Easter Vigil is the service held traditionally after sunset on Holy Saturday before the sun rises on Easter Sunday. This service engenders wildly disparate reactions in Catholics. The devout regard it as the most important mass of the liturgical year, while the majority of Catholics—i.e., those of us who have two-point-three children because we wear condoms and pop birth control pills like Tic Tacs, think abortions should be rare but legal, and would rather watch George Carlin in Dogma than Jim Caviezel in The Passion of the Christ—well, we fucking hate it.
Very simply, Easter Vigil is when the real Catholics get their Jesus on. The service is anywhere from three to four hours long and is an all-you-can-eat sacramental buffet. There are Baptisms, First Communions, Reconciliations, Confirmations, even weddings. Easter Vigil is interminable to the point where in the pantheon of old school Papist rituals I’d rather sit through a Rosary, watch a Mother Angelica marathon on EWTN, or read an entire issue of Latin Mass magazine.
The first Easter Vigil service I remember attending was in 1983. We were living in Louisville, Kentucky. Our next-door neighbor was the team doctor for the University of Louisville men’s basketball team, a dynastic program of the early eighties. He got Dad and me in to see closed practices in which we met the players, and so names like Milt Wagner, Lancaster Gordon, Scooter and Rodney McCray, Charles Jones, and Billy Thompson supplanted the latest Fighting Irish football players at the dinner table. Granted, Dad and I appropriated the Cardinals more as a temporary distraction from the Gerry Faust era at Notre Dame, but our passion and commitment was real enough to us.
Louisville was playing Houston in the Final Four the Saturday night before Easter. CBS promoted it as “the Doctors of Dunk versus Phi Slamma Jamma.” Dad had the bright idea to go to church on Saturday afternoon so we could stay up late and watch the game while not having to worry about getting up early for church. We attended Holy Trinity. An eighteen-year-old parishioner by the name of Mary T. Meagher was the cross bearer, still a year away from winning gold in the pool at the Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. We missed almost the entire game, although about halfway into the four-hour Vigil service, Dad excused himself to go to the restroom, never to return. Just as my feet and knees had gone numb and I shouted my first “Alleluia!” in forty days, Dad was in the car screaming at his radio, “Crum, get a body on Olajuwon!”
Today’s Easter Vigil service is passably tolerable, as I have a vested interest. For one, my old friend Father Fisher Kelly presides over today’s Easter Vigil. For another, Beth and Sasha are receiving the sacrament of First Communion together. Father Fish wears the traditional Roman Catholic alb, a white linen liturgical vestment with tapered sleeves. The stole around his neck is reversible, purple on one side and white on the other, which allowed him to symbolically flip it from purple to white at the beginning of the service to symbolize the progression from Lent to Easter. He stands behind the altar. A large ceramic bowl of communal wafers sits to his left, a gold chalice of wine to his right.
“Blessed are you, Lord, God of all creation,” Father Fish says. “Through your goodness we have this bread to offer, which earth has given and human hands have made. It will become for us the bread of life.”
The congregation responds, “Blessed be God forever.”
“Blessed are you, Lord, God of all creation,” Father Fish says again. “Through your goodness we have this wine to offer, fruit of the vine and work of human hands. It will become our spiritual drink.”
We again respond back to him, “Blessed be God forever.”
Father Fish walked us through the requisite rituals: the singing, the bell ringing, the bowing, the reaffirmations we say by rote more than faith. After about ten minutes, Beth and Sasha approach the foot of the altar with the other catechists. My wife wears a sheer black dress, my daughter a floral print that, because she’s nine years old, I can still get away with calling cute instead of pretty. An altar boy stands in front of Father Fish, holding open a leather-bound book. Father looks down intermittently at the book, but the way he maintains eye contact with the congregation tells me he isn’t reading it.
“The holy Eucharist completes Christian initiation,” Father Fish begins. “Those who have been raised to the dignity of the royal priesthood by Baptism and configured more deeply to Christ by Confirmation participate with the whole community in the Lord’s own sacrifice by means of the Eucharist.
“At the Last Supper, on the night he was betrayed, our Savior instituted the Eucharistic sacrifice of his body and blood. This he did in order to perpetuate the sacrifice of the cross throughout the ages until he should come again, and so to entrust to his beloved spouse, the Church, a memorial of his death and resurrection: a sacrament of love, a sign of unity, a bond of charity, a Paschal banquet in which Christ is consumed, the mind is filled with grace, and a pledge of future glory is given to us.”
This is the part about the Eucharist that usually freaks out non-Catholics. Protestants regard the consumption of Jesus’s body and blood as symbolic, while Catholics are supposed to believe in a process called transubstantiation, by which the bread and wine are mystically transformed into the literal body and blood of Jesus. That’s right, Catholics are actively practicing cannibals. The doctrine is disgusting, but the truth is most Catholics don’t obsess about it too much; with all due apologies to Pope John Paul II and St. Peter, we don’t buy into it any more than our Protestant friends.
Father Fish continues. “The Eucharist is the source and summit of the Christian life. The other sacraments, and indeed all ecclesiastical ministries and works of the apostolate, are bound up with the Eucharist and are oriented toward it. For in the blessed Eucharist is contained the whole spiritual good of the Church, namely Christ himself, our Pasch.
“The Eucharist is the efficacious sign and sublime cause of that communion in the divine life and that unity of the People of God by which the Church is kept in being. It is the culmination both of God’s action sanctifying the world in Christ and of the worship men offer to Christ and through him to the Father in the Holy Spirit.
“Finally, by the Eucharistic celebration we already unite ourselves with the heavenly liturgy and anticipate eternal life, when God will be all in all. The Eucharist is the sum and summary of our faith: our way of thinking is attuned to the Eucharist, and the Eucharist in turn confirms our way of thinking .”
If the Lord works in mysterious ways, the fact Beth came around to “our way of thinking” is as mysterious as it gets. How does the wife of the world’s worst Catholic, not to mention the daughter of a divorced atheist, decide that a world of rhythm methods and fish fries is the smart move? In the decade prior to Beth starting catechism, I could count on one hand the number of times we’d been to church that didn’t involve a holiday, wedding, or funeral.
Sasha is mostly to blame. Firmly ensconced in the Empire Ridge Public School system, she’s now more than two years behind her Catholic friends who received their First Communion at age six or seven. It got to a point where we didn’t go to church just to avoid explaining why she was the only one her age required to approach the altar for the Eucharist with crossed arms and a closed mouth. Barring that, we’ve deferred to the ultimate rationalization of thirtysomething closet agnostics that, our intellectual faculties be damned, we’re giving Sasha “a good foundation.”
Like most parents in their mid-thirties, Beth and I have talked ourselves into believing that in lieu of relying on our own reasonably competent parenting skills, it is up to an imaginary bearded old man in the sky to teach our kids right from wrong. Furthermore, he’s not even teaching them right from wrong; rather, he’s teaching them there’s no point in worrying about right or wrong as long as you bathe in the soul-cleansing afterbirth of his kinda-but-not-really-dead son.
Like I said, I’m the world’s worst Catholic.
“Welcome to the fine young cannibals,” I say, hugging my wife.
“Aren’t they a band?” Beth asks.
“Or so you thought.”
Sasha looks up at me. “Daddy, why do grown-ups drink wine? It tastes horrible.”
I smile. “Check back with me in about ten years.”
Beth wraps her arm around my waist. “If we’re that lucky.”
“I thought that was you,” a voice says from behind us. Before I can even turn to face him, Father Fish has me in a full bear hug.
“Been a while, Father,” I say.
Father Fish grabs Beth and Sasha and brings them into the hug. “Too long,” he says.
“I can’t breathe,” Sasha says.
Father Fish talks to us in between greeting the polyester brigade exiting the church. Glad-handing the procession of retirees is of absolute necessity. They will forever regard him as their pastor, seeing to it that Father never pays for a meal, eighteen holes of golf, a ticket to a Notre Dame football game, or a car. If Dad were alive, he’d be their ringleader.
“What are you doing here?” I say. “I thought you’re retired.”
“Semi-retired,” Father says. “I’ve been doing missionary work in Central America for the last three years and just needed some time to recharge the batteries. With Father Liam on sabbatical in Rome, I thought I’d come back to my old stomping grounds for Easter. I assume you’re going to be at the birthday party in a few weeks.”
“Birthday party?”
My master scheduler pipes up behind me. “Jack’s ‘Second Sixteenth’ party, husband.”
“Oh, that,” I say. “You mean the birthday party Mom is throwing for Jack two months after the fact because she was too busy back in February sitting on her ass in a ski lodge in Utah.”
“Show a little respect, Hank.” Father crosses himself, and then me. “For your church and your mother. She’s the only mom you got.”
“Don’t remind me.”
“Hank!” Beth says, smacking my shoulder.
“I’m kidding,” I say. I rub my shoulder, looking at Father Fish. “Of course I’ll be there. I take it Mom invited you, Father?”
He flashes me his toothy white grin. “Not really. I kind of invited myself. I have a little surprise for Jack.”
“What is it?” Beth and I say in unison.
A liver-spotted wrinkly hand squeezes my shoulder. I notice out of the corner of my eye that Father still wears a gold claddagh ring on his left ring finger, the heart turned inward as a sign of his commitment to the Lord.
“Your guess is as good as mine,” Father says.