As If

"Quasimodo geniti infantes, rationabile, sine dololac concupiscite."


"As if babes, alleluia, desire the spiritual milk without guile, alleluia, alleluia, alleluia. Rejoice in God our helper. Sing aloud to the God of Jacob!"

As newborn babes, alleluia, desire the rational milk without guile, alleluia, alleluia, alleluia. Rejoice to God our helper. Sing aloud to the God of Jacob.

Stepping outside to gather flowers, I see there is not only cold rain but snow. Now that the first few days around Easter showed us springtime growth, and after the flowers have erupted in yellow and red, snow comes and threatens to undo everything. There is always a struggle between the coming warmth, and the old coldness which, even a few days before the beginning of May, does not wish to pass. I am reminded of the end of Andrew Rissik's play Dionysus. where he gives a Gnostic Christian slant to the ancient play The Bacchae. When we begin the play, King Cadmus who was once harsh and unrelenting, and then, in his despairing old age passed his crown to his harsh grandson, is full of joy at the arrival of the young God of Wine the new order of the world the God has brought. But by the end, Cadmus cannot sustain his joy in the coming of Dionysus and so, retreats to his old way of thinking. This is how it can be after the dizzying heights of Easter. After the warmth, the world is gradually colder, and then it even seems like winter again, that which has grown is blighted by the return of the old familiar cold.

But I have gathered flowers for the altar, and during the mysteries of the Triduum one thing is revealed, the altar is not only the body of the Lord who has died, but his tomb. And on Easter it is the tomb of the one who was once dead, but now lives. The altar is visited for the reason every tomb is visited, not to hold court with a rotting corpse, but because the tomb of resurrection is the joining of earth to heaven, the above to the below, the sight of miracle and transformation.

Every tomb is the tomb of resurrection.

Today we light the candles for Low Sunday, the Octave of Easter, low in comparison to last Sunday which is the highest of them all. This Sunday is also called Quasimodo Sunday, because that Latin word is the beginning of the introit “As if infants,” or “In the mode of infants….” Which declares how we enter into this new spiritual life. And how fitting that Quasimodo is the name of the creature of Notre Dame, when it is also entering into its new life. Quasimodo, the reminder that after the sacred mysteries that passed, after the blighting snow, having stood before the tomb we are not like Cadmus who went back to his old ways, but infants in the new way, still hungering for this new and beautiful life which we have just entered.

Quasimodo, As if. Though the weather is foul again, we celebrate as if it were not. Though everyone celebrated transformation with us, and it seems like all that has passed, we celebrate as if it were still clearly before us, as if what we just barely saw we could see clearly, as if we were at the beginning of a thing and not at its ending, as if…