On Holy Thursday

Whenever I attend a Holy Thursday Mass, I always think about Eamon Duffy's Stripping of the Altars.  If you don't know it, it's a riveting history of the religious revolution in England:  he debunks the Protestant myths we've all been fed since, well, the beginning of the Protestant revolutions.  You know the ones:  that the glorious Protestants came in to rip away all the silly superstitions from the ignorant masses, and brought them the Word of God for the first time, since evil Catholics never let anyone know what was actually in the Bible.

(Had I written my dissertation, it would have been a literary history cataloging all of the major texts in Middle English, from 1100 up to the advent of the Reformation, that distributed Biblical texts in the vernacular widely through England.  Curious that such history hasn't been written yet.)

Eamon Duffy simply goes though the evidence:  the parish records, mostly, and finds that instead of embracing the Protestants as liberators, most Catholics in England held on to their Faith for as long as they could.  They practiced their "superstitious rituals" in spite of the tenets that were imposed on them from without.  They held in their hearts and homes what Jesus Christ himself revealed, not what some contemporary malcontent believed about his particular reading of the Bible.

As I watch the altar be stripped last night, it occurred to me that in the end, the altar looked very much like the Protestant worship places that I've been to or even belonged to.  When I took my foolish, twenty-something hiatus from the One, True Faith, I ran to the closest thing:  all the songs and liturgy without those silly, pesky teachings.  No one's authority to clash with my own.  After all, didn't I understand the Faith better than St. Thomas Aquinas?  Absolutely!  Hadn't I thought things through more carefully than St. Augustine?  Sure, I did!

The altar is stripped of every good gift our Saviour gave us before he left.  All the helps that he meant for us to have:  the candles, flowers and linens that point our minds upward and mark out the Holiest of Holies; our friends, the saints in heaven; the very Body of Christ himself; the priesthood.  We'd be lost and alone without these good helps.  Why on earth would anyone reject them? smash them? make up something to replace what the Good Lord saw fit to give us himself?

I thank God for the Church.  I thank God for the priesthood, and for all those men who sacrifice their lives to serve us and to show us how to serve God.  I thank God for his Body and Blood, and for knowing that while it was a hard teaching, it was exactly what all of us need to sustain us and draw us to Him.

I ask his mercy for my follies, but especially for the time in my life when I lived in open rebellion:  when I dared to reject His gifts out of nothing but selfishness and pride.

Today, I thank God that He brought me back to embrace what He has revealed to us instead of someone's private interpretations.  I hold fast to that, and wait with anticipation for Saturday night, when once again the church building is filled with the abundance of his graces and blessings.  Come, let us adore!