Easter joy emanates from Gretna balcony

Story by Beth Donze
Facebook video courtesy of Victoria Donze (see link at bottom of this story)
 
In “normal times” on the Saturday night before Easter, Jaymie Wolfe would be waiting in line outside of St. Louis Cathedral – with her husband Andrew and some subset of their eight adult children – to attend the Easter Vigil Mass.

With that option off the table this year, Wolfe found a way to at least partly recreate the atmosphere of being “in church” while tenaciously expressing her faith: On April 11 at 8 p.m., the designated start-up time for the Easter Vigil, Wolfe and her husband chanted the Exsultet – the “Proclamation of Easter” – from the second-floor balcony of their Gretna home.

The chanters, who are parishioners of St. Martha Church in Harvey, held a candle symbolizing their baptisms. A small group of neighbors watched from the street.
 
Familiar with the chant already

“Sometimes, you’re in a parish where the deacon is too afraid to chant (the Exsultet) and the priest doesn’t want to, so the music director will do it,” said Wolfe, speaking by phone with the Clarion Herald a few days before the April 11 event.

Wolfe, 58, said she became familiar with the Exsultet as a parish music director and adult faith formation minister during her nearly 40 years in the Archdiocese of Boston, vocalizing it both as a soloist and as a duet with her husband.

“We had (Andrew) up in the choir loft and me down in front filling the nave with this echoing of praise in male and female voices, and it’s very profoundly beautiful,” Wolfe said. “We’ll see how that translates to our balcony!”
 
Rich language

Her favorite moments in the Scripture-based Exsultet, which traces salvation history and revels in humankind’s joy in its redemption, include the poetic observation that Christ’s resurrection has “wed” heaven to earth, “the divine to the human.”

Wolfe also loves the chant’s description of “the sin of Adam” as a “happy fault” that earned the world a “glorious” redeemer, and its sweet nod to “mother bees,” whose wax keeps the Paschal candle glowing brightly.

Beautiful words aside, Wolfe, who has also helped a few deacons navigate the lengthy chant, said the real challenge of the Exsultet is having enough vocal stamina to get through the nine-minute piece. 

“It helps to have two people alternating (the parts) because you get a break between those phrases,” she said. “There’s something very powerful when you actually are the person who gets to chant the Exsultet. It’s something amazingly beautiful! It’s almost hard not to be distracted by the beauty of experiencing the entire church in darkness, except everyone has the light and the light’s spreading as the (Paschal) candle comes forward. Then you chant the praises. It’s very profound!”
 
Used Facebook to share Holy Week rituals

The Wolfes, who are sheltering in place with Jaymie’s 85-year-old mother, Judi Potts, and their 20-year-old daughter Marjeta Wolfe, a Loyola junior, have been staying in spiritual Communion with their faith through St. Louis Cathedral’s televised Mass.

The family also recorded a series of Facebook Live events during Holy Week in a desire to share the rich traditions of each day.

On Holy Wednesday, the foursome gathered in their darkened family room to read and sing the Tenebrae, an ancient prayer service gleaned from the Liturgy of the Hours. An online audience of about 100 prayed with them.

“(The Tenebrae) explores not the ‘externals’ of the passion of Christ – things the cross, the nails, the whips and the crown of thorns that we get in other liturgies,” Wolfe explained. “In this, we explore the depths of the interior passion of Christ – the abandonment, the loneliness, the betrayal.”

To prepare for the Tenebrae, which draws from sources such as Psalms, Lamentations, Hebrews and the writings of St. Augustine, the Wolfes placed 13 lit candles on the mantle of their fireplace to represent Christ and his 12 apostles. The candles were slowly extinguished as the service unfolded, a graphic reminder of the growing darkness Christians encounter as they enter into the Triduum. One candle stays lit, representing “that whole notion that Christ really is not extinguished. You cannot extinguish him,” Wolfe said.

On Holy Thursday, the family gathered for a Passover Seder on Facebook Live, the traditional Jewish meal that Jaymie Wolfe had hoped to share in person with this year’s confirmation candidates from St. Martha.

And on the morning of Easter Sunday, the Wolfes took to their balcony again to chant the Easter Sunday Gospel sequence.

“The church has been praying this chant for over 1,000 years. It belongs at the Easter Sunday liturgy and nowhere else,” said Wolfe of the sequence, which precedes the Gospel acclamation (“Alleluia”) at that Mass and is ascribed to an 8 ^th-century man known only as “Wipo.”

“I think people are grateful for small initiatives. I don’t have a gigantic reach, but whoever flips them on and sees them (on social media) – it’s a good thing,” said Wolfe of her Facebook videos. “The more people who preserve the traditions, as rich as they are in our faith; the more people who bother to learn those things, it becomes a treasury for them! We can open up that treasury for other people.”
 
Went full circle as a Catholic

Wolfe, who works as book editor for Ave Maria Press and a columnist for The Boston Pilot, the country’s oldest Catholic newspaper, moved to Gretna two years ago and serves on St. Martha’s Justice and Life ministry and as an extraordinary minister of holy Communion.

A native of Cleveland, Ohio, she was baptized Catholic, raised as an Episcopalian and became an evangelical Christian as a teenager, rediscovering her Catholic roots as an undergraduate student at Harvard University. The turning point: a friend casually invited her to Mass. 

“At the time I was pretty much in a faith crisis,” Wolfe recalled. “I went to that Mass and knew that I could not receive Eucharist, but the choir sang ‘One Bread, One Body’ and I just broke down and cried.”

After Mass, the priest announced that the Catholic student center was hosting a speaker series on basic Catholic beliefs.

“I decided I would go because the first topic was Eucharist,” said Wolfe, who enrolled in RCIA classes and came into full Communion with the church as a Harvard senior.

“One of the first things I did was to sit down and learn the Gospel sequences and the Exsultet, because I really wanted to be someone who could help the church preserve its rich liturgical heritage,” she said.

Wolfe, who also holds a master’s degree in ministry from St. John’s Seminary in Boston, said one of her greatest joys is seeing faith “take root” in the lives of her eight children – five daughters and three sons who range in age from 20 to 35. In Boston, the family would always celebrate the Easter Vigil inside the Cathedral of the Holy Cross.

“We’d take our children with us, sometimes in pajamas,” Wolfe said. “We’d fill a pew.”

Click here to see the video.

Beth Donze can be reached at bdonze@clarionherald.org.