Christian Counseling Service -- Devotions

The steeple falls

Thursday, April 18, 2019

From Exodus 12
Every one of your families must procure for itself a lamb, one apiece for each household. If a family is too small for a whole lamb, it shall join the nearest household in procuring one and shall share in the lamb in proportion to the number of persons who partake of it. Eat with sandals on your feet and staff in hand, eat like those who are in flight. Each year, forever, share this feast and celebrate with pilgrimage. It is the Passover of the Lord.

Where can we go for pilgrimage? Why, to Notre Dame of course. Cathedral of the Blessed Lady, filled with treasures. We'll sing everlasting praise to God the Father, Son and Holy Ghost.

But now the steeple's fallen! All the oak has burned. A thousand trees cut six hundred years ago, then shaped to beams, now burnt to cinders, burnt to ashes, burnt to death.

Like the Hebrews shared a lamb, we shared this space. The fire began during the last mass on Monday, last of countless masses, hundreds of years of masses. Christ has died, Christ has risen, Christ will come again.

Could the people at the mass, ready to flee the fire with girded loins and sandals on their feet, could they feel how close God was? How rich this bread and wine, this Holy Week, this Passover of the Lord.

Fire destroys, and fire also purifies. Always it has been so.

On this first day of Triduum, we must find another place to share the body and the blood. Can we share in Jesus' sufferings, on Passover, on this day in dark Gethsemane?

Night cloaks all. Sleep calls its siren song. We sit, and lean against the tree, and wait. Jesus prays just beyond the light. We can hear his keening, crying, out to God. I feel so much pain right here, right now. My whole soul hurts and ... I close my eyes.

Am I the only one who sleeps? Mary Oliver noticed what did not:

The grass never sleeps.
Or the roses.
Nor does the lily have a secret eye that shuts
until morning ...

Jesus wants me just to wait with him. But I could not. What about the rest of God's creation?

Maybe the stars did, maybe
the wind wound itself into a silver tree, and
didn't move,
maybe
the lake far away, where once he walked as on a
blue pavement,
lay still and waited, wild awake.

I hail Jesus now, but I also know I fail him. My body, mind and spirit fail him, and I fall asleep. The fire rages among our cut-down trees, those best intentions turned to ash. "What I want to do, I do not do, and what I do not want to do, I do! What a wretched man I am. Who will rescue me from this body of death?"(Romans 7:15-24)

Thanks be to God, because you deliver me through Jesus Christ, O Lord. Paul's words ring through the garden, ring over the smoking debris of our cathedral, ring through the caverns of my heart. You are Lord, and you will reign forever. I just look up at you.

Mary Oliver, "Gethsemane," from Thirst, p. 45, 2007

Devotions Archive

The steeple falls

Thursday, April 18, 2019