I am grateful because I was early…
The other day I arrived for a meeting nice and early. It was early in the morning and early in the week and I was early to the meeting. And when I arrived – ready to get to work – I sat there in silence for a little while and thought.
And in that quiet hush before the chaos of the day – when the Sun was not even fully risen in the sky, my mind was drawn to a contemplation of Christ on the day before He died.
On the morning of Holy Thursday, Christ would have woken in the early morning light and He would have started His day with His prayers. And I wonder what those prayers would have looked like. How would they sound?
Did He start in a state of fasting? Did He rise early so that He would finish His prayers in quiet contemplation before the Apostles arose?
Were they used to Him praying as He did? Did the apostles pray next to Him and listen to His prayers or did they fail to see the perfect love of the Son for His Father? I wonder how it would have felt to kneel next to Him as He prayed. Would they have felt a tingling on their skin as the Holy Trinity communicated? Or would it have looked like any other things and they would have sat there shooing the flies with their hands and failing to recognise the wonder to which they were witness…?
Did the Son’s prayer to the Father appear to them then just as the Holy Eucharist appears to me today? Was it something so normal to them that they failed to wonder at the majesty of the moment? Did they even recognise it among the dust and the dirt? Did they see what they were watching in the form of the pious Son? Or, were they like me, watching the Lord of all Creation in the form of a piece of bread and seeing not the Lord – and only the bread?
And that morning when I was sitting quietly at the beginning of the day, as I sat quietly and reflected on my Blessed Lord on the morning before He died, I wondered about the Blessing that was there in front of me that very day. You see, in that reflection – in that quiet – God allowed me to know Him a little better. He allowed me to use the limited imagination in my mind to imagine Him in that scene. And that is such a blessing to me. Because the Lord of the Universe owes me nothing. And there is no reason for me to have the presumption to imagine Him. And yet, He came to this Earth and He lived on this Earth, and He acted on this Earth. And He did all these things just for me. Just so that I could imagine Him and love Him a little more for that imagining…
And today, I am grateful because I was early…
For with prayer, I stand on Holy Ground where everything is clear. Here. At the Foot of the Cross.
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