Realm: Update - Subrealm: Easter(?), 2020

[choco_frosh]

Well, folks, it's officially a slow afternoon here in work-from-home land. I went for a walk (with mask) after lunch, bought chocolates, spent most of an hour EATING said chocolates (they may have been a mistake) while rereading some of my favorite bits of The Mauritius Command, finally dragged my lazy keister into Spare Oom to get some work done, and still managed to finish* my back-burner project of helping to update the small business database... despite having tabs for a video of a Messiah performance and cracked.com open in the background. Time for my long-delayed Easter update.

Easter this year was, of course, intensely weird.
Palm Sunday: got up early, scrounged some palms,** went on a long walk that circumambulated a couple of local churches, pausing in the parking lot of All Saints to say parts of the Liturgy of the Palms. Went home and I...think I just read morning prayer? Can't have been very memorable.

(Pauses to check email. Nope, nobody wants me to do anything.)

Maundy Thursday: In my...personal sense of how Maundy Thursday should go, it's a complicated, many-part liturgy, involving a potluck dinner, the footwashing, and a semi-normal communion service (not necessarily in that order, and potentially overlapping), followed by the stripping of the altars and vigil over the reserved sacrament.

Obviously, none of that was happening this year.

Equally obviously (for me at least), listening to a pre-recorded webcast of the service*** wasn't gonna cut it either. So I read the office on my own, then stayed awake late, partly in actual vigil, partly getting some work done in preparation for a Friday when my workday was going to be cut short AND unproductive.

Good Friday: By contrast, whereas Good Friday at the Church of the Advent doesn't differ much from the previous evening in terms of audience participation, the physical participation is less important to me, and the music more important, because it's a service of...let's simplify it and call it contemplation, since I don't feel like analyzing my emotions at huge length right now.
Anyway, so I fasted all day, put in five or so hours of work anyway, then listened to the webcast of one of the Preaching of the Cross sermons,†† and then to the webcast of the Good Friday service itself, breaking off near the end to read The Dream of the Rood.
Then I...pretty much slacked off for the rest of the afternoon, actually (OK, I think I may have caught a second sermon as well.) After it was dark, remembered that I would feel ok with stopping fasting now, and that that would probably be a very good idea, so went downstairs and ate a potato. And some other stuff, but first and foremost the potato.
Somewhere in here, Roommate E. went out and picked up hommade masks, made by sovay's mad-genius-engineer father and some friends. Thanks, roommate E.! Thanks, Sovay's parents!

(Nope, still no new emails/requests/tasks.)

Holy Saturday: Made hot cross buns! Curiously enough, my fb was full of fellow Williams alumni posting about making hot cross buns, and my email contained a large conversation by my family about HCB recipes.
Roommates and I also made delicious salmon, which seemed sort of appropriate for it's-the-end-of-Lent-but-it-isn't-quite-Easter-yet.

Easter Vigil: As I've said before, this is probably the most important service of the year for me, but I skipped it, because in my personal liturgical consuetudo, if you're not setting fire to stuff, it's not Easter Vigil. Went to bed early instead.

Easter:
I decided fairly early on during the Plague my Stages of Grief process for anticipating a messed-up Triduum that on the one hand, one nice aspect of this was that I could go virtually hang out with people that I don't see all the time; and that sort of pretending that I was away from home for vacation/work would make the whole thing easier to cope with mentally.
As such, I decided (for Lent 5, I think) to virtually attend church with (via their recording of the livecast), and later that I would get up at @$$-o-clock AM on Easter and actually tune in live. And so that is what I did.
Excellent sermon, btw, Tree!

(I know that for many people, getting up at @$$-o-clock AM for a dawn service is part of their Easter tradition; but it's never been part of mine. My ideal Easter involves getting up at what only seems like @$$-o-clock AM because you were in a service til ten or eleven the previous night and THEN you went to the giant "everything you've been fasting from" party.)

I also caught a little bit of the Advent's webcast later, but mostly, the liturgical bit of my Easter was hanging out (virtually) with Tree and spouse.

* Well, temporarily, pending further instructions.

** In medieval England, since there were obviously Palm Sunday processions but a notable absence of palm trees, they used any old green branches available: usually yew or box, or pussywillows, among others. I basically did a repeat of this.

*** This being what the Church of the Advent has decided to do for lockdown. it's not a bad notion, since while in some respects doing a livecast makes much more sense (the congregation can all be at least together in time, if not space), (a) lots of other churches are offering that already; (b) livecasting isn't an ideal solution, either; and definitely also (c) God forbid we have a CotA service without a choir!†
On the plus side, we get good music. And they feature bells! Now we just need to persuade them to use a recording of us ringing something well...

† Yes, that was sarcasm, in case you couldn't tell.

†† BACKSTORY: In a perfect liturgical world, CotA would do the Good Friday service at some point between noon and three, the hours that Jesus hung on the cross. Being CotA, it would in fact take up most of that period.
This, however, would require the congregation to be available during that period, which in turn would require Good Friday being a public holiday. Since it isn't (a fact about which I have mixed feelings), they traditionally do the main Good Friday service in the evening.
But in addition, for the Three Hours they do The Preaching of the Cross - a series of sermons (feels very 18th century, doesn't it?) on the Seven Words from the Cross (the seven things Jesus is recorded to have said while hanging on it.) (Or at any rate that's what they did this year.)
IMHO, the one nice thing about this whole business was that in the circumstances, these were instead webcast on a one-per-day schedule all through Holy Week, so I actually got to catch a couple of them.

Comments

[sovay]

Somewhere in here, Roommate E. went out and picked up hommade masks, made by sovay's mad-genius-engineer father and some friends. Thanks, roommate E.! Thanks, Sovay's parents!

Oh, excellent! I'm glad someone came for those.

I am glad the hanging-out Easter worked for you.

[choco_frosh]

I mean, hanging out isn't quite the term, since while I was singing along with the hymns, they couldn't hear me at 5000 miles distance, and I was otherwise lurking silently so that their regular parishioners didn't have to figure out who the random Yank was.

[tree_and_leaf]

Excellent sermon, btw, Tree!

Thank you!

Also, don't feel you can't comment/ like, we've had all kinds of randomers, and the parish know we've got friends and relatives in the US, so I don't think anyone would think anything of it.

[tree_and_leaf]

But I'm glad to hear you were there even if I didn't know at the time!

[sorcyress]

which in turn would require Good Friday being a public holiday. Since it isn't (a fact about which I have mixed feelings)

Good Friday was a holiday for me, which I also have mixed feelings about (especially given that Pesach was not). I'd be interested to hear more about your mixed feelings and find out how much they overlap with mine.

[choco_frosh]

Probably the mirror image of yours? I would really like to have my religious holidays off, but I get that it isn't entirely fair, given that actually practicing Western Christians are a minority of the population.
(And actually, I dunno if, say, Baptists observe it, so...)