My Sepulchral Subconscious

The Triduum can be a gloriously immersive experience: physically and mentally overwhelming, but emotionally and spiritually rich.  A time when the Mass becomes new again, when we weigh our own petty crosses and thank God that they are only splinters, and when, in the words of one of our catechism students, we remember that Christ “had to become a man so that He could die.”

This year I got the “overwhelming” part.  And, I thought, not much else.

I went to the liturgies, knelt for the Tantum Ergo, stood (and stood) for the chanting of the Passion, and rose on Easter Sunday morning to...a grey and gloomy day that about summed up my mood.  It wasn’t bad enough to complain about.  It was just sort of there, like I had been just sort of there all weekend.  I took some consolation from being in the Catholic Church, where you do get points for showing up, and resolved to work on the “emotionally and spiritually rich” part next year.

Then, during Easter week, I got one of those rare runs where you sit down to write and don’t feel like you’re writing - you’re typing, as fast and furiously as you can, and even then your characters are impatient that you’re slowing them down.  It was a crazy little spy script, something I’d undertaken just for fun (and to get a couple of scenes out of my head by committing them to paper).  But when I caught my breath and reviewed what I had written, I found:

• A story that took place almost entirely from a Friday afternoon through a Sunday night

• An ignoble death on the Friday and a sacrificial one on the Sunday

• A wounded side, followed by...

• A (semi-)voluntary descent into a reasonable temporal facsimile of hell

And just as I was congratulating myself on at least giving my fascination with the Stigmata a rest (two previous scripts, two wounded hands), I realized that I hadn’t, not entirely.

But those were all the little things, more or less foreseen in the plotting stage.  What I hadn’t really worked out in plotting was what happened on Saturday.  I had a checklist of sorts, but it amounted to “Here stuff happens to get us from Friday to Sunday.”

Well, those impatient characters took over and explained a few things to me.  They told me that Saturday was about absence.  Every line and every action were given their meaning by someone NOT being there.  And then a minor character - sort of a subordinate antagonist, though really more of a trickster figure - told me that he was dying, that he wanted the Last Rites, and that he wanted his body discovered in a cathedral late on Saturday night.

Well, the writer momentarily asserted herself.  I reminded this upstart extra that he hadn’t even existed in the outline version, that when he appeared he was purely a plot contrivance, that I didn’t want to spend time on deathbed reflections, and that This Was Not a Script About Religion, darn it.   At least, not capital-R Religion.  It was about truth (of course), fidelity (yes, I suppose), and  the sacrifice of the self (all right, all right, I know).  But for once, I was trying to be subtle about all that.  Having a priest even walk through would be too obvious and fight the tone of the rest of the piece.  And the cathedral thing was way, way too blatant.

To all of which, he responded that it was his death, and he was going to have the Last Rites and then rest in the cathedral.

The moral being, never argue with your characters, because who do you think you are, anyway?

All of this is not to say that the script is any good.  But good or not, I’m grateful to it.  I realized that I had “got something” out of the Triduum, and that there are certain things that really are ingrained in my subconscious.  Even when I am trapped in the absence of Holy Saturday, I see it as the time that gets us from Friday to Sunday.  I see it through the hope of the Resurrection.

Which is good to know.