Jackson Perry, (shown left of Peter Jesserer Smith at our Toronto conference last November) is a member of the Connecticut ordinariate group.
Jackson called my attention to Bishop Lopes’ Triduum homilies and transcribed them to we could publish them here, subject to the bishop’s permission, which we now have.
You can find the liturgies online at the Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter’s YouTube channel. Here they are. They are wonderful. Enjoy.
The picture below is from last year’s Easter Vigil at the Cathedral of Our Lady of Walsingham, taken from the Cathedral’s website.
Maundy Thursday
What makes this night different from all other nights? That’s the ritual question with which every Passover supper for the last three millennia has begun. From the Passover celebrated today, and the Passover celebrated at Jesus’s own last supper with his disciples. The youngest asks it of the oldest. And so, we imagine in the tradition that it fell to John the Apostle to ask the question of Peter. What makes this night different from all other nights? It’s a retelling, a ritual retelling of the most important event in the entire history of Israel, woven through the entire history of God’s people. This is the night in which God saved and redeem His people and delivered them from slavery in Egypt. It is, therefore, their foundational experience, and it tells them everything they need to know about who God is, about who they are in God, and therefore their relationship with the world. It all comes down to that night, and the experience of the God who led them out from slavery to freedom.
But in leading them out, that relationship God forged on that night had to be formed, and reformed, again and again. How quickly his people forgot. How quickly they went astray. They had to be, in many ways, stripped down and rebuilt by the Lord Himself. When we read the accounts of Exodus over these three sacred days, this is what we come back to, again and again: That being stripped down to the foundations of faith, and allowing the Lord to rebuild our own faith, is essential in order to live the new and eternal relationship with the Father. Because in Exodus, they had to come to rely on God’s power, not their own. They were utterly powerless and forsaken. In the great revelation of God that they would experience on Mount Sinai, they had to come and embrace His law, not their own, His holiness, certainly not their own.