Image credit: Franklin Hotel, Rome

Lumen Christi

I'd trudged up to Sant' Anselmo on Good Friday evening under an uncertain purple-brown sky, luminous with the directionless light of a cloudy night. I threaded my way through the orange-lit streets to the floodlit, green-lawned forecourt of the Benedictine monastery on the Aventine and stepped into a solemn, womb-like darkness. The last few lections of the final Tenebrae service of the Triduum were being sung. Monks approached one of the two lecterns, one after the other, with lit tapers in their hands bathing their faces with a warm nocturnal fleshy red-gold glow, chanting the familiar laments of Jeremiah. Two lights flickered on the altar, reflected on the simple, stark rich-veined wood of the Corpus on the cross. The last lector brought his chant to a leisurely, melancholy close, extinguishing his candle and vanishing into the darkness beneath the vaguely glittering apse mosaics. The lights came up and Good Friday passed soundlessly into memory.

*

Holy Saturday was uneventful. A service at the Greek parish I had hoped to attend had actually occurred the previous evening. I waited, a little anxious, a little tired, a little happy, for the Easter Vigil at St. Peter's. I talked idly, snobbishly perhaps, of slipping out in mid-service and going to the Tridentine-rite Vigil that would be starting at eleven that evening over at Santissima Trinità dei Pellegrini. I'd done the Vatican before. I'd done Easter Vigil at the Vatican before. I'd done it all before. The Sistine Choir would be abominable, of course; it was common knowledge. And naturally, there would be an unfortunate lack of birettas. It wasn't impossible. The Vigil was starting at 7, earlier than the typical nine: it'd be over long before the other started. Perhaps I could even do both.

It was a plan.

So, at a bit after five o'clock, attired in tie and sport-coat, I squeezed onto one of the human sardine-cans that make up the Roman municipal bus system. With six or seven friends joining me. Preparing for the two-hour wait, I'd brought my trusty sketchbook, a guide to St. Peter's which boasted rather quaintly of revealing the "curiousities and secrets" of the grand old pile, and, for more edifying reading, a copy of John Paul II's Crossing the Threshhold of Hope. While perhaps the last volume might have been good to peruse, I elected to go to Confession instead and get a jump on my Easter Duty.

Before getting there, however, we had a minor odyssey to wade through. With one hand on my portable library and the other on the papal ticket in my pocket, it proved more difficult than expected trying to hang onto the overhead rail. There were a few perilously close calls as the cranky bus swerved and staggered to stops and starts and I found myself bending and weaving in an attempt not to re-enact the fall of South-East Asia to Communism. (You know, George Kennan, domino affect, all that good stuff). As more and more souls pressed close to us, my concerns became increasingly theoretical. There were probably moments there where my feet had lost contact with the ground.

Somehow, we found ourselves alongside the southern arm of Bernini's colonnade and got into the already-bulging line forming up at its customary place below the Scala Regia and the great bronze doors. We climbed the steps of the Basilica and soon were being shephereded down unfamiliar passages, the travertine flanks of the basilica rising up against the sky overhead. We were--we were going deep into Vatican City, I thought, with a delighted little thrill. We pressed deeper and deeper until the swarm of pilgrims stood beneath the immense curved silhouette of the north transept. A little neoclassical iron charcoal brazier on genteel lion-foot legs smoldered prettily alongside the pavement, tended by workmen.

Could it be--could it be the Papal Easter fire? It certainly looked dignified enough. I'll never know, but it's a good story, anyway.

The guides directed us through a little doorway and up a claustrophobic staiurcase and we popped up, Alice-in-Wonderland fashion at the polished floor-level of the great church. I later discovered we came up through one of the doors of a dignified papal monument, though at the moment I was caught up in the wonderful disorientation of entering St. Peter's from completely the wrong direction. We were up among the confessionals, those pleasant marquetried curvilinear cabinets with their little winking green lights. Rank upon rank of chairs now stood facing the massive Bernini baldacchino.

And we waited. Soon, the lights began to be turned down for the opening procession, and a pleasant, afternoon grey darkness settled over the vast basilica. The windows still showed pale daylight against the cavernous interior, and a little boy with red-blinking lights in his sneakers wobbled across the aisle. A major-domo stood stiff and Malvolio-like in his white tie and tails, while I could see Swiss guards clank to attention in the distance, halberds in hand.

Earlier, a friend of mine unfamiliar with Catholic ritual had asked if these extravagant Helvetic harlequins were priests of some sort.

The darkness was pleasant, anticipatory, calming, unlike so much of the fearful darkness of Good Friday. Little golden spotlights bloomed on the baroque shells of a dozen niches holding the billowing marble statues of religious founders gesticulating piously overhead. And St. Peter's, so deceptive with its carefully-balanced game of perspectives seemed all of a sudden to shrink.

The largest church on earth had become, somehow, cozy.

We listened to the lighting and blessing of the Easter candle in the narthex, over the loudspeakers, and after the three cries of Lumen Christi--Deo gratias sung from the nave, the lights came back on, with dazzling--almost daze-inducing--brightness. Every surface of the vast marble church gleamed with silver light. It was like stumbling into heaven, blinking our eyes and waiting for them to adjust to the Beatific Vision. Lumen Christi indeed. Light gleamed everywhere, in mellow blooms on the golden mosaic of the frieze with its great didactic black capitals that seem like a Tridentine catechism come to life, in harsh exciting silvers and whites on the grey-veined marble, in tiny pinpricks on the gilt horns arrayed around the rim of the Confessio.

We wobbled uncertainly through the readings; Libreria Editrice Vaticana must have botched the order and there was only one booklet for the seven of us. Meanwhile, through a mix of improvisational philology and looking over the shoulders of the two girls in front of us, I translated for my friends on either hand. Cozy enough, I should think.

"How many readings are there to go?" asked Muriel, on my right. She'd been following my lead on the translations, and even had started singing along to the a capella Latin psalms interspersed between the lessons.

"One more. Then we have the Gloria. And then the fun begins," I said, with relish. I smiled.

The Pope, a distant figure in sparkling gold seated on his motorized baroque cathedra, sung out "Glo-oria in excelsis De-o," in his vigorous mumble, and the church exploded with thunderous music and a tumult of bells. "The organ has been silent all throughout Lent," I explained to Muriel, smiling broadly at the sacred spectacle.

"Oh," she said primly. "That would explain why it's out of tune."

I wasn't complaining, though. Even the Sistine Choir was magnificent, for all the academic sniping it gets, in its sheer joy as it declaimed the great chanted strains of the Missa de Angelis, embellished with polyphonic counterpoints and grandiose organ intabulations. It was wonderful. It was heavenly. It was Easter. It was God coming back from the dead. It was simply: alleluia.

And so it happened. Beatissime Pater, annuntio vobis gaudium magnum, quod est: Alleluia. The deacon had approached the Pope, and had chanted the declaration, I announce to you this great joy, which is: Alleluia. Everyone rose to their feet, and the Schola began to sing the sacred word over and over again in ascending scales described by a complicated caligraphy of Gregorian squares in the program, Alle-e-e-e-e-e-lu-u-u-u-i-a-a-a-a. Over and over again, with that same ecstatic, inebriated joy that runs throughout the whole Vigil, from the proclamation of the Exsultet to the last Alleluia of the Ite missa est. Alle-e-e-e-e-e-lu-u-u-u-i-a-a-a-a, yet again, extravagant joy like a singing-contest, the congregation and cantor jousting at one another for the sake of the love of God.

If there was any doubt that Lent was over, it was gone by now. Easter had officially begun, the bells had tolled, the organs had played, the Gloria sung, the Alleluias shouted. Haec nox est, in qua destructis vinculis mortis, Christus ab inferis victor ascendit!

All the gloom of Lent, as theatrical as it might seem at first glance, made sense against this light and magnificence and joy. The Church, one often hears, is an Easter people. And here, among my friends, feeling gloriously comfortable, grandiosely intimate in this enormous church, I could finally understand what that seeming-platitude meant, and how it felt deep in my soul. But I could finally understand it only after having passed through the Triduum. The pain was real, searingly so, the Sacrifice of Calvary was a real sacrifice, a bloodied, sweat-salted horror for our sake. But it was also the reparation of a felix culpa that gave us such a great Redeemer. The crude mocking purple of the Ecce Homo becomes the glittering white and gold of the Vicar of the King of the Jews enthroned before the altar. And that altar, blazing with tapers and bronze, is the same as the sharp stone of Golgotha.

The liturgy of Baptism followed after a short papal homily, the Pontiff assisted by Cardinal Ratzinger singing the prayers with his high reedy German voice, followed by a grand litany of the Saints. V. Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, R. ora pro nobis. That was it: that was the source of my happiness, my comfort. V. Sancte Petre et Paule, R. orate pro nobis. It was impossible not to be cozy, not to be at one with oneself in that great marbled space, its walls set with the bodies of two hundred-odd popes and the shards of a thousand saints, old relics and older stones. V. Sancte Laurenti, R. ora pro nobis. We, all we living Catholics packed tight in our humble plastic bucket-chairs were united by their presence, the Church Militant, Suffering, Triumphant. Triumphant. (Catechism quiz. Question: where is most of the Churchat any given time? Answer: Heaven). Tonight, of all nights, was the night which prefigured most the Church Triumphant in Her Savior rising from the grave, and it was in the most glorious church in Christendom, full of weightless cherubim and glittering stucco sun-rays.

The Baptism rite. To be baptized by the Pope! It's almost impossible to cram the thought into your brain. But there they were, five or six unknowns in colorful national costumes, some cradling infants in delightful white, others themselves the candidates for the Sacrament. To be a baby baptized by the Pope! To be a convert baptized by the Pope! I can't think which is better.

By this point, I'd forgotten all about Tridentine Easter Vigils, and even more astonishingly, any interest in seeing a biretta had passed from my mind. For the evening, anyway.

*

The Vigil ended around 10:30 PM, and we trickled back somehow to the obelisk in St. Peter's Square amid the crush of ushers and clicking Swiss Guards with red-plumed helmets bobbing. I turned a wistful eye in the direction of Ponte Sisto and Santissima Trinità dei Pellegrini, but one Vigil for the evening was probably enough, I thought. And so we headed home to Studio and ate pancakes for a midnight breakfast I will never forget. Easter greetings were exchanged, Easter candies mailed in by thoughtful friends were scarfed, a little island of domesticity in the night.

I eventually wandered in to Santissima Trinità around two in the morning, threading my way through the dark maze of streets that is Campo dei Fiori. Red curtains bedecked the great doors in festal array, and I hung towards the back of the church to watch the priest and deacon and subdeacon, moving with the slow dance-like ritual of the old mass, perfume the air with rich incense, clinking the thurible around the altar, around the gleaming golden reliquaries and the two ranks of burning candles. The Mass was almost over. The penitential veils had been removed and the Trinity blazed on blue-white clouds above the altar, as magnificently real as the gold and white of the altar frontal below was ornamental. The celebrant and his assistants lined up in the center of the altar and the deacon--the young familiar bespectacled face of Fr. Josef the Croatian--turned to face the people and sang out in a high festal voice those same words I'd heard a handful of hours earlier. Ite, missa est, alleluia, alleluia.

I lingered for a little bit in that little circle of antique gold light and then stepped back out into Campo dei Fiori, that most pagan of Rome's neighborhoods. The glowering excommunicated monk Giordano Bruno loomed over a rough piazza full of irregular revelers. I'd missed the other Easter Vigil, yes, all but the spectacularly beautiful dismissal, but it seemed enough to have been able to glimpse that one fragment of a greater whole, that one corner of a vast canvas. That it existed, that it could exist, and had existed, was justification enough. I wouldn't have had my Easter any other way.