Month: April 2025

A Reflection on Holy Thursday
Deacon Douglas McManaman

Also published here

What is so important about Holy Thursday night is the explicit connection between the institution of the Eucharist and a life of service, that is, the link between the sacrament and works of mercy, works of charity, which includes the commitment to social justice in all its forms. An ardent love of the Eucharist alongside relative indifference to those who suffer is a love that is essentially a farce. 

Christ washes the feet of the Apostles, the dirtiest part of the body, a task reserved for slaves. The life of Christ was a descent. God the Son, the Second Person of the Trinity, descended and “set up his tent” among us and took the form of a slave, so it is fitting that at this time he would engage in the work of a slave, namely washing feet. All of us without exception are to descend to the level of slaves (Gk: doulou); for the only way to ascend to God is through a descent to the lowest place. God, like water, always seeks the lowest place. 

I am reminded of a dream I once had early on in my career as a teacher. I was teaching in the Jane and Finch area of Toronto (a very broken neighborhood) and that year I was assigned a period of chaplaincy. The Vice Principal, a very good man, had just lost his father, and he was struggling with this loss as well as with a group of rather cantankerous staff members who were making his life miserable. One night–it must have been close to 30 years ago–I dreamt I was in a barn. I went to the barn door, the top part of which was open, and looked out. The entire pasture was covered in dung, feces, or cow manure. Over to my left was a beautiful stallion, standing deep in the manure. There was a woman next to the stallion, slightly older than I, but not by much (I was in my 30s), and she grabbed the hoof of the stallion, like a farrier, and with her hand would scoop up the dung and throw it on the ground. She kept doing that. She then looks over at me and, with a bit of consternation in her voice that I was just watching her, calls me by name and tells me to get out there and help her. And so I did. 

That was the dream. When I woke up, I knew exactly what it meant. The woman, I was convinced, was Mary, Our Lady. In that dream, however, she was more like an older sister, and she spoke to me with genuine familiarity. The stallion, I knew immediately, was a symbol of that Vice Principal who was going through a very difficult period in his life, with the loss of his father and the frustrations of having to deal with a very cynical group of teachers on staff. My job was to help her tend to him, wash his feet, serve him, keep him company in his difficulties, encourage him, keep the “crap” that was being spread around from discouraging him. I am reminded of that dream every time I drive to a certain small town in Ontario, for there is a barn on the way that looks just like the one in my dream. 

We receive Christ’s body in order to become what we eat–Christ. But Christ lost his status, and in first century Palestine, status was everything. He lost it because he had table fellowship with those whom the religious leaders would have nothing to do with– prostitutes, tax collectors, sinners who fail to observe the requirements of the law because they don’t know the law, etc. To share a meal is to enter into intimate communion with all those at table, in this case with those considered to be forsaken by God. Genuine love of the Eucharist will therefore translate into love of others; if not, it is not love of the Eucharist, but love of something else in some way related to the Eucharist, i.e., ambiance, candles, quiet, etc. 

English poet and WWI British army chaplain G. Studdert Kennedy warned of those clergy who yearned to keep religion indoors. In 1920, Studdert Kennedy wrote:  

The cry that is often raised, that we are going to secularize religion and take the clergy away from their purely “spiritual work”, is the cry of the man who dare not face the Cross. He wants to keep his Christ forever standing amid the lilies of the altar, with the sweet incense of worship rising around him, a weekly refuge from the distraught and vulgar world. He wants to lock Christ up in the Tabernacle, to keep Him in the silence of the secret place, where men must go down on their knees before they touch Him. But Christ wants to come out into the market-place, and down to the streets; He wants to eat and drink with prostitutes, to be mocked and spit upon by soldiers. He wants to call the dishonest trader from his office desk; to stand at his lathe beside the workman; and to bend with the mother over the washtub in the city of mean streets. He wants to go out into the world, that beauty and goodness and truth – beautiful things, good people, and true thought – may grow up around Him wherever He goes. You cannot keep Christ in your churches; He will break them into pieces if you try. He will make for the streets in spite of you, and go on with His own work; defying dead authorities, breaking down tyrannies, destroying shams, declaring open war against a Godless world. And wherever He goes the true Church will go with Him – the Church of those who are forgiven because they are bearing the sins of the world, and have learned how to forgive.

We are called to discover Christ in the Eucharist precisely in order that we might more readily perceive him everywhere. The Blessed Sacrament leads us, “not to a localization” (Studdert Kennedy), but to a deeper sense of the presence of God everywhere in the world, in and among the sick, the poor, the forgotten, and in and among all creation, every part of which sings the praises of God (Dan 3, 56-82). 

Deacon Douglas McManaman

Holy week begins, and it is the holiest week of the year. This week brings us into the heart of the mystery of suffering. A mystery, in theology, is something that is knowable or intelligible, but it is inexhaustible. It is infinitely knowable, which means it can be understood more and more, but without end. And the reason that suffering is a mystery is that God, who is the unutterable mystery, joined a human nature to himself and in doing so entered into human suffering. He joined us in our suffering, out of love for us; for if we truly love someone, we do not allow them to suffer alone. Their suffering causes us great sorrow, and so we long to join them in their suffering. And our suffering causes God a sorrow that is greater than we can possibly conceive–for God is Love–, and this sorrow is visible in the life of Christ who is the Word of the Father, who is everything that the Father can say about himself. This divine sorrow is visible in his passion and death. Christ came to enter into human suffering so that we may always find him in the midst of our own darkness. And we do find him, if we look for him there. Even if we don’t find him there at the time of our deepest suffering, we will see him in retrospect, if we look hard enough.

I have been through some difficult times in my own life, as have you all. Many of you have endured worse than I have, but I’ve had my share of situations that were unjust and frustrating, and they gave rise to a justified anger. I had no explanation for it at the time, however, the anger was there and it was real. But one Sunday after Mass, I was approached by an older man who wanted to talk, and this was a man who suffered far more than I did, and had been carrying so much more anger than I had been carrying. I soon realized that if I had not been suffering as I was at the time and had not the wounds from which that anger arose in me, I would not have been able to listen to him, to hear him, to understand him. I would not have been able to connect with him, and he would have been left in his sorrow, to endure it by himself, because he would know at the deepest level that I was not there with him in his own suffering. But I was there with him to some extent, because I had experienced something similar. And because he was heard, because he was understood, he experienced a degree of healing. You could say my wounds helped bring him healing, even though his suffering and wounds were greater than mine. 

And that’s what St. Peter meant when he wrote: “By his wounds we have been healed”. Christ’s wounds heal us. If our wounds help to heal others, it is only because they are a sharing in his wounds. He knows our suffering because he’s endured worse, and he is God, and God is not supposed to suffer. But he does. And he chose to suffer with us and in us, imparting to our suffering life-giving power. We never suffer alone, and we will discover, if we have not already, that we have never suffered alone. Suffering and even death will not have the final word over your life or my life, because Christ entered into it and he rose from the dead. At the end of our sufferings will be the fullness of eternal life, and an eternal friendship with him who loved us so much that he drew close to us.