| | So tonight was Holy Thursday (yeah, I'm up late). My parish always has what they call the Agape Meal (a big pot luck with special prayers cribbed from the Jewish Passover service) followed by the Mass of the Last Supper. We have feet washing (tip: always wear sandals to Holy Thursday Mass), and at the end we all follow Father, who is holding the Eucharist, out of the main body of the church, singing a song written by St. Thomas Aquinas over a thousand years ago. Then we have Adoration until midnight. See, Catholics believe that Jesus Christ is truly present, body, blood, soul, and divinity, in the Eucharist. (He said, "This IS my body." not "This is a symbol of my body." and Catholics like to take Him at His word.) We remember how in the Garden of Gethsemani Jesus was left alone because the apostles couldn't stay awake. So on Holy Thursday night we have the opportunity to keep Jesus, present in the Eucharist, company. We don't do it in the main part of the church because we're remembering how on this night Jesus was outside the city in the Garden. It's a pretty profound thing, even more profound since I saw the Passion.
It was good to take some time to really pray. Mass ended around nine (I think) so there were three good hours there. There's been a lot of turmoil in my life lately. God has been showing me some areas where I've never really allowed Him to work and telling me that it's time I let Him in there. With all my heart I want to be completely open to God, and to belong totally to Him. I've been holding on to these areas for so long without realizing it - or without chosing to realize it. It's hard to let go. Little by little, though, God is helping me release these things into His hands. Keep praying for me, though. We have a long way to go.
It was also cool to see some of my youth group kids. One of the girls from my small group was also in the Catechism class I taught last year, and became Catholic last Easter. She was telling me how much she misses our classes, that we really had a good time last year. I miss them too. I had so much fun teaching those. This year they did this weird thing, trying to combine efforts with four other parishes. It turned into an odd catechetical merry-go-round, with each parish instructing the candidates for only a few weeks. I didn't like it at all. I barely got to know my kids before they moved on to another parish. I'm really hoping that next year they'll chose to do something different. |
Hehe!
