Maundy Thursday

Today I would like to share with you words from a character of mine—a pirate captain turned priest.  Here is his meditation, roughly translated, which conveys at least some of the beauty of the original language and thought I hope:

How eagerly He desired that moment, how eagerly He desired that they might understand, how eagerly He desired that He might share His suffering with them by sharing His very life! For what does love desire except to give itself wholly to the beloved and to keep nothing for itself? So much He loved us that He would not keep even that to Himself!

So it was that on that night He knelt and washed their feet, teaching them how greatly He wished to turn their preconceived notions upside down. And so He still does. He calls us to follow Him and then reverses all that we expect in following Him.

He sat there then, asking them to come to Him, even as He asks of us now, as He said to them: “This is My Body,” and “This is My Blood.” This He said because it was His life He gave for us, and so it was that He asked us to do the same, to give our lives for Him and for our brothers.

This is what a priest is called to do, whether a ministerial priest or any baptized person sharing in the life of Christ. We are asked—for He always asks and rarely commands, begging our love—to become ourselves a living sacrifice, to pour forth our blood for others and to let them eat of our body in His memory, not as we eat of His Body and Blood, but in a spiritual way that is in communion with His sacrifice so that all we do, all we suffer, all that others ask of us, and all that each moment brings may be an offering of love to Him.

Yet always, weak and sinful creatures that we are, our time is cut short. We think that we are in the garden to keep watch with Him, but then we find ourselves sleeping and all our efforts lost, all our attempts to pray in vain. When He says it is time to go, we do not understand. We want to beg Him to wait, but it cannot be so. We can only let go the past and meet the next moment for love of Him, trying once more to be faithful where we have so often failed.