Maundy before Mournday?

Maundy Thursday. This always used to be a bitter-sweet day for me: often it marked the start of the school Easter holidays, and that sense of being "demob happy" never quite left me in my years at work. The rare time in the year where a public holiday is observed on a Friday, followed by a weekend and then another holiday, seemed to throw one's sense of time into total confusion. On Maundy Thursday itself, I've always in the past found a real sense of hurrying around making preparations and yet, for the past twenty years since I became a Christian, it has been one of the most beautiful and meaningful days of the year as our Lord's last night on Earth is remembered.

This Maundy Thursday though, and the days that will follow it, take on an added poignancy and sense of worry quite devoid of the normal sense of expectation and relative happiness I have experienced in the past at this time. What is the Lord's will for my dear Mum? How much longer can she possibly hang in there? Is it too much to hope that she can survive through the Easter weekend and share in earthly celebrations of the most important festival and the core of Christianity? Or is God himself going to draw her into that permanent Easter before we even get to that?

I ought to be able to say that in some super-spiritual way I am being drawn into greater understanding of our Lord's passion and just what he went through in that "Holy Week" which went all too quickly. I ought to be able to say that I feel his strength and his hand close by on my shoulder, as I so often do. I ought to know that he weeps with me as he did with the sisters of Lazarus, even though the frail flesh that contains my Mum is still with us, breathing and constantly sleepy and therefore considered by medicine to be close to the end.

I ought to know where my place lies at this time, what I can do, what I can say. I ought to feel strong. Yet, despite the support of my dear brother Matthew, I feel so weak and helpless, so longing for sweet sleep to take away the pain and to forget it all. To wake up in the morning and find my troubles behind me. Above all, like a helpless child, I feel like saying "I want my Mummy"!

On this day last year, whenever it fell, I was at this very moment sitting in a dark cinema in Eastbourne watching "The Passion of the Christ". This was surely the most affecting film I have ever seen. Controversial though it was, and played out in an unfamiliar language, it portrayed the final hours of Christ's life on Earth before the crucifixion in the most graphic way I have ever seen it portrayed. The full horror of that grisly death was brought home in a way that could not be ignored. Thereby, in some way, the full horror of any death, any loss, was suggested. For death and loss are the ultimate insult and offence against the love which God offers us and which, on that night he was betrayed, Christ his son asked us to have for one another.

I suppose if I am honest I have had much experience of grief for my Mum already. That ought to make facing whatever the next few days holds "easier", but it doesn't. Fear still grips me, confusion, the strange and almost surreal attempts to carry on with normal life, even down to watching the same television programmes I've always enjoyed together with some that just pass the time. So much of the daytime fare on offer now seems to be about what money you can make from your home, or how you can trade up or find a nice new place in the country- what you can get, rather than what you can give.

This though is surely symbolic of the ignorance and distaste for spiritual values and the eternal things that so many folk in our society seem to have today, or am I being unkind? In finding joy in the beauty of Springtime, or hankering after a nice rural retreat, that "God shaped hole" is being revealed in many folk. Yet we can only taste and enjoy the pleasures of this world for a time. At the moment, I have been finding it hard to find meaning in all the things people search for, and in the apparent lack in my own life at this stage- at 45. I have no children, no job. What is the point in life. How can I be joyful again when I have to face such loss? Yet to see myself in simply these terms is to give in to the one Jesus defeated at Calvary! It is why he spent forty days in the desert of temptation and loneliness, grappling with Satan to find his own meaning.

ALL THE VAIN THINGS THAT CHARM ME MOST
I sacrifice them to his blood. Isaac Watts wrote his great Passiontide hymn "When I survey the Wondrous Cross" in an age long before PDAs and iPODs, flat screen TVs and world cruises. Yet the hedonism and self-seeking of his generation were probably as real as they are in ours, even if his had a more accepting faith in Christ than ours does. The brevity of life in his time brought a recognition of the importance of trusting in something larger than life, something beyond life, something which gives hope and meaning for eternity.

I do not know what the next few days will bring. Making decisions at this time is so difficult. Matthew is still undecided as I write, whether he should join his usual Easter camp with the scouts in the Ashdown Forest, or whether his duty lies here in Middlesex. I feel for him. Part of me thinks that he should go, while the other half wants him around for support and to just "be there" if the terrible expected event of Mum's passing happens this weekend. And yet even if it does, nothing can really be done on a practical level til Tuesday. What a horrible, difficult burden you have thrown at us, Lord, yet what a privilege of love you have given us in having a Mum who loves us so much that she is still clinging on in there to life, even if she can't say so. May her journey through life's close, whenever it comes, be comforted by the knowledge that on the other side she will meet you, who has conquered death that we all might live.

I do not know whether I will have the opportunity for another posting between now and Easter Sunday. How very different it is from the joyful anticipation of Christmas I wrote about just three months ago today, when did we but know it, Mum already suspected in her mind that something was wrong and that she might not see another Christmas. Nevertheless, we will have our memories of so many joyful Christmasses and happy Easters, of playtime and fun time and of the wonder of childhood. However you spend your holiday weekend, and wherever you are, may you experience life in all its fulness but remember your maker in the passover from Passiontide to Eastertide. God Bless MARK