Fr Mark Schultz

Dear Friend,

Before she immigrated to the US in 1957, my grandmother, my Omi, was a concert singer in the old country. It was something my brother and I knew about her, but we knew it more as a fact, as a bit of information: Omi was a concert singer. I don’t think either of us really appreciated or fully comprehended the gift she was giving us when she babysat us and sang the Lord’s Prayer to us before we went to bed. I certainly didn’t understand how formative her singing us to sleep could be, how it could inspire in me my own love and study of music, how it could till the ground of my soul and prepare it to receive a call to the priesthood. I only understood that Omi had a beautiful voice, that she meant everything she sang—and that there was a power in that: not necessarily from her, but in her. And it was hers, even if it came from beyond her, even if she was its more than it hers.

I remember a time, after the Maundy Thursday service at the church we attended, that Omi was very dissatisfied with how I sang one of the hymns. She felt I didn’t know what I was doing and had no thought for what I was singing. And she said something like this: “My dear,” she often began anything she said to anyone with “My dear.” “My dear,” she said, “when you sing this song, this song in particular, you must feel it. You must understand that you are part of it. When you sing, ‘Were you there when they crucified my Lord,’ how will they know what ‘there’ was like if you don’t show them? If you don’t let the ‘O’ of ‘O, sometimes it causes me to tremble,’ to be your grief, how will they know you’re crying? If you don’t ‘tremble’ at the very word, what does it mean? If you don’t sing, staccato, ‘Nailed. Him. To. The. Tree,’ how will they know that that is how it was done? That that is what it sounded like? How else can you show them, my dear, how you held the hammer?”

Our Office Gospel today is the climax of Jesus’ farewell discourse to his disciples: a section of the discourse known as the High Priestly Prayer. Jesus is praying not just for his disciples, but for us, for the church that is about to come into being in the flood of blood and water that will pour from his wounded side. And the key note of the prayer is oneness, unity. Just as the Father and Jesus are one, Jesus prays that we will understand that we are one in and with him and through him, one with the Father. Just as the Father gave Jesus glory, Jesus has given the church glory…the same glory he was given. Just as the Father has loved Jesus, Jesus has loved the church with the same love he has received. This intimate oneness of Jesus with us, us with Jesus, all of us with each other, across all space and all time, and all in and with God: this is the fundamental reality of who and what we are as church together. One of the mysteries of this oneness, this communion, is that when we’re asked, “Were you there?” We can say, “Yes.”

Yes. I was there in the upper room at the last supper: I reclined on Jesus’ breast, even as I left early to betray him. Yes. I was there in the garden: I kissed his cheek as the guards surged forward to arrest the Righteous One, and I helped bind his hands. Yes. I shivered in the cold and wept to hear the rooster crow. Yes. I held the hammer, and yes: I remember what it sounded like. Yes. When the earth shook and the sky darkened and the Life that gives life to everything sighed his last on the blood-dark tree, I panicked and fled. Yes. I was there: as the song says, “Heav’n was his home / But mine the tomb / Wherein he lay.” Yes. I was there. I held a jar of ointment tightly to my chest as I walked quietly with the other women in the morning's gloom-shadowed twilight to what we all thought was Love’s dark sepulcher, only to discover….

Yes! I was there!

So were you! And even as our sins crucified Our Lord, Our Lord’s love for us redeemed us from sin, transferred us from the kingdom of death to his own Kingdom of Life and Love, and raised us from the dead with him when he shattered the stillness of the tomb with a breath of New Life. And by virtue of Jesus’ communion with us, sharing our life that we might share his…yes, beloved, we were there…and that breath was ours, too.

Beloved, I pray today, that we can use that breath, God’s own breath, to sing the story, tell the story, live the story like we mean it. Like we were there. Like it’s our story.

Because it is.

Under the Mercy,
Fr Mark+

NB: Beloved, please note the Triduum schedule of Livestreamed services here, and join us at this holy time as we enter into the contemplation of those mighty acts by which Our Lord rescued us from sin and death and gave us God’s own life and love.