Harrowing Holy Week

In Which the Prudes Go to Church Again

While we Prudes have not yet attained the prosperity we expected as women of Faith, we have found rich reward in the ongoing choral drama at our local parish. The thrilling saga took a surprising twist when, three weeks before Holy Week—the longest, most complicated week of services in the liturgical year—our choir director parted ways with our parish. When our sister was appointed the new choir director, things got interesting. When things get interesting, a Prude has no choice but to record events, which we faithfully did, and present to you here.

Saturday My friends and I were asked to decorate the side altar for Holy Thursday mass. We have our hearts set on fans of palm leaves, and as we’re exiting a particularly grim Walmart, we see a sign across the street, like a directive from Heaven—a cracked marquee bearing the words “palms sold here.” It’s an ancient greenhouse; stepping inside feels like entering another world—misty, mysterious, a trifle sinister. When we inquire about palm branches, an elderly gentleman materializes from the back room, brandishing two canes of palm leaves, head cocked inquisitively.

“For a church?” He asks. We say yes.

“For Palm Sunday?” He asks. We say no.

His eyelid flickers, betraying momentary surprise, but he takes it in stride. We explain that we want to fan them out and put them in a vase. Simple, we think. We are wrong. It is not a task for the uninitiated, he tells us.

“Have you worked with Palm Branches before?” he inquires. I say I have not.

His eyelid flickers again, and I begin to feel afraid. We need a damp towel, he says. A damp towel and a sharp knife, don’t think scissors will do, they will not. Now, about how large is our vase? About how far from it do we want the palms to protrude? Will two canes do? Do we want them trimmed? Many people ask for red ribbon when purchasing palms, do we want red ribbon? We do not? It is all the same to him, of course, he merely seeks our satisfaction.

When we have nodded and fumbled our way through that interchange, we ask about hyacinths. Hyacinths are a journey of their own. He takes it that we want them blooming by Thursday, and not closed? We do indeed. Very well, a warm window by day, and a cool one by night. They will bolt, he says, right now they are in a controlled environment to prevent that very thing. When I mention how much nicer they look than the Walmart hyacinths, he pales slightly, and I regret having even made mention. “The less said about that, the better,” he says (I kid you not).

It has become clear that any question we ask will elicit a monologue the length of King Lear, and since we’d like to start decorating by Wednesday, we resort to one word inquiries and pointing to curtail the flood. Even so, the sun is setting by the time we exit, bearing paper-wrapped palms reverently, heads spinning with his dire warnings.

Sunday My sister-director is hosting what begins as a peaceful Sunday brunch, when out of nowhere she announces a surprise choir practice. My sister is petite and dainty—upon first encounter, you would think her sweet, maybe even demure. But within that trim little shell beats the ruthless heart of a fanatic. She runs on organic flaxseed, Palestrina sung masses, and rare steaks that she absorbs into her stick-thin frame with no apparent effect. Her appointment as choir director has unleashed an inner dictator with a swiftness that is terrifying to behold.

This is why three weeks before Holy Week, when any sane novice director would be choosing hymns one step up from “Jesus Loves Me,” she’s pulling obscure Byzantine chant music from some dusty cache in her basement, presenting them to us with a fanatical glint in her eye that would have looked familiar to Napoleon’s soldiers.

And the scariest part is…they keep coming. We’re still wiping maple syrup from our fingers and wondering what happened to the second pot of coffee, and she’s rummaging in the depths of her bag like a diabolical Mary Poppins, emerging with sheaves of sheet music that no one has ever seen before—“Just a psalm,” she says, slapping a terrifying tome of tangled notes and lyrics down in front of us, “just an offertory hymn,” and, deaf to our protests, smiles a basilisk smile. It does not bode well for the week ahead.

Monday Choir or no choir, the nightmare housebuilding project must go on. Unfortunately, my foreman is departing for Montana in t-minus 48 hours, which means that he has only two brain cells to spare for shoe moulding, as opposed to his usual three. My own brain is too occupied with the alarming growth of the hyacinths—which have indeed bolted and now run the risk of being dead by the time Thursday arrives—to do much quality control. As a result, most of the corner trim looks like it was installed by a team of rabid beavers.

Tuesday My friend and I get to the church early to decorate the altar, which is set up in the gym. We’ve been warned that some baton twirlers will be sharing the gym with us for an hour, but they will be on the other side, and won’t be in our way.

We get to work hanging curtains. The church has provided us with a set of portable steps to lead up to the altar, each roughly the width of a fingernail clipping. I’m a little anxious about these, but my friend is not. The priest is young, she says, he can handle it. There is a slight rustling noise from the foyer and when we turn, a ponytail whisks quickly out of view. A moment later, a second anxious face peeps around the corner and just as swiftly disappears. Then an elderly couple enters more boldly. The baton twirlers have arrived.

We say hello. The elderly woman looks at us as if she’d just flipped a rock and found us underneath.

“You’re here to practice?” we ask.

“We were told we would have the gymnasium,” she says.

“From five to six,” chimes in the elderly man.

“Yup,” we say, “do you need us to move anything?”

“We were told we would have the gymnasium,” she repeats, lip still curled.

I can take a hint—one must assume that the stunning skill of the twirlers is not to be observed without a fee. “Would you like us to leave?” I ask.

“You can have the room back at six,” she says, as one granting a great concession. We depart with dignity. Perhaps she would not be quite so demanding if she knew she addressed a three-time judge of the baton twirlers in the local Fourth of July parade.

Wednesday The first night of our choral performances has arrived—Tenebrae. It’s a full hour of sung psalms, which we have run through exactly once. Mercifully, the singing goes fairly smoothly, but the end of the service is an anticlimax, to put it mildly.

Tenebrae ends with the strepitus—a sound that is supposed to represent an earthquake. In the past, a small group of dedicated parishioners has done most of the work, stomping, rattling boxes of random metal implements—one avid gentleman always takes great delight in shaking a plexiglass sheet and producing a thunderous rumble. It sounds weird, and it is weird, but usually it’s weird and cool. This year, for legal reasons, the avid gentleman informs us irritably, he was not allowed to bring his plexiglass sheet, and apparently this took the heart out of all the other noisemakers, too, because at the end of the service, they are nowhere to be seen or heard. The organist starts pounding on the keys and hissing at the choir to stomp our feet. Since we are all kneeling for this part of the service, that’s impossible, and the floor is carpeted anyway, but it’s clear that the organ is the only noise going on right now, and that doesn’t sound remotely like an earthquake, so a few of us kick feebly upward at the bottoms of the chairs behind us, which is very awkward and also fruitless. The strepitus ends up sounding like a flock of Canada geese dying in a gentle spring rain.

Thursday We return to the gymnasium to finish decorating the side altar. The flowers are all alive and well; we’ve raided a supply closet for hazardous amounts of candles, and made what I, with all due modesty, must describe as ingenious arrangements with curtains to transform a bunch of rickety props into a very majestic altar. The palms, however, elude our genius. I’d give years of my life for the greenhouse man to pop out and soliloquize now. No matter how many times I pull the fronds apart they snap back into place with quiet botanical snickers. We fan them out and set them in the vase—they hold for a moment, then the second we turn our backs, furl up again into a spiky scroll, dorkishly protruding from the vase like a malformed cactus. In the end, we place them in the background, where we tell ourselves they give a subtle middle-Eastern flavor without attracting too much attention.

They are still snickering softly when we leave for lunch.

Friday is largely uneventful. My personal, very penitential Good Friday tradition involves filching Hot Cross Buns from the houses of all my sisters and sisters-in-law. It is a psychologically as well as culinarily rewarding experience. On one end of the spectrum, my sister-director produces regiments of well-trained pastries that emerge from the oven singing the Hallelujah Chorus, while year after year my other older sister bakes what I fondly refer to as Hot Cross Pebbles, ill-tempered little rolls that refuse to rise, and who’s lack of fluff is disguised beneath liberal pools of icing. I eat them all, indiscriminately, and am pleased to report that this leaves my vocal cords unaffected for the afternoon service.

Saturday The big day has arrived, but we’re all too tired from the last three day of singing to waste much time on worry, and ultimately, the vigil service is a blur—three hours of chaos and confusion and swearing that I’ll never again make snarky comments about a church choir. My sister’s baby is up in the loft with us and blows out his diaper early in the proceedings. She doesn’t have a spare, because she never has a spare, but the foggy recollections of holding a reeking infant teething on a beeswax candle are obscured by other, more pungent memories of utter panic as we wait for cues from the pastor that never come, as we stand in deafening silence, realizing that the length of the communion hymn doesn’t begin to adequately provide for the length of the communion line, as we shriek our way through an alleluia in a vocal range written for bats.

“What comes next?” My younger sister keeps asking me and when I shrug because I truly don’t know anymore, she says meditatively, “I can’t wait to have food.” Not a reverent sentiment, but an honest one.

Sunday We all sort of forgot that there was mass on Sunday. Put briefly, that is patently obvious to anyone in the congregation this morning. And that’s all we’ll say about that.

He is Risen.

—C.C.