Most Blessed of all Weekends

With the celebration of the Holy Thursday Mass, I've now entered into the Easter Triduum, the most solemn three days of the Church year, and the setting of my absolute favourite liturgies. As it stands, I'm unfortunately very ticked off at myself. I suffered through Mass with a hint of a buzz from too much wine at supper (we had a Seder supper, re-enacting a Jewish Passover meal, and it requires have four glasses of wine). The buzz wasn't the real problem so much as the fact that I forgot to take my insulin at supper, and thus by the time Mass came around all my supper had ended up in my bloodstream, which inevitably makes me really uncomfortable--and less than able to sing as the high blood sugar meant a syphoning of water into the bladder, and thus drying out other places like the mouth.

The unfortunate result of this is a general crankiness that has only now started to alleviate as I've taken insulin and have had a drink of water. I'm still in a rather pensive mood, though, and this has a lot to do with the fact that I'm feeling quite disconnected from the seminary of late--because I'm never able to be here.

This has been a bad semester for that in general, and while I'm at school I don't begrudge being at school, but I really, really felt kind of "doing nothing/useless" at Mass tonight. This is a false sense of how things should be, I know, since a Mass is SUPPOSED to have ordinary church-goers, but I've been spoilt this week. I served for the Archbishop on Saturday, on Sunday, and on Monday I was on the Chrism Mass serving team, all of which serves to bring out my very normal tendency toward wanting to be at the centre of the liturgical action. I'm quite certain that this has peaked nearly every year yet around Easter, since quite a while before I entered seminary.

On the plus side, as far as that goes, the rest of the weekend should make up for that amply. I'm heading back to Olds tomorrow, and I'll be serving at the Good Friday liturgy, the Easter Vigil, and the Easter morning Mass, a Triduum tour-de-force that I've never had the chance to serve before.

Every year, the Triduum sneaks up on me and I find myself at or just after the Holy Thursday Mass, wishing I'd been just a little bit better prepared, and regretting that the weekend always has to disappear so quickly. I always want to savour this part of the year for so much longer... all year would be nice. But before I know it, Thursday has passed into Friday, suddenly Friday is gone, and then the Easter Vigil (which seemed forever-long and boring as a little kid) has flashed before my eyes and it's Easter morning... and once that Mass has vanished, the high spiritual weekend is over, and it's back to real life.

Basically, it's the same sort of hunger you get after you've just eaten a chocolate bar. One never seems to be enough. The chocolate was just savoury enough that you want a second one... but you never get one. However, as I learnt today, when you plan ahead and actually do have two, the second one always ends up tasting too sweet, and you can hardly get it down without nausea. Maybe that's how it is with the Triduum... it's ever so much better to having that lingering desire for more than to ever actually have more.