Tenebrae

Tenebrae (Latin for shadows) is an ancient liturgical form designed to move us to individual prayer and meditation through scripture readings, prayers, hymns, and anthems. The service traditionally begins in a fully-lighted church and progresses towards darkness. Since we can't be in a church building, we suggest that home worshippers begin with all the lights up in whatever room they are in and if available, add some lighted candles as well. These could be real candles or Christmas window candles, for example.

There are seven lessons, prayers and musical meditations. After each set, you should extinguish a candle or turn off a light. By the seventh lesson you should only have one candle or light remaining. At the silence after the anthem, Were You There, you should remove that candle or turn off the light to symbolize Jesus' death. At that point, we all recite the Lord's Prayer in the dark, in a whisper. Then you can return the candle or turn on a light symbolizing the promise of resurrection.

During this recorded presentation members of St. Thomas-Epiphany Episcopal Parish will be reading the lessons and prayers, and the musical meditations will come from archival recordings of the choir from past Tenebrae services. The texts of the prayers following each of the seven readings were graciously provided by the Rev. Dr. George Paul Mocko, retired Bishop of the Maryland Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America. We hope everyone can join us in this powerful Holy Week worship experience.