Holy Thursday
March 24, 2016
J.A. Loftus, S.J,
We gather here this evening coming from many different
places. Places of the heart more than of geography. For some few,
there is a burden of finality. Some of us will not be here again for
another Triduum. For an even smaller group there is the delight
and expectation of a “first time.”
Some may already feel the darkness that others still just
await. Still others may be too frightened to allow themselves to
sense any darkness at all—even liturgically. The dark is scary and
is a place many refuse to go—at least as in “a heart place.” And yet
the light will be extinguished tonight.
We gather this evening from many different places. That’s the
reality. I remember a marvelous quote from Albert Einstein.
“Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a terribly persistent one.” So
let’s try to heed some poetic advise from Mary Oliver.
“Sometimes I need
only to stand
wherever I am
to be blessed.
(Evidence (2009)
As we begin this sacred time together, stand wherever you are!
That’s your reality. And let God bless you where you are.
We all know the rich symbols of this night: the songs, the
Word, the water and the feet. We all know the smoke (incense), the
bread and the wine. They are all familiar, perhaps even too
familiar for some. But these three days, of all days, let them speak
themselves. Let them be wherever they are for you.
There are a few of us in very fancy robes tonight and we are
mostly grateful for a gift. There are others longing for the privilege,
and still waiting in hope. You get the point by now, I’m sure: we are
the pious and the bored, the over-educated and the theological
dunces, the mystified and the largely opaque. But we are one single
family waiting for a blessing.
We celebrate tonight something very special in the history of
world religions. As Father Timothy Radcliffe reminds us each year
on Holy Thursday, we are perhaps the only group in religious
history that gathers to actually “celebrate” its own disillusion: the
night on which we were no more.
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In his own words, this night “is a story which tells of the
moment when there was no story to tell, when the future
disappeared.” And “we gather around the altar and remember the
night that the community disintegrated….our community looks
back to when it fell apart.”
That is a paradox at the heart of this Triduum. It is filled with
the paradox of Jesus of Nazareth. T.S. Eliot speaks of Jesus as “the
hint half-guessed, the gift only half understood.” This is all a
strange and paradoxical story we remember.
And at the end of this evening’s gospel, Jesus asks them and
us another question: “Do you understand what I have done for
you?” Let’s admit it. Most of us do not! And yet we continue to
follow him. Let that question, and the liturgical richness we
reenact, be whatever they are for you, wherever you are tonight.
God is about to be abandoned and die in order to re-start
creation from the beginning and in order to show again just how
much God loves this world, and all its creatures, its best desires, its
fondest dreams. No matter what it looks and feels like in our lives
right now, God has already shattered death itself. And that, too, is
the Promise we remember.
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“Sometimes I need only to stand wherever I am to be blessed.”
Be there, stand there! And receive God’s blessing.
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