Maundy Thursday "services"

This was the first year in a while I didn't go out for Maundy Thursday services. Because, of course, wisely, the churches here are closed down until....well, I don't know how long. I'm hoping it's not until a vaccine is found but it might be.

So instead, in the afternoon, after my work for the day, I went out and spend an hour and a half cutting brush (for exercise) and then came in and took a shower. I put on the BBC news (I have an app on my phone) while I was doing that.

I...maybe should not have. There was a news story about a family going in (in full protective gear) to say goodbye to their husband/father, who was sick in the hospital with COVID-19. (I am not sure but the story seemed to imply he actually survived). The wife/mother said that he was intubated and unconscious and that it was hard for her seeing her teen kids tell their dad that they were going to do their best to make him proud with their lives and.....well, holy crap.

Visceral memory of my last ever phone conversation with my dad. He could not really speak, I told him what I needed to, but yeah. I mean, I guess he was proud of me, but we're not a demonstrative family in the way some are....and just the whole thing, it made me cry.

Also, the footage I saw from Hart Island - an island off of New York where typically people with no next of kin (unclaimed bodies, extremely homeless people, and, a friend tells me, sometimes stillborn babies) were traditionally buried....but now they've increased burials by I-don't-know-how-many-times because of the sheer overwhelm from hospital deaths and...Yeah. Everything feels kind of terrible.

At first I said, after that, that I couldn't "do" the Triduum this year. Maundy Thursday - at least how the congregation I belong to - is kind of emotional - you start out with the Last Supper and the symbolic foot-washing, but you end with Tenebraes, where every light in the church is gradually extinguished and honestly, I'm glad it didn't happen this year because the feeling of "the light going out of the world" would have been a bit too on the nose. You feel a bit abandoned at the end of the service, but maybe that's part of the point. And I know....for me "abandonment" is one of my issues, and yes, I have felt it HARD in this....what is it, a month now? Almost.

Many years, we would sing this Taizé Community chant at the part of the narrative about the time in the garden:



And I realized I needed something last night, and I had heard it mentioned in one of the news programs that the BBC (because, of course, the UK has an official state church) was doing a Maundy Thursday service.

So I listened to it. It was only about 14 minutes, different from the long Tenebraes we do, but it was still something. The pastor conducting it talked in his homily about service to others (which made me laugh bitterly: there are no others here, just me) but also....waiting. The waiting in the garden, and how Peter and James and John fell asleep, and when he came back, Jesus gently rebuked them about "could you not even sit up an hour while I prayed" (And yes, yes, of course: they had also just come off a Passover dinner with the ritual four cups of wine and all, but still).

And it occurs to me: this is a time of waiting for a lot of us. And yes, as I've said before: I wish I COULD just sleep through this and wake up on the other side when it's safe to go back out and pick up my "normal" life again. This is a sort of extended Lent, where we have given up a great many things we used to have and used to do, and where we are left to wait and to hope...

And yes, I cried. I cried most of the way through the service, they also played Lloyd Webber's "Pie Jesu" (which, I didn't realize: was part of a requiem he wrote for his father). I cried through the second short program of Scripture reading.

Though really, it's not too surprising. I hate crying in public and a couple years I've cried during Maundy Thursday services - oh, not all through them and not very much, but I give myself more permission to cry when I'm just by myself and no one else is seeing me. And I think if ever there's an appropriate time for tears in church, it's during the Triduum. But I was pretty well cried out by the end of it.

(I think of the line from "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe" towards the end, where Susan and Lucy have witnessed Aslan's assassination, and how they've cried over it, and how, after tears, there sometimes comes a quiet where you feel as if nothing would ever happen again, and yes, that makes sense to me)

So I am....kind of sad now. Not "depressed," as I said on Twitter, merely "sad." Sadness will pass, it's part of being human.