By the second century the Christian year centered on the Pascal feast, the great commemoration of the death and resurrection of Jesus. The Easter cycle unfolded over three days, beginning with Good Friday, called the triduum, which Ambrose of Milan referred to as “the three most sacred days” of Christian time. In those three days Christians grounded their spiritual identity.

Sometime around the year 400, Egeria, a Spanish woman, embarked on a multiyear pilgrimage to the Holy Land. We know little about her; she may or may not have been a nun, but she appears to have possessed considerable resources to make such a lengthy journey. She kept a journal of her travels, written in the form of letters to her “sisters” at home. Her diary traces Christian time as she visits distinctly Christian sites, paying scant attention to anything Roman.

Egeria reported on the “Great Week,” the week before Easter, which Christians now refer to as Holy Week, as a special time of worship both in churches and at various holy sites around Jerusalem. She described Palm Sunday:

All the people walk before the bishop singing hymns and antiphons, always responding: “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.” And whatever children in this place, even those not able to walk, are carried on their parents’ shoulders, all holding branches, some of palm, some of olive; [they walk] through the whole city, all go on foot, the matrons as well as the noble men… singing responses, going slowly so that the people may not tire.

Each day was marked with worship and processions, gathering large congregations of people from every station of life. She wrote on Good Friday at the service commemorating the crucifixion of a crowd so great “one cannot even open a door.”

From noon to three, people listened to the Gospel accounts of the Passion; there was no music, only the sound of people crying. “At each reading,” she reported, “there is such emotion and weeping by all the people that it is a wonder; for there is no one, old or young, who does not on this day weep for these three hours more than can be imagined because the Lord has suffered for us.” An all-night prayer vigil followed the service.

Holy Week led up to the Saturday night vigil, when the faithful walked, their way illuminated by hundreds of candles, to the church where new Christians were baptized. There the whole congregation sang and celebrated the first Eucharist of Easter in a feast. Her delight in the Great Week is obvious, as she carefully recounted all she observed. “Journeys are not hard when they are the fulfillment of hopes,” she wrote.

Christian time unfolds from the locus of these three days and in no way may be considered a morbid experience. Egeria pointed out that the crucifixion was commemorated on one day—Good Friday—whose meaning could not be understood separate from the Easter feast that followed. She duly reported weeping, not because Christianity was a gloomy faith, but because it so startled her. She had never seen such great spiritual lamentation before. It was precisely because Christian time was hopeful, a celebration of God’s restoration of paradise here and now, that Egeria underscored mourning over Christ’s death on the cross so specifically. The full triduum, the three central days of Christian alternative time, forcefully made the point that God was with humanity to transform suffering into a joy-filled feast as the days move from crucifixion to celebration. Early Christians did not wait for God to fix time or to rescue them from time; instead, they believed that God had hallowed time by acting out Christ’s love in time. So they redeemed earthly time. As Irenaeus of Lyon said, “The church has been planted as a paradise in this world.”

As Egeria pointed out, because it is grounded in shared human experience of time, the Christian year is the most inclusive of all spiritual practices. Rich, poor, young, old, city dweller or stranger—all are invited into the mystery of God as experienced physically in human time. The Christian year embodies the life of Jesus in readings, song, feasts, and prayers. As a French monk commented, Christian time is “the joy of the people, the source of light to the learned, and the book of the humblest of the faithful.” As contemporary theologian Dorothy Bass writes, “In a single turning, the Christian year carries the content of Christian faith into present time, inviting us to experience the here-and-now in relation to a story that began before creation and continues into a future that is already dawning.” She continues, “The Christian practice of living through the year cuts against the grain of despair, as the paschal mystery at its heart touches all our stories…. Time is for sharing the gifts of God’s love and strength as we go about daily work.”

Diana Butler Bass, A People’s History of Christianity: The Other Side of the Story, p 51-53