Triduum: The Three Days That Hold Us

A Contemplative Reflection on the Significance of this Time

“The endurance of darkness is the preparation for great light.”
— St. John of the Cross

The Triduum is not just a sequence of liturgies—it is a passage, a descent, a silence that echoes through time. It is the space for silence between what has been and what is not yet. It holds the grief of loss, the ache of waiting, and the holding onto hope that something deeper, something eternal, is unfolding beneath the surface. For those drawn to the contemplative path, these three days offer no easy answers—only the invitation to remain, to watch, to trust. Yet for me, they are often the focus of my year, a time to give room for my wounds, my disappointments, and this year the loss of both my parents and my rooting to the ongoing story of my family. This year Triduum has a particular focus.

The death of Jesus cannot be understood apart from his life. He lived as one who questioned the certainties of power and disturbed the complacency of nationalistic religion. His very presence threatened the tightly bound systems of domination—imperial control, institutionalized violence, spiritual elitism. In his death, those forces did their worst. And yet, they did not win.

To sit with Jesus’ death contemplatively is to let go of our longing for resolution. It is to recognise that love often looks like loss before it looks like triumph. Julian of Norwich, writing in her Revelations of Divine Love, says, “Christ did not say: You shall not be tempted, you shall not be troubled, you shall not be afflicted. But he said: You shall not be overcome.” These three days teach us how not to be overcome. And boy this year, do we need to hear this given the chaos of the world.

This is not a time of escape or spiritual bypassing. The mystics never rushed the silence. They knew that transformation comes in the waiting. John of the Cross called this the dark night, not because God is absent, but because God is working in hidden ways. “The endurance of darkness is the preparation for great light,” he wrote. And so, we endure. We wait. We let the darkness do its slow work.

Holy Saturday, that space of absence and uncertainty, is the very heart of the Triduum. The ancient Church called it the day God was dead. It is the silence after love has been crucified and before anything makes sense again. For many of us, this silence is familiar. We live in it. We pray in it. We try to make sense of God in a world where grief is real and justice feels so far off. And yet the mystics remind us that God is most active when most hidden. Meister Eckhart once wrote, “God is not found in the soul by adding anything but by a process of subtraction.” The Triduum invites us into that holy subtraction—letting go of control, certainty, ego, and even our images of God.

In this descent, something paradoxically begins to rise. Not through our effort, but through our surrender. We discover that hope does not always shout. Sometimes it whispers. Sometimes it waits with us in the dark. “All shall be well,” Julian wrote, “and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.” But not because we understand how. Only because Love Himself has entered even into death and refuses to let go of us.

The early Christians lived from this place of hope. Their confidence in the life beyond life was not theoretical—it was embodied. They faced persecution not with defiance, but with song. They went to their deaths trusting in the one who had gone before them, knowing that the promise of Christ was not merely survival, but union. The desert mothers and fathers, too, taught that the spiritual path was not about avoiding suffering, but about being present to it with courage, humility, and trust.

Yet it is also a difficult time. Every year I do feel a certain sense of feeling overwhelmed with emotions. Anxiety in particular is my big struggle. It is with me from the moment I awake until I sleep, where my contemplative practice and other prayer brings spiritual relief. Triduum reminds me that this personal struggle no matter how pervasive in most of my life, is not permanent, is not about who I am, but about my response to my experiences of a broken world since I was a child, and how the world’s brokenness is played out in our families and in every generation, that wounds the next. It is not by chance that Jesus says to Pilate: “I Am not of this Kosmos”, literally, I Am not of this [world], I am not of this domination system. These words that sound so weak in English when translated, are a profound statement of loving revolution said to the representative of the imperial Roman Empire. In Triduum these words of Jesus carry immense meaning, and personally a deep hope that brings me to grateful courage and to not allow my life to be dictated by the consequences of anxiety. Triduum therefore for me is waiting for the source of all love and hope, trusting in the words of the Emmanuel, God-with-us.

The Triduum teaches us how to stay present in a world that rushes to fix, to distract, to numb or to avoid. As Holy Week and Triduum have been overtaken by consumerism and the market society, many have no idea what it’s all about, with chocolate, eggs and the rest. Missing out in the profound meaning of this time except for the showing of Jesus of Nazareth or Jesus Christ Superstar on the more cultural TV channels.

As an alternative to this vacuousness, Triduum teaches us to sit with what is broken, unresolved, unfinished. It teaches us to keep vigil—not just with church communities, but in our own souls. Contemplating Triduum, is at its heart, the willingness to hold space for mystery. It is to believe that even in the silence, God is speaking. Even in the waiting, God is working. Even in the loss, God is loving.

These are the days that hold us. Not with easy comfort, but with deep uneasy truth. The challenging truth that the way of Christ is the way of downward movement, the way of surrender, the way through death into life. The mystics knew this well. So we walk with them—not to escape the world, but to learn how to love it and lean into it more deeply. We sit with the silence. We wait with our wounds and disappointments. We honour the loss. We express our love in attentive waiting. We keep the long vigil.

And by the way, at this time, it is ok to cry, it is ok to be upset, it is ok to not force the emotions down, but to let them out…. The release is also part of this time, because great love and great grief go hand in hand.

Yet and always, and at some point in the bleak stillness, and outside of our perception, hope begins to rise. The spiritual revolution has already begun.

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A Prayer for the Triduum

O Christ,
you entered the silence of death
so that nothing—no sorrow, no loss, no despair—
would be outside your love.

Teach us to wait with you in the dark.
To trust what we cannot see.
To let go of what we cannot hold.
To hope where hope seems lost.

Hold us in these holy days.
Unravel us gently.
Empty us of all but love.
And lead us, slowly,
into the life that rises in stillness.

Amen.

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Photo by Mr. Great Heart on Unsplash