Today, Holy Thursday, which opens the Triduum, gives us two important rituals that reflect the heart and meaning of these holy days, these final days building towards Jesus’ death and resurrection.  These rituals are Jesus washing the feet of his disciples and Jesus offering his body and blood using the symbols of bread and wine.  Whatever angle one looks at these ‘sacraments’, clearly, they are an encounter of love, an encounter of mercy, an encounter of forgiveness, an encounter of a most complete self-gift that embodies God’s unconditional love.

How does the Word of God speak?  In what way or ways do we hear the Word of God speaking to us?  Is God’s word a silent word, silent though still speaking?  What happens if we separate out silence from the word?  Do silence and the Word belong together?  Clearly, they do.

There is no Christianity without love and forgiveness!  There is no true Christian love that does not include mercy and forgiveness.  In the gospel parable of the so called ‘Prodigal Son’, Jesus reveals the nature of God as unconditional love and compassion.  And this revelation is what he incarnated in his life, death, and resurrection…He continues to incarnate this love now, within our hearts as they are converted, meaning changed, to being opened wider than wide!

“Without communion there is no mission”…Communion communicates mission….“Communion is the substance of mission”.  What are these words of Dom Mauro Giuseppe saying to us?  Is not the core of our mission as monastics communion, communion of heart and mind with God and one another?  There is a creative tension between the ‘I’ that has said ‘yes’ to God and this same ‘I’ that surrenders in the process of creating a ‘we’, a communion of persons who together are giving their lives to God and to building up a world where God’s love always has the final word.

The first reading from Sirach for today’s liturgy says: “The fruit of a tree shows the care it has had; so too does one’s speech disclose the bent of one’s mind” (24:6). Our speech, our words are revelatory.  Do not our words show the care of heart and soul that they have had?  Our words reveal how silent or quiet we are inside.  Interior silence brings wisdom, compassion, mercy, even fruitfulness to our words.  Behind the words we utter we get a sense of ourselves, our true selves.  And this self is in process, always growing, a self that is always being converted to becoming more Christ-like in demeanor and in action.