April 3, 2026: “The Willows,” Triduum, “Good Friday”

I only get to write this once a year—happy Good Friday!

Yes, Lent is over., and were are in the middle of the Triduum of the Christian calendar.  Yesterday was Maundy Thursday.  (Pretty much all services—aside from the Catholic ones—were canceled yesterday due to a snow and ice storm.)  I did not go to church yesterday.  Today, however, I played two Good Friday commemorations, one Catholic and one Lutheran.

I have to be honest.  Lenten and Easter music just don’t excite me.  I’ve been a church musician for close to 40 years now (started playing pipe organ when I was 17 years old), and I still dread Ash Wednesday with all its minor keys and dirges.  I know Lent is supposed to be a time of preparation and sacrifice, headed toward the loudness and light of Easter morning, but I won’t cry if I never have to play “O Sacred Head Surrounded” or “Jesus Christ is Risen Today” again.  (Let me stress:  I’m against the crappy hymns and music of Lent and Easter, NOT the seasons themselves.)  You would think that, after 21 centuries, churches might have come up with a few good pieces of liturgical Eastertide music.

Now, before I start getting comments from angry churchgoers listing favorite Lent and Easter tunes, I will say that, given the choice between the funereal ditties of Lent and the overwrought anthems of Easter, I will choose the overwrought.  I can get into a rousing chorus of “Up From the Grave He Arose” as much as the next Christian, but it’s just so . . . ostentatious is the word I’m looking for, I guess.  I prefer subtlety.  What can I say?  I’m a poet.

Marie Howe gives us a subtle poem today . . . 

The Willows

by: Marie Howe

As we are made by what moves us,

willows pull the water up into their farthest reach

which curves again down

divining where their life begins.

So, under travels up, and down and up again,

and the wind makes music of what water was.

A beautiful little poem that packs a lot of joy.  It’s a celebration of “what moves us.”  Water—the one thing we (trees, plants, birds, insects, human beings) all depend upon.  We can go for days without food.  Water, on the other hand, is necessary for survival.  

Howe’s words more to me about Lent and Easter than “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross” ever has.  Because it’s about the force that sustains and uplifts us.  Even the wind sings a water hymn in the last line.  That’s what this season is about—walking across a desert and finding a cool, fresh running river at the end.  Whether you’re a Christian or not, we can all understand the relief of a glass of icy water on a hot summer day.  

You see what I’m getting at, I hope.  For me, Lent and Easter aren’t about the ashes and bells and incense and chants.  This season is about being offered a hose to slurp from after sweating in the fields all day long (metaphorically speaking).  

There’s another ice storm blowing in tonight.  I’m sure the grocery stores in the area were jammed with people trying to get their last-minute Easter shopping done prior to the freezing rain.  Think Black Friday, but everyone is fighting over hams and baskets and Cadbury Creme Eggs.  My wife and I did our final shopping last weekend.  We’re not planning on going out a whole lot tomorrow.  (I may hit the laundromat, but that’s about it.)

Saint Marty wrote a poem during one of his Good Friday services today . . . 

Good Friday

by: Martin Achatz

I sit,

listen

to this

familiar

story of betrayal, love, forgiveness, redemption,

think how my mom, with knees calcified by

arthritis,

knelt in

church every

Good Friday,

knobbed 

knuckles

folded, 

accepted 

her pain

like a kiss 

from her 

dead mother.

March 29: "The Visit," Good Friday, Dead and Living

Billy Collins welcomes a guest . . .

The Visit

by:  Billy Collins

The wind blew

open the front door

and sat down

in my father's chair.

It is Good Friday, and I've hardly written anything this whole Lenten season  I had big intentions to write a new poem every day, from Ash Wednesday to Easter Sunday, this year.  But, the best laid plans of mice and poets . . . 

So, here I sit at a Subaru dealership, scribbling in my journal while my car gets an oil change and tire rotation, and I have only one or two terrible drafts of Lenten poems under my belt, feeling guilty, which is an appropriate emotion, I suppose, for this particular day of the Christian calendar.

I find myself kind of . . . haunted this morning.  The wind has kicked open the front door and plopped down on the couch beside me, metaphorically speaking.  The wind looks a lot like my mother.

You see, my mom was the person who brought me into the life of a church musician when I was about 17 years old.  Holy Week was always a marathon of Masses and music, my mother selecting the hymns, telling me when to show up at church.  Me, being a dutiful son, always followed her directions.  Thus, the Triduum resurrects my mother for me.  For the next three days, I feel her close by, hear her shadow soprano when I play, see her shadow form in the corners of the choir loft.

Right beside my mother is an army of ghosts.  My dead.  They gather beneath the arms of "The Old Rugged Cross," standing there (do ghosts stand?) as the pipe organ sighs and hums and booms.  My dad.  Two sisters.  A brother.  A passel of friends.  They sing and leap, dance and cry.  Crowd around me, waiting to hear favorite songs in their spectral ears (do ghosts have ears?).

Saint Marty can hear the stones rolling away, graves emptying, the dead and the living crowded in the kitchen, waiting for ham sandwiches, colored eggs, and baskets of chocolate.

April 1: Holy Thursday, Poetry Workshop, "Last Suppers"

 Greetings all of my loyal disciples!

Yes, I am still alive.  It has been a long week, heading into a long weekend.  I have found myself feeling overwhelmed by life in a lot of ways.  But, Holy Week usually does that to me.  I find the whole Triduum emotionally exhausting.  In fact, it starts on Palm Sunday for me, with the reading of the Biblical narrative of Christ's passion.

This time makes me reflect.  Take stock.  Often, I find myself lacking in a lot of ways.

Many years ago, as a Lenten practice, I wrote a poem a day, from Ash Wednesday to Easter Sunday.  It was a fool's undertaking, but I managed to see it through to completion.

Saint Marty is still a fool.  And he's still taking stock.

Last Suppers

by:  Martin Achatz

3 days until Easter

Details from Andrew Caldwell and Honesto General


For years as a child, I hoped, prayed
My last night would be cataclysmic
And holy, a meteor roaring
Out of the heavens to smote me
As I descended church steps
Onto sidewalk, Jesus lingering
On my tongue. My parents starved
Me before mass, Body of Christ not allowed
To mingle with grilled cheese or Milky Way,
Holiness absorbed as fast as
An atomic flash. My mother told me
If I got killed by a bus immediately
After communion, I would go straight to heaven,
The host my get-out-of-Purgatory-free card.
If I ate only holy wafers,
I could be like Padre Pio, who bled
From his hands and feet for 50 years,
Tasted the flesh of Christ in his mouth
When he died, warm, thick as the lentil soup
John Belushi consumed his last night,
Or the French onion Julia Child ate
The day her soufflé finally fell.
Custer stuffed himself with buffalo
Steaks, beans and molasses,
Roasted wild corn and prairie hen,
All fresh kills, prepared by his chef
Before Little Bighorn. Marilyn Monroe
Ordered gazpacho, chicken breasts
As full as her own ample cleavage,
Layered taco dip, meatballs, refried beans,
Veal parmigiana. Ginsberg made
Fish chowder, stored two gallons
In his freezer before his last howl.
John Lennon noshed on corned beef.
John Kennedy, first Catholic president,
Breakfasted not on the Eucharist,
But soft-boiled eggs, bacon,
Toast, marmalade, orange juice,
Coffee on the morning he rode
To Dealey Plaza. Martin Luther King,
Had fried chicken, Louisiana hot sauce and vinegar,
Black-eyed peas, collard greens, cornbread,
As he stood on the mountaintop,
Saw the Promised Land, his dream.
On Good Friday, Lincoln ate
Mock turtle soup with oxtail,
Roast Virginia fowl with chestnut stuffing,
Baked yams, cauliflower drenched
In cheese sauce. He carried his cross
To Ford’s Theater, was set free
Next morning, Holy Saturday. Jesus consumed
Grilled tilapia, jugs of red wine,
White and red grapes, olives, dates,
Melon and lamb, pit-roasted
And dipped in wild honey.
His friends got drunk, sang songs,
As He broke bread, passed the cup.
They had no idea what was coming,
The meteor bearing down on them
As they descended the stairs, stomachs full,
Into the hungry streets.

April 3: Christ's Body, God's Love Numbers Forty-Four and Forty-Five, Fary Fairy Tale

[Ives] returned to work.  Above his drawing board on the wall, he kept a small crucifix, and could not avoid the image of Christ's body on the Cross:  the musculature of the legs, the tensed arms, the tormented chest, the downturned head, sculpted in metal.  For a moment, Ives imagined the actual body of Christ and wondered what He would have made of the woman in the courtyard window.  Would He have seen the woman in the courtyard window?  Would He have been thrilled by the sight of that woman's alluring body?  Would He have felt a momentary queasiness in the belly, or lingered for a moment, as his son and his friends--as Ives himself--had done?

Ives has just discovered his son, Robert, and his son's friends spying on a neighbor woman.  The woman is getting undressed in her bedroom, and she leaves her curtains open.  Like any teenage boy would, Robert turns off the lights in his room and watches her take off her clothes.  Ives gently reprimands his son and son's friends.  Afterward, he sits at his desk and contemplates the cruciform on the wall,  The anguished body.  Ives doesn't know his son will soon be dead.  Instead, Ives thinks about a young Christ.  A Christ who would, like Robert, find pleasure in looking at a woman's "alluring body."  A human Christ.

I just returned from a Good Friday service.  Lots of chanting.  A recitation of a Gospel passion narrative.  Adoration of the Cross.  Communion.  It's a worship service focused on Christ's body.  His torture and death.  It's not a feel-good couple of hours.  But, always on Good Friday, there's the promise of Easter Sunday.  Sun.  Birds.  Rebirth.

I always find the three days of the Triduum taxing.  Not just because I will be playing the organ/keyboard for about five services in the next 72 hours.  It's the whole Jesus story that drains me emotionally, spiritually, and physically.  By early Easter Sunday afternoon, I will be ready for about a three-day nap.  But it's a good, renewing tiredness.  A joyful one.  That's God's love number forty-four:  Easter exhaustion.

Tonight, I will probably watch The Passion of the Christ.  It's sort of a little tradition for me.  It focuses me.  Reminds me that, no matter what crap is going down in my life, it's not so bad.  I've already been saved.  Sorry to get all evangelical, but this weekend does that to me.  Makes me put things into perspective.  God's looking out for me.  For example, I just found out that I received two classes to teach in the fall semester.  Eight credits.  That's what I was hoping for.  That's a God thing, I think.  And that's God's love number forty-five.

It's been a good Good Friday.

Once upon a time-time, a wizard named Bobby-Bob lived in a faraway kingdom where everybody repeated themselves.  The kingdom's name was One-Won.

One day-day, Bobby-Bob met a friend named Fred-Fred on Second-Second Street.  Bobby-Bob said, "Hey, I thought you were going on vacation-vacation!"

Fred-Fred shook his head.  "I couldn't afford it-it.  Didn't have enough gold-gold."

Bobby-Bob took out his wand-wand.  "You should have come to me-me," Bobby-Bob said.  "I can cast a Midas-Midas spell on you-you."

Fred-Fred said, "Really-really?"

Bobby-Bob nodded.  "Sure-sure."  He waved his wand in the air and said, "Bippity-boppity-boom-boom."

Fred-Fred immediately turned into a pile of horse manure.

Bobby-Bob frowned.  "I think I used the wrong wand-wand."

Moral of the story:  Be happy with your life.  It could turn to shit.

And Saint Marty lived happily ever after.

Amen amen