Holy Thursday, 1997

Holy Thursday 1997

My favorite night

I begin every homily on every Holy Thursday Night with the same personal observations: I think this is my favorite night of the whole Church year for a variety of reasons. But one, I hope it’s the most important, is that this night is really an adumbration of what is to come. It is a celebration of the family of God, a big family. We heard all those Africans singing in the Gloria. They’re the family too. But it is only an anticipation, and so if we’re to take that notion seriously then I think it is useful to go back to the proposal that I made for the whole of Lent: namely, that Lent is a time of approfondissement, a deepening of our understanding. It would be very nice to say, "Oh, Holy Thursday, this is great, we’re all going to get together and love each other and it’s going to be terrific..." But that doesn’t work.

What does it mean then to deepen our understanding of Holy Thursday? We have this extraordinary gesture of the foot washing and we have the Eucharist itself... But I’d like to propose a little incident from the life of Thomas Merton that he described in one of his many books. Merton was a Trappist Monk in Gethsemane who was killed in a freakish electrical accident in Bangkok, I think. As a Trappist, of course, you could never leave the grounds, except if you got sick. But one time he did get sick and so they shipped him off to Louisville, Kentucky because the monastery was out in the hill-country not far from there. In this extraordinary passage he’s standing on some street corner in Louisville and looks around at all these people: blacks, whites, running around doing their business, and he’s consumed with love for them... It is amazing, there is this great explosion of his heart that embraced all these people--strangers, total strangers... It is a great moment of illumination that all these people are lovable before God and had a place in his heart... I don’t think that is so unusual an experience, but I think it is transitory; he probably went back to the monastery and a brother may have kicked him in the shins by accident... the regular sort of thing. But something extraordinary and unspeakably wonderful had happened which I suspect left an enduring mark on Merton’s soul and in his heart and gave him some insight as to what his whole life was about. I think that Merton, even at that moment of exaltation, was not unaware that there is a terrible asymmetry in his experience. That is, if we could have stopped all the people in that street, people crossing the street, strolling with their babies, maybe picking somebody’s pocket..., they would have said: "see that guy over there? What’s with him?" I suspect they would have been clueless as to Merton's response to them. And that’s what I mean by asymmetry, and I think it is precisely the awareness of the asymmetry of love as we get it from Jesus that takes us as deep as we can get on this night, and on many nights beyond it.

We’d like to say that there is this magnificent reciprocity, you know: "where charity and love is there is God, oh sacred banquet...," all this terrific stuff, "Glory to God in the highest," with drums and bells and little kids singing... But we are strangers, we are strangers to ourselves, and I suspect, that Merton became a stranger to himself in that experience... but that does not invalidate the experience. The asymmetry of the experience is the manifestation of its greatest reality and depth. You get that in the passage from John. Here’s Peter, good old Peter...: "What are you doing? This is supposed to be the job for the littlest, or the weakest, or the most insignificant person in the household. What in God’s name are you messing about like that on the floor for?" The asymmetry here is realized with a brutal power as Peter runs away not so long after that. But what is wonderful in that gesture is that the asymmetry itself is manifest with Jesus singing: "here I am doing this for you, and the fact that you get all bent out of shape, unwilling to be embraced by me, so preoccupied by yourself, and protocol, and your sense of shame and fear and guilt and all those things that paralyze you... What I’m getting at is that even in the gesture of the foot washing I think that an asymmetry is there if we look at it very hard and try to come as deeply as we can to it. Love here is not mutual. But we so want it to be. Our hearts cry out, our hearts are wrenched when there is no mutuality. (One of the other aspects of that sense of asymmetry is the sense that one was, maybe, a little premature in this universal love. And that realization is always useful. But even that sense of the qualified nature of our loving invalidates neither the notion of the possibility of love nor its essentially asymmetrical quality this side of the grave.)

Finally, and this is very hard for us human beings to get hold of... Time Magazine, that strange piece of literature, has as its cover story: "Does Heaven Exist?" . And I confess to being so frustrated by the article that I stopped reading it two-thirds of the way through, because their heaven, well, I don’t want to exist. To them Heaven is what Freud thought it was, basically some kind of wish fulfillment: "me and my buds are going to get together and God’s going to rent the hall, maybe..." That is precisely a trivialization of this whole business. Yet even in its trivial form, it may move us further and more energetically to seek the depths of this event, despite our own ineptitude, and our own mediocrity, to find within it this profound appetite that it be so, and the blessed recollection that even momentarily it was so for us, as it was for Merton too.

So, now we’re going to do our regular graceless business: we’re going to have the foot washing, right now, right after I take off this nice robe, and everyone is going to feel uncomfortable and I’m going to feel foolish, but that’s all right. Nevertheless, thinking about this, even in our awkwardness ands embarrassment, is an intimation of what is to come, what God offers us in Jesus. So let’s be about it...

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RT 12/4/97