Thursday, April 5, 2012

Holy Thursday

I am trying to convince myself that having volunteered to help Amy out tonight and tomorrow are also a good way to observe Holy Week - even if they prevent me from attending Holy Thursday Mass (for the second time in my life) and a Good Friday service (I have no idea of my overall record). I console myself with the fact that they are (unbelievably) apparently not Holy Days of Obligation?

My Catherine of Siena book today told the story of how Catherine drank from the blood that gushed from Jesus's side, and the author took the time to say this:

"People of our own time may consider the story of Catherine and Andrea more horrible than edifying, and feel that her ecstatic contemplation of the blood of Christ - a motive which recurs continually in her visions and her letters and her teaching - discloses an unhealthy love for the least attractive feature of Christianity. In our own lifetime we have learned to know the smell of rotting corpses on battlefields and in bombed towns; we know of the stinking sores and boils of prisoners from concentration camps, where dead and dying were made to lie on beds as wretched as the one Catherine had chosen for herself. We have poured out oceans of blood and tears, both of the guilty and the guiltless, while we hoped against hope that this blood and these tears could help to save a world reeling under the weight of its miseries. And how little have we achieved of the great things we dreamed! Yet we ascribe it to the confused ideas of the time she lived in and her own dark vision of Christianity, when Catherine intoxicated herself with the blood of Christ - that blood which would put an end to human bloodshed, if only we could agree to receive it as the redemption from our bloodthirsty passions, our insatiable lust for imagined gain for ourselves projected onto other nations or classes. Indeed, many Catholics think in this way. The strong-willed, brave and strangely optimistic girl who handled the powerful men of her time so masterfully, who had such an unusual understanding of the characters of the men and women among whom she lived, who really succeeded in making peace between many of her unruly townsmen, who in fact on one or two occasions prevented war, and on many put an end to bloody feuds - she would answer us as she answered her contemporaries in her letters and conversations and in the Dialogue: that the blood of Christ was the only source of her own courage and strength and wisdom, of her amazing and indomitable joy of living. She would say to us, Drink of it with the lips of your souls, as the saints in their visions seemed to drink it with their lips of flesh; assuage your thirst in the love which streams from God's holy Heart - then there will be an end to the vain shedding of man's blood by the hand of man."

- Sigrid Undset Catherine of Siena p. 69-70

Also, someone has apparently published the abortion question version of "A Modest Proposal", which I think I may need to review here once I've had a chance to read it properly. At least, I hope that's what's going on.

I wanted to do something related to Holy Thursday, but there aren't any women mentioned in the Last Supper or the Garden of Gethsemane, so I am going with a similar moment: before Jesus washes His disciples' feet, a woman washed His.

MARY OF BETHANY

There are things you cannot understand from the outside. Things you cannot understand looking in. Things you could not explain to someone who stood outside looking at it. They are only equipped to see the three hundred denarii you could have showered upon the poor.

They find your sincerity, your blatant metaphors, your unintentional foreshadowing, embarrassing. They find your faith, the nakedness of your faith, awkward. I suppose it would be disconcerting. People dance so many rings around things like faith.

Sometimes it is not enough to sit, drinking in every word of the Son of God. He is here. Present, in a human body. He limited Himself for us. To be fully visible to all, even those who would not see Him. He became less, to be closer to us. Later, He would join the human experience even to unto death, to bring the human pattern of life and death into the house of God, forever. Sometimes, that realization cannot stay in your head, it cannot stay a kind of mental confusion. Sometimes, you cannot bear that feeling - of gratitude and wonder and just sheer disbelief at the amount of love being poured in your lap - in check. You cannot be still in the face of it.

That is when you go and get the most precious thing that you own, the most expensive and rare and beautiful thing you have and offer it to Him. You try to wipe away the grime that has collected on the human feet He has taken upon Himself. Your hair brushes it, and you are in awe that your hair has touched God Himself, and you brush away the grime of the world, knowing that you are grime just the same as the dust on His feet. But He loves your bit of dust enough that it is a precious act.

Sometimes sitting is not enough. Sometimes, you must strew everything that is beautiful at His feet and stare at it as foolish dust, foolish dust no more than the mud caking his heels, and cry that God so loves you He has made you worth more than the dust. Sometimes, you cannot sit quiet in the face of that love.

They will never understand, on the outside. Only those who have felt that moment, when the truth of what God has done for us overflows the bounds we use to keep in check so that we might live our lives from day to day. Only they will understand why three hundred denarii is mere dust on His feet - that it was foolishness to do it not because the money was better spent, but because but for the love of God - we are all dust on His feet, however much men would covet us.

It cannot look like anything but foolishness. Because even what God has done, in coming down, in taking human form, looks like a kind of foolishness to us. And the only way to answer divine foolish kindness is with human foolish thanksgiving, knowing that even that is made beautiful only by the love He pours into us.