Maundy Thursday

Just got back from the Maundy Thursday service. We meet in a lodge at a church camp outside town for a dinner featuring Mediterranean foods. Then there's footwashing and communion. Then the altar is stripped for Good Friday, the crucifix is wrapped in black cloth, all the tables and chairs are cleared away, and everyone gathers on the dark porch to sing a song based on Jesus' plea to the disciples to watch with him in Gethsemane and to hear Psalm 22 read by flashlight.

During dinner, Hugo and I were chatting with someone at our table, who we learned had lived in Congon during the 1970s as a Peace Corps volunteer. After that, he did a stint with USAID in Mali. He said that in Mali he deliberately didn't open himself up so much because he had opened himself in Congo and then found it painful to leave.

A little later, as supper was ending and I could hear the sounds of conviviality all around me, I thought that we're supposed to imagine Jesus experiencing a similar pain at gathering for what he knows is his last supper with his friends before he is taken from them. It's the sadness I'll feel when I walk out of the last Sunday service I attend here at the Advocate before I move away. Or the sadness I felt leaving the Dominican Republic at the end of my LDS mission. Even if you know that you'll get together again someday—still, something is ending. Your relationship, even if it's resumed in the future, will never quite be the same again. Jesus may break bread with his friends again in the future, but they'll do so on the far side of a rupture from which they have to look back on this last supper as part of something that was lost.

What does this mean for the Mormon dream of "together forever"?