Back in the fall I had a rough weekend. My husband was on a retreat team and I was supposed to run music for a Saturday night gathering. I didn't have enough childcare, I hurt my back trying to change a tire with rusted lug nuts, I was 15 minutes late to the rehearsal I was supposed to be in charge of, and when I got there I was on the very edge of tears.
And then, afterward, some of the women at the gathering wrote a letter to the pastor complaining about the music. The gathering took too long, they said, and some of the songs were too old. I didn't read the actual letter; the people who did told me it was nasty. The other music leader just rolled her eyes. "You don't need to worry about that for a minute," she said. But it's niggled at me ever since.
I don't know who wrote the letter, but the pool of possible authors is small and I've been nursing suspicions about one of them ever since. Tonight I was sitting where I could see her during the Holy Thursday Mass, and having a familiar conversation with myself: "You need to let that go and move on. --But maybe it would be easier if we just knew for sure who needed forgiving. --Or maybe, JUST MAYBE, you should just let that go and move on."
I knelt there after communion and prayed as people streamed past me. It was one of those lovely post-communion moments in which the goodness of God and the joy he offers shone especially clearly, and I was thinking about God's love for each one of the people in the aisle. I had a quick flash of tender feeling for my children waiting at home, whom I hadn't seen all day, and a quick flash of worry about how their outing with Elwood had gone, and then a surge of wonder at the idea that God loves each one of those people in the aisle -- and their neighbors, and their neighbors' neighbors -- with a ferocity and concern far keener than my feelings for my own children.
With sudden conviction, I knew it was also true of the woman sitting near me, the one I haven't wanted to look in the eye for months now. And as I reflect on it now, it occurs to me that this is an especially good night on which to offer up the pain of feeling betrayed. If Jesus had only stewed and muttered about that unbelievably unappreciative Judas, it would be an altogether different story, would it not?
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