Holy Thursday

Holy Thursday already and Easter is actually late this year. It does seem as though the year is flying by. I loved singing for Holy Week when I was young, although I quickly realized that it was a half time job!

Admiration and prayers go out to all of you who sing in choirs this week. Unless you are able take time off the experience will be one of sleep deprivation--and of liminality. The liminality, temporary transcendence from the mundane as it is, may be a good thing. The fact that ordinary routines must go on is too bad though. It would be good to have an economy more attuned to liminality, perhaps?

I notice that Passover is being celebrated this year at the same time as Christians are celebrating Holy Week and Easter. This is good. It reminds us of our relationship to one another. Christianity is after all, rooted in Judaism. The Passover Seder is the root of Holy Thursday. After the institution of the Eucharist, the Crucifixion and the Resurrection, the disciples were no longer Jewish in the way they had been before. Today, Christians certainly are no longer Jewish.

I have mixed feelings about the custom, in some Christian communities, about holding a Seder. The intentions were good I think. Mine certainly were when as a young woman I convinced my parents we should move the furniture around so that people could come for the Seder at our house. I learned something more about Judaism and also about community from this experience. I never did it again though. Today, I think I would feel that it would be stealing from someone else's tradtions. Respecting the others is important though, and I hope that more respect will grow in this country.

Last year I wrote about the foot washing command of the Maundy and how I have never been comfortable with it and why. That post is still available, I think, so I will not repeat it, except to say that I have found a kind neighbor who is helping me with washing my hair! What a blessing this is!

Community is fractured and fragmented in our modern world. We need to keep working to build it and to make it less fragmented, more cohesive.

I am reading, not exactly as Lenten reading, although I think it is appropriate, The Moral Measure of the Economy, a book about Catholic social teachings that is also a critique of big capitalism run amok. I would like to see a national discussion. Maybe I will start a group on Facebook to read this book and others that are related to it.

I am grateful for the rain this week, for the reading and for the liturgy even though I can be there only in spirit. (I wish they would do Podcasts!)