the action – and that is how it should be for Palm Sunday.

Our wonderful sexton, John, is pacing about, attending to last-minute issues. He goes outside and discovers that a (probably large) dog has pooped right on the step at the side entrance, where we will all be entering the church in a few minutes. He cleans it up. And then learns that we will not be going outside after all – there is a light rain, and we will stay indoors. So now he has to move the Green Songbooks from their place inside the door to the parish hall, and all of this at pretty much the last minute. He gets it done.

9:00 am – We begin:

Assist us mercifully with your help, O Lord God of our salvation, that we may enter with joy upon the contemplation of those mighty acts, whereby you have given us life and immortality; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. (BCP p. 270)

Normally, I start the singing and scurry through the Sacristy by the short-cut into the Church to be ready when the procession arrives; for the first time in years, I am free to walk the procession with everyone else. I find myself beside H., my almost-seven-year-old goddaughter, each of us holding our palms and singing. Again my eyes fill with tears. She drifts back in the procession and now I am beside L., one of our choristers. She is not a particularly religious girl. But I find that she knows by memory all the words to “All glory, laud and honor” and sings them with vigor. She stumbles on stanza 5 and looks over at my church bulletin, but she certainly knows more of the hymn than I do. Her father and younger brother (also a chorister) are with us, and H.'s family is behind. All of these people, ahead and around and behind, are my friends, my family. It is good to be here with them, palm frond in hand, walking down the hallway and singing.

Last week, I had a discussion with one of my fellow-laborers in Christ about one of the challenges of this work. When you do this, your experience of Sunday morning is not what it would otherwise be. It is hard for us to receive the nourishment that others get by coming to church, and we must find other ways to remain connected to our Lord and his Body, the Church. While others are worshipping, I am noticing the mistakes in the bulletin – the bulletin that we worked so hard to prepare. There are mistakes in the liturgy, in the music. But we are here, this “family, for whom our Lord Jesus Christ was willing to be betrayed, and given into the hands of sinners” (BCP p. 276). And it is good.

10:00 am – The service ends: exactly one hour. We had worried about this; how could we keep it short enough so that the children could have church school? This will be the first year in many that they have even made the attempt, for the long liturgy has most often chewed up all of their time. Not this year; we moved the middle service from an 8:45 start time to 9:00 last summer (to a loud and continuing chorus of complaints), and here is a place where those fifteen minutes have made a difference. It allowed the 7:45 service to get done, instead of it running late and forcing the middle service to likewise get a late start.

10:15 am – Choir warmup. I spend too much time on the hymns and psalm; we have only five minutes for the anthem, just enough to sing it through. And I have worried about this one; it is right at the edge of what this choir can do.

10:55 am – Rev'd Raisin tells me that the service bulletins have disappeared; there are only thirty copies! We printed many more than this, and they were in place earlier this morning. Where could they be? She and I dig through the recycling basket; no luck. I am in a panic, and certainly no state to be leading worship.

11:00 am – Ready or not, we begin. I start the singing, head through the short-cut, take my place at the organ. I kick in with “The King's Majesty” as planned – and the congregation is so small that the long introduction I was prepared to play turns into twice through the tune, about thirty seconds. All that work for nothing...

I am still flustered, not at all in a spiritual state; I am not sure that anyone is. But it is time for the Psalm:

Have mercy on me, O LORD, for I am in trouble;
my eye is consumed with sorrow,
and also my throat and my belly.
For my life is wasted with grief,
and my years with sighing... (Psalm 31:9-16)

The calm sanity of Plainsong Psalmody saves me, and I hope it saves others. This day it immediately connects me with Holy Mother Church and her thousands of years with these texts, with the eternal Song.

The service proceeds. At the earlier service, we took the “short” version of St. Mark's Passion (15:1-39) to keep the liturgy short. At this service, we have time for the “long” version, beginning with the woman and the jar of spikenard. This is how is should be; the short version was too short, “Passion-lite” as it were. There is nothing “lite” about the Passion, and it should take all the time it needs. We should be in Kairos, not Chronos. But at the middle service, we cannot.

The prayers of the people: it is not at all what we expected, which was Form VI in the Rite Two liturgy (BCP p. 392). It is, instead, the Rite One prayers “for the whole state of Christ's Church and the world” (BCP p. 328), which we have used through Lent. We will certainly hear about this on Tuesday at staff meeting.

We have had to produce too many pieces of paper, and we are short-handed. And this week was mostly consumed with the death of a former rector and plans for his funeral – and for the crucial day when all this happened, none of our clergy were in town. One was sitting in an airport, the other was on the road going to visit her mother, who is dying. And that was the day when these prayers and much else also had to be done. And it was also the second day at work for our new secretary.

But we will nonetheless hear about this from the congregation.

Our anthem is “Vexilla regis” by Anton Bruckner, written a few years before he died, a setting of three stanzas of the hymn, given in our book (Hymnal 1982) as “The royal banners forward go,” number 162. The choir sings with intensity and commitment to the sound, to this text and its music.

I have posted our work on YouTube (here). It seems to me that it stands up well against many of the other versions there. Our reading is slower than almost all of them as one can tell from the timings – some of them are almost twice as fast. I notice that our tempo is about the same as that taken by Eugene Jochum and the Bavarian Radio Chorus

Jochum is one of the foremost Bruckner interpreters; his readings of the Symphonies are among the best. It pleases me that he and I seem to be hearing this motet in a similar manner; perhaps there is hope for me. His version is very fine, by far the best of the few that I sampled this afternoon. We are not a professional choir; on this day, we had two basses, two tenors, three altos, and four sopranos, a much smaller group than Jochum doubtless had. But I think we sang with an intensity that approaches that of his recording. I am very proud of our choristers for this.

During Lent, I have not played organ preludes at the choral service, and my postludes have been quiet – some of them posted here through the recent weeks. Today's postlude completes that series: a setting of the tune “Herzliebster Jesu” (Ah, holy Jesus) by Max Reger, entitled “Passion.” Here is my version. To my surprise, I can find only one other playing of this on YouTube, a fine rendition by Edgar Krapp, played on the 1928 Steinmeyer organ at Passau Cathedral in Germany, perhaps the best Reger organ in the world: five manuals, 327 ranks. It will give you a better idea of how this piece should sound. I have adapted it to our much smaller instrument (two manuals, nineteen ranks) as best I could. If I am to play any Reger at all, that is what I must do.

12:45 pm – the postlude ends, and with it the liturgy – almost twice as long as the middle service. I am worn out; I put things away, eat a piece of corn bread, try to work. It is Holy Week; I do not see how we will get everything done.

Jesu, juva.