Today is always the hard day: late night followed by early morning tenebrae, the liturgy of Good Friday then the beginnings of the Easter Vigil set up. You begin to feel a little like one of those sleep deprived cult members, though the payoff from the 20th Street Gulag is much more tangible and immediate.

Last night's visit to seven altars of repose was particularly good. This was my third year to make the trek. There's always a certain Mission Impossible element in the frantic scurries between churches as you try to make it to places before they close up for the night, but I'm amazed that that mood always seems to stay out on the street. Once inside a church, you fall into your devotions and are reminded that Christians across the world are watching just as you are.

Each altar and each set of watchers in every church is different, but you all know that you are doing the same thing and that, though these might be faces that you see only once a year on this night or faces that you never see again, you are all joined together in something larger than yourselves. I think of the final verse of a song the evangelical church I grew up in often sang at Communion:

And that dark betrayal night
We with His last advent unite,
By one bright chain of loving rite
Until he come.

This morning, I spent too long putting up last night's journal entry and only made it to the church about ten minutes before tenebrae started in the crypt at 7:00 a.m. The morning shift was just Reilly, Goings and I. Psalm 22 comes in the first nocturn. The verses never fail to move me:

My God, my God, look upon me; why hast thou forsaken me: and art so far from my health and the words of my complaint? … But as for me, I am a worm and no man: a very scorn of men and the outcast of the people. … They pierced my hands and my feet; I may tell all my bones: they stand staring and looking upon me.

Maybe I should say something about the structure of tenebrae. In a nutshell, it is the simplified form taken by matins and lauds on the days of the Triduum. Matins consists of three nocturns, each of which includes three psalms and three lessons with a responsory after each lesson. Lauds follows immediately with five psalms and the Benedictus.

There are no ceremonies to speak of. A large candlestick called a hearse holds fifteen lit candles. The six altar candles are lit as well. During the two offices, one candle is extinguished at the end of each psalm, leaving only the topmost candle, often called the Christ Candle, burning. In a similar way, one of the altar candles is extinguished during each of the final verses of the Benedictus. After the Benedictus, the lit Christ Candle is carried from the room or hidden behind the altar as Psalm 51 ("Have mercy on me, O God…") is recited. After the psalm, the officiant recites the collect and the burning candle is returned to the holder.

Some associate the name of the service, which means "darkness" or "shadows," with the lessening of the light throughout the service, but a better answer is probably that fewer candles were needed to read by as the service moved on towards the dawn. Like many other things that were originally functional, the practice lives past its original purpose because of the symbolic value that has taken on. I suppose we could use a dimmer switch or unscrew light bulbs, but somehow I don't think it would be the same.

The Crypt Chapel at Tenebrae of Good Friday.