Tenebrae

We have been burning cherry wood, dried garden off cuts, a gift from my in-laws. It burns solid and leaves the shapes of branches and twigs of ash in the stove, fragile ash-twigs that dissolve with a breath of wind. Cherry become ash.

It has been a cold day, a day of sudden cold storms, sleets and clouds and unexpected sunshine, darkness, squalls of rain. Dramatic weather for Good Friday. On Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Easter Saturday the church service of Matins was closed by an event called Tenebrae, which means darkness. As the service progressed the lights would be extinguished, leaving only the Easter candle lit; hidden behind the altar, symbolic of Christ's light hidden in the tomb. A gentle, quiet, melancholy act of filling the church with gloom, which (coincidentally, this year)echoes in church mystery and theatre the greater earth and sun drama of equinox. Tenebrae is only beautiful if you have faith that the light will be reborn, that Christ will rise, that the sun will climb higher in the sky and the warmth will return. (Otherwise it would be a death-ritual, a Gothic celebration of non-existence.) The connection with the equinox this year is a magical, poetic coincidence. The priest at St Teresa's, Father John, said that when he came to the church 30 years ago there was a large iron frame for 30 or 40 candles, that during the end of Holy Week was wheeled into the church for Tenebrae. The gradual softening and fading of light in a church must be very beautiful. I wrestle with conventional faith, but I find the poetry of the church very moving, never more so than at Easter.