Tenebrae

This year, my parish here in Santa Barbara, St. Raphael's, is having a Tenebrae service on Good Friday. I'm excited because it'll be the first one I've ever been to! The form is slightly different depending on where you go, but I've heard so much about them. What are your experiences of the Tenebrae?

Also, I found this poem:

E Tenebris, by Oscar Wilde (1881)

Come down, O Christ, and help me! reach thy
     hand,
For I am drowning in a stormier sea
Than Simon on thy lake of Galilee:
The wine of life is spilt upon the sand,
My heart is as some famine-murdered land
Whence all good things have perished utterly,
And well I know my soul in Hell must lie
If I this night before God's throne should stand.
'He sleeps perchance, or rideth to the chase,
Like Baal, when his prophets howled that name
From morn to noon on Carmel's smitten height.'
Nay, peace, I shall behold, before the night,
The feet of brass, the robe more white than
     flame,
The wounded hands, the weary human face.

A deathbed conversion, also out of the darkness into the light.