… we have just celebrated the Mass of the Lord’s Supper and entered into the mystery of the Triduum, the three culminating days of Holy Week and the portal to the Paschal feast of the Lord’s Resurrection.
Tonight the altar is bare.
Everything is in darkness.
Even the moon is shrouded, the stars hidden behind a thick veil of cloud.
The night is strangely, unseasonably, warm.
Silence fills the space … and the soul.
The mind is suspended empty over a sudden void.
The heart is held, like a captive sparrow in cupped hands, clasped close to the chest.
All is as though in readiness for something tremendous to happen, something shattering, something never seen and never heard before. And, in truth, it is! For the mystery of Christ’s death and resurrection is always new, always shattering … tremendous. Our minds and our hearts and puny souls are far too small to contain it, to grasp it, to understand. Its depth and height and breadth and scope and plenitude and glory are too great, too … divine for us, finite mortal beings that we are.
And yet … and yet! Something registers. Something infinite irrupts into finitude; something immortal sets mortality atremble. A glimpse. An inkling. The barest hint of light alighting on the nascent optic nerve of a new creation. The birth of a new “sense”—nay, its conception! A spiritual sense, with which to apprehend the Spirit—beyond flesh, feeling, reason and will. Beyond, but not apart; fulfilling rather than superseding, much less rejecting or despising. The resurrection of the body transfigures, transforms and indeed transubstantiates creation—flesh, feeling, reason and will—into spirit and life by the Spirit and Giver of Life.
And so it begins. Always. Beginning. For unto the ages of ages …
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