article_snippet.sent: (CNN)Easter is unique on the Christian calendar, a major point in the cycle of the religious year, and one that has always been able to resist the commercialization and culture warring that surrounds Christmas.
article_snippet.sent: That's in part because Easter is genuinely about how religious impulses, and patterns, can operate in ways that affect our lives.
article_snippet.sent: Nevertheless, I'm often surprised by how little people, even those supposedly within the Christian tradition, actually know about what is called Holy Week and Holy Week culmination on Easter Sunday.   
article_snippet.sent: There is a phrase that many never come across, even among Christians:  Easter Triduum.  
article_snippet.sent: This refers to the three days of Easter that begin with Good Friday, proceed through Holy Saturday, and conclude with Easter Sunday.  
article_snippet.sent: Easter Triduum has a kind of major prologue in Maundy Thursday, the day when, by tradition, Jesus celebrated the Last Supper with Jesus disciples in the upper room in Jerusalem on the night before Jesus was crucified.  
article_snippet.sent: Holy Saturday is probably the least understood day of the Easter Triduum.  
article_snippet.sent: the least understood day of the Easter Triduum occupies an anxious space in human experience, when the certain knowledge of something dreadful isn't quite erased -- can't be erased -- simply by hope.  
article_snippet.sent: Then comes Easter, with the aura of the resurrection.  
article_snippet.sent: Easter embraces the great mystery of resurrection, with Easter promise of transformation -- a shift from one form to another, and a change that moves well beyond any literal understanding.
article_snippet.sent: The three days of Easter, the Triduum, occur only once a year on the calendar.  
article_snippet.sent: This is the joy of Easter, and it's not something reserved for one day on the calendar.  
highlights_snippet.sent: When religious identity, ethics, tolerance are roiling the culture, it's worth looking at message of Holy Week and Easter .
  