Thursday, April 2: Holy Thursday

Reflection from Kaki Roberts:

I have such strong memories of the Holy Thursdays of my Catholic childhood. Each year on this first of four days of profoundly moving liturgies recalling the death and resurrection of Jesus, I carefully tidied the scuffed whites of my uniform saddle shoes with a coat of chalky polish and bobby-pinned a chapel veil in place. My parish schoolmates and I lined up, two-by-two, smallest to tallest, behind choirboys in cassocks and crisp surplices to process into the church. At the end of the long, incense-scented Mass of the Last Supper, the large white host (wafer) of the Blessed Sacrament was placed in a gilded monstrance and borne aloft in procession up and down the aisles toward a side altar and placed for adoration until it would be removed the next day, Good Friday, with the altar stripped and the empty tabernacle’s door left standing open.

Beneath the thumbs of our folded hands, each child in the procession clutched a tiny card imprinted with the Latin lyrics of St. Thomas Aquinas’s medieval Eucharistic hymn, the Pange Lingua, “Sing, My Tongue”. I smile now, recalling our little East Tennessee voices in solemn Gregorian chant.

If you would invite music to accompany you today, many recordings of the Pange Lingua and especially its last two stanzas, the Tantum Ergo, “Down in Adoration Falling”, can be found online. I will be listening to this one today:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4apJNn2Y-ds&list=RD4apJNn2Y-ds&start_radio=1