I've been having an unusual Holy Week this year. The most hours I've spent in church have been spent not in services, but in singing. I have missed the liturgy of sorrow and pain and astonishing redemption, but it has been a gift to sing Purcell's Funeral Music, and Heinrich Schütz's Matthäuspassion, a piece I've gotten to know through singing it. The final chorus is full of the paradoxes of this season: "Glory to you, o Christ, for you have suffered…" And beyond the bitterness of death, eternity.
