Chapter Talk
LOOKING TOWARDS MAUNDY THURSDAY AND EASTER
Jesus, having loved His own who were in the world, He loved them to the end. Jn 13,1. Dilexit in finem. Jean-Marie Hennaux, writing about consecration in ‘Vie Consacrée’, views it, first of all, in the light of Our Lord’s act of sacrifice on Calvary. In dying, Jesus said, “It is accomplished” and in this accomplishing, the history of humanity reaches its Summit. A man, of our own race has loved to the end, gone to the end of love, abandoning Himself into the hands of the Father and the hands of sinners. This act is perfect and cannot be surpassed. It is for us to enter into it, participate in it and make it ours in the measure grace is granted us.
Martyrs of all times have shown how this can be done. But there are acts of quiet heroism and of the love that goes to the end, still taking place around us. One of the arresting images of the Tsunami disaster was that of a mother running towards the oncoming waves in contrast to the others running away from them. Having become separated from her family, her overriding instinct was to confront danger rather than escape; in hope of rejoining her loved ones, even of saving them. There was a happy ending. They found each other and remained on a rock till rescued. The mother did not think there was anything unusual in her action.
In the Paschal mystery, Jesus acts in this way on behalf of the human family. He goes out to meet His redeeming death, to lay it down of His own volition. Throughout His ministry, we hear Him speaking of the cup He is to drink and the baptism he must undergo, with both anguish and desire. This is the opposite way to that taken by the first Adam. Ignoring His personal safety and renouncing His rightful glory, Christ confronts suffering and death for the sake of all and His actions are efficacious, because He is God. Although death claims Him and the tidal waters of evil overwhelm Him, He rises again into glory, enabling us to find Him and each other once more in the Father’s house. He does not so much go to His death, remarks P. Durrwell (in ‘Resurrection’), as to the Father by way of it. It is a single movement in which we are caught up by our faith, baptism and profession.
All this is anticipated on Maundy Thursday. The footwashing leads up to the distribution of Himself under the form of bread and wine. The stooping, the menial service of others, the sacramental character of the action, that is, the washing away of stains, all reveal the mind of Christ at this crucial moment as well as introduce us to His actions at the last supper.
On this night, Christ made Himself bread for us. Says Hennaux: “He takes the bread which is His body; anticipating His death, He takes the totality of His being and of His existence into His own hands, He takes and breaks Himself: No one takes My life from Me, but I lay it down of My own accord. Jn. 10:18. He breaks Himself, before being broken by us, His sinful brethren. He shares Himself; master of His own death, He becomes capable of sharing Himself in a manner whereby He is truly given to each one.” There is a sense in which He can look at each of us, then and now, and say again: “This is My body”. Even when the disciples are scattered and even when the participants in Holy Communion are dispersed over the globe, they are now tabernacles for Christ, whole and entire. It is this, above all, which makes Christianity more than a system of thought. It is a way; and the way is a Man who is also God, able to distribute Himself as Bread.
At the Last Supper Jesus says ‘do this in memory of Me’. This is not simply a rite to be re-enacted, remarks Hennaux, it is the very act itself. “The whole Church is invited to enter into that Act which saves and consecrates her” and her members make a perfect consecration of their lives in so far as they do this in memory of Him. As participants in the act we are invited to take up our lives and break them and offer them for all, to the glory of the Father. Jesus’ perfect act of love is made present, until the end of the world, in the Mass. The Mass is thus the moment where we allow it to lay hold of us, consecrate us, “transubstantiate” us, so that we too may go to the end of love. (Ibid.)
Our religious consecration also, takes all its meaning from Christ’s consecration of Himself. The Father consecrates Him from the beginning of the age for His mission; He is the One sent, anointed for the purpose of bringing us salvation. Yet He also consecrates Himself, in responding to His role with all the love of His being. Christ never straggles behind His vocation, as we sometimes do. The One who consecrates, calls forth, demands everything and the one consecrated, responding to that call, gives everything; not this or that, not certain obligations, though they are implied, but the whole person. What is in play here is the dedication of a life to God’s service. For religious, this dedication is externalised in the vow with its triple aspects, the vow being, as has been remarked, ‘the symbol of the interior vow of one’s whole life.’ In the words of ‘Lumen gentium’ we give ourselves, “completely to God who is loved above all” and who has first laid His hand upon us, a giving which is then ratified by the Church.
To dedicate ourselves in service to the divine Goodness, then, is the occupation of our life. It is the fruit of Christ’s act on Maundy Thursday. Taken up into Him, we are able to go beyond ourselves, our own limits; and because we are driven by something that infinitely transcends us, we become unified in ourselves. Everything in us tends in one direction, becomes simplified. Consecration says Mère Cécile Bruyère, has the result that we can no longer be separated from God or, more vividly in the French, “sortir de Dieu”.
This is a programme of sanctification and if it sounds rather grand to speak of consecration and dedication of the person, we can never forget that the example given by Christ on Maundy Thursday was a simple action of washing the feet of others. It is, then, in the humble acts of daily living that we live out our consecration, ‘paying in coppers’. (Abbot Sillem). If we were to disdain them or wait until something we considered more heroic were asked of us, our consecration would be rendered unfruitful. Although consecration is a definite intervention of God in our lives, it does not automatically make us holy. For that we have to exercise our faith, hope and charity in all the mundane details of our life. These details are all transformed because we are living now by a higher will. The true consecration says Mère Cécile Bruyère, is the invasion of the Lord, His transforming action. We can, in other words, enter ever more deeply into our consecration by collaborating with the Invader. This means not refusing God anything, whether small or great. We do indeed gather up our whole being in our hands on our profession day, our past self and past life, our present and what we shall become; we break it, so to speak, and offer it to God and to the world. This is only a beginning. “The consecrated soul must always repeat: Custodi hanc voluntatem; detach me from this human fragility which makes it possible for me to take back what you have already taken” for Yourself.
The characters in the drama of Calvary show what human beings are capable of, even after Consecration. Judas turns his back on his initial commitment to the extent of defacing it by hatred and contempt. The disciples fall away and Peter betrays Him by his threefold denial. They fail to confront evil; do not go out to meet it, strong in the knowledge that Christ had gone ahead and of the mutual indwelling after the communion of the Last Supper. Unlike Christ in Gethsemani, who prays in the testing, taking the pain of the world into Himself and submitting to the Father’s will, they pray rather to avoid pain and testing. John follows at a distance up to the hill of Calvary, we are told; at least he does not run away. But only the Mother does not betray her consecration in the slightest. She is faithful to all the implications of her fiat at the Annunciation, that moment of consecration, very clear and well-defined, when the Father lays His hand on her and she gives unequivocal assent. From that moment she was given over to her Son, both body and soul, in a unique way. The dedication was total and maintained to the foot of the Cross and beyond. There is a tiny echo across the millennia in another mother’s bravery in the face of a tidal wave, even if that was largely maternal instinct at its most sacrificial. We ask her to pray for us and the deepening of our own dedication, our participation in Christ’s loving-to-the-end.
