Last year, I wrote this blog post about Maundy Thursday in a time of plague. That year, the idea of lockdown was relatively new--my county had only mandated a lockdown three weeks earlier. At the time, I was still wondering if there would come a time of tighter lockdown, a time where National Guard troops monitored our coming and going. I assumed it would be years before we got a vaccine, if ever we did, and I couldn't imagine how we were going to get ahead of the pandemic.
At the same time, I assumed we would do something to avoid all the death and upheaval that has occurred. A year ago, I assumed that our Holy Week in lockdown would be a one year thing.
This year, it's important to remember that some of us needed to be in a lockdown mode long before the pandemic, and that some of us will need to remain. This past year has inspired us to experiment with ways of being church online. I hope we will continue to do that once the pandemic is not burning its way across our planet.
In past years, we'd have celebrated Maundy Thursday in a variety of ways. Some of us would have done a worship service that ended with the altar being stripped. That's the way I think of the Maundy Thursdays of my childhood. We'd do a service (would it include communion?) and at the end, members of the altar guild (always female) would come up and remove the candlesticks, the Bible, and anything else on top of the altar, and then they'd whip the paraments off the altar and fold them.
I've been part of other churches that did more on Maundy Thursday. Some years we'd share a meal together and think about the meal as metaphor for love. I've been part of churches that do a foot washing service. I've been part of congregations that offer a hand washing option or a hand anointing option for Maundy Thursday. Once those approaches would have been seen as experimental or daring. Those approaches aren't as easy to do when it's not safe to be together physically.
I hope that as we move forward we'll remember that for many of us, it will never be safe to be together physically. I'm thinking of people with physical disabilities. But I'm also thinking of people with food allergies who can't share the same kinds of meals that the rest of us do. I'm thinking of people who find the idea of touch itself as dangerous. In a world where touch can so easily turn coercive, can congregation members feel comfortable saying no to worship options that revolve around touch?
Yesterday I read an article by Melissa Febos in The New York Times where she explores the idea of touch and consent and how women are socialized to accept a variety of touches that make them uncomfortable or unsafe. For a variety of reasons, from sexual abuse to the easy transmissibility of germs, I've begun to think that the Church must explore ways to be church together but from a distance.
We might protest that surely we can celebrate a meal together. But even a meal comes with inequity. Should we do the kind of meal that Jesus would have eaten as his last supper? If so, are we practicing cultural appropriation? Can we talk about the Seder without being offensive to Jews?
And then there's the inequity of our field to table path that our food travels. Who is growing the food? Who is transporting it? How are our grocery workers treated? And then, who prepares and cooks the food for our meals?
Jesus instructs us to love each other, and that's where we get the word "Maundy," for mandatum, Latin for commandment. Can we love each other without thinking about all of the people who are not loved by our various economic systems? I don't think we can.
Soon we enter the Easter Triduum, the three days that begin with Good Friday and end with Easter. Good Friday shows us the world's response to the idea of God's love, the idea that we should be taking care of those on the margins. Shaping our Maundy Thursday celebrations to consider these issues of our economic structures, these issues of consent, these issues of how we deal with our physical bodies in this dangerous world--there are worse ways to shape a Maundy Thursday celebration.
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