Holy Thursday is a particularly special day for priests because it’s the day Christ instituted our vocation. When he said “do this in memory of me,” that was the ordained priesthood. This wasn’t a task he gave to the whole community of disciples, but as a calling within the Church. I want you to know that priesthood lived with fidelity and zeal is a life of great joy and great sacrifice. Like any other life, the depth of joy is directly caused by the depth of sacrifice.
Priests, like everyone, become unhappy and bitter when they haven’t given enough. I’m at a stage in life where my sister and many of my friends are raising young children. I look at the complete self-gift involved in that and I think, “that’s the standard.” To put others ahead of yourself in that absolute way. To allow yourself to be spent, used up, poured out, that’s the calling of every Christian, priest or lay, married or unmarried, every one of us.
Priests who do that are happy priests. They are tired, perhaps physically but most of all mentally, but they are very, very happy. Priests who do not do that are miserable and bitter. That applies to everyone. We were made for love, and it’s only modern insanity that would make that about feeling a nice emotion all the time. Being made for love really means we were made for self-gift. We were given our lives in order to be poured out, used up, spent for others.
I read a column once by an author who was pregnant. I searched for it and couldn’t find it again. But parts of it I’ll never forget. She described the physical side of pregnancy with a bluntness that was new to me: “oh, I didn’t know that happened!” She described all the ways in which her body was stretched, sore, off-balance, sick, spent. It wasn’t with a tone of self-pity at all, she just described it. And then she said that going to Mass had taken on new meaning for her as she heard the words, “This is my body, given for you.” She could say that with Jesus in a very physical and literal way. But we all should be able to say it with Jesus in our own way.
Holy Thursday and Good Friday are really the same event played out in two settings. What Jesus does tonight only makes sense in light of what he will do tomorrow. His body is given for you. His blood is poured out for you. He is spent, used up, for others, and this is not a tragedy but a triumph. It gives sense and meaning and power to every sacrifice of every disciple in every age. You see - the washing of his friends’ feet, the gift of himself as food and drink, the offering of his body on the Cross - they are all one. They are Eucharist.
Everything about modern life is telling us to grasp at what will make us happy. Life lived lived like that will never be anything more than a tragic joke. Happiness is not something you find by taking the right things from life. Happiness is the empty space that’s left when you’ve given everything away.
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