Thursday: Today starts the Triduum, the three days before Easter, and my favorite time of the liturgical year! Today's meditation ties into yesterday's and Monday's a little because Holy Thursday is the commemoration of the institution of the priesthood, the Mass, and the Eucharist.
Undoubtedly an important day to the Church and to Catholics and Christians everywhere, but I noticed today that we treat each of the three days of the Triduum as completely distinct, almost as if they have nothing to do with each other. This isn't true, of course, as they are commemorations of three actual days in history which flowed together quite the same as every day before and since. I would like to be able to offer some profound thought on Holy Thursday's significance to me or the Church, or some beautiful words on the events that took place on that day, but I feel like doing that would rob the Triduum of its wholeness liturgically, and its significance.
It's always seemed funny to me that the way the Passion is read in church, the events of Holy Thursday sound like they are merely a preface to Good Friday, though the celebration of the day is so cut off from the celebration of the next. It was likely a matter of a few hours which separated the Last Supper, at which the priesthood, Mass, and Eucharist were all instituted at the same time, and the agony in the garden of Gethsemane, and Jesus' trial and all that followed it. However, the distinctness of Holy Thursday and Good Friday from each other makes it seem as though everything except the Last Supper happened on Friday.
This is also often true of the way we view God. So much of Him seems very distinct, when in reality, it is all very fluid. The three persons of the Trinity, God's mercy and justice, Jesus' divinity and humanity. These are all things the people look at as being singular, but they're not, because none of them can stand on their own. There cannot be Trinity without its persons, and there cannot be three distinct, unconnected persons if they are all one God. God's justice, likewise, is often separated from His mercy, as if the two do not complement each other in the course of history and our lives. When God judges, He does not do so vindictively, as if He were out for blood. God judges mercifully every time, though He cannot ignore what has contributed to the judgement, and often someone may intercede for the person or people being judged to heighten God's mercy toward them. Believers also separate Jesus' human and divine natures as if there were two men, not one. Jesus' divine nature allowed Him to do miracles, to institute the Church, her priesthood, the Mass, and the Eucharist, but His human nature allowed Him to suffer as we suffer, so that when the time came He could bear all of our sins on the Cross to give us eternal life.
We forget too often as Catholics that so much of our lives are these things, and that much like the lives we live, they are not just a series of occurrences pieced together like a paper chain. No link in our lives can stand alone, just as no aspect of our faith can be separated from the others and remain whole. Instead, we are, the faith is more like a jigsaw puzzle. Each person, piece and aspect contributes to the whole in such a way that together they are harmonious and paint the full picture of our Christian life.
Friday: Not much stood out about today for me, except that it seemed to be marked by failure. I couldn't stay up all night praying like I wanted to, I forgot to say prayers I usually say every other day, I couldn't concentrate on much of anything, and I wished I could be home for the Good Friday service at my dad's church, rather than appreciating the service at the church by my university.
It is an annoying and frustrating experience to feel that more or less everything in your day has been for naught, which was exactly how I felt when the chaplain got up to the lectern to give his homily after the Passion. Then I heard his voice come out sounding strained and almost choked as he asked the congregation what Jesus had done to deserve His death, to deserve being put to death in the way He was. He told us that it was because He spoke the truth to people, and that the Church has inherited His crucifixion (figuratively) because she has continued to preach His truth.
The foremost of all these truths is the God loves us, he said. He then recounted with much exasperation that many priests, he among them, minister to people every day who refuse to believe that God loves them. They think that it isn't even possible for Him to love them, for whatever reasons they have. He begged us, literally repeating the words "I beg you" three times, he begged us to believe that it was true. That God really does love us.
This, I believe, was the only success of my day. Not the homily, obviously, I couldn't have come up with that. But that I could believe it when he said it to me. Today I believed with all my heart the God does love me. After all, isn't the core of our faith that God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that all who believe in Him might not die, but might have eternal life? We hold this in such esteem as Christians that we give it as the explanation for the Cross. God wasn't just looking for entertainment, He loved us, and so He gave us the only acceptable sacrifice to make up for all our sins against Him: His only Son.
This is a beautiful truth, and I believe that after tonight I will hold it all the more dear because it is true, and because someone took the time to beg me to believe it because he loves me, too.
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