March 27th, 2024
On Wednesday night of Holy Week is the service of Tenebrae (from Latin for darkness) which custom emerged in the early Middle Ages when the offices of Matins and Lauds from Thursday through Saturday of Holy Week were combined and chanted on Wednesday night in a mournful ceremony that symbolizes Jesus’ abandonment by His disciples and His entrance into His Passion. The shadowed church is illuminated only by candlelight from the ‘hearse’ (the traditional candelabra) whose fifteen candles are extinguished one-by-one until only one, representing Jesus, remains and then also is taken away and hidden for a time behind the altar until it (He) emerges again and is revealed as the light that “shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (John 1:5 NIV).
This is the first Catholic Church service that I ever attended, when I was still an unbaptized unbeliever. I was, however, an artist in my second year of my MFA and my aesthetically sensitive soul was profoundly moved – no, crushed – as if by an earthquake whose loud crash is imitated at the end of the service signifying the Crucifixion. When Allegri’s seraphic Miserere (a musical setting of psalm 51) pierced the dark church, it also pierced my heart and, like in paintings of the Annunciation showing rays of light emanating from the Holy Spirit penetrating the heart of Mary, the same Spirit slew me with the twin gifts of contrition and conversion. I didn’t understand what was happening, but I knew that it was what art is for.
As artists we are attuned to symbolism; we are comfortable with paradoxes and metaphors. Thus, the great mysteries of our Catholic faith (e.g. the Holy Trinity and the victory of the Cross) which transcend linear and discursive presentation, are intuitive to us. We intuit them through our souls and our bodies; our physical senses are trained to attend to the deeper meanings signified by the material world. Because, as I learned even as a secular art student, beauty points beyond itself.
As I now know as a Catholic, beauty is incarnate in Jesus Christ. That’s why the Church’s sensorially and symbolically lush liturgies like Tenebrae are so important for us to encounter the living God who became flesh in Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ took our real wounded human flesh to the Cross, and – as we will learn again this week – through the Cross to glory unimaginable.
Sarah Crow is a professional oil painter, sacred artist, and educator. She is artist-in-residence at Saint Gregory’s Hall in Chicago Illinois. Learn more about her work here https://www.deigratiasacredart.com/about