So much happens on Maundy Thursday that it’s difficult to take note of it all. The first Mass. The washing of the feet. The agony in the Garden, and Christ’s great intercessory prayer. The kiss of Judas. And Our Lord’s arrest. I know no other day in the Christian calendar that commemorates, all in the same 24-hour period, such a dramatic combination of wonderful and terrible events. This is perhaps why Maundy Thursday always draws me into reflections on the limitations of liturgy.

Now, I should say right up front that I don’t at all wish to dismiss liturgy as unimportant. Perish the thought! This is coming from someone who loves high liturgy enough to drive hours to satisfy liturgical preferences, and who doesn’t even remember a time when liturgy seemed boring (since I spent my childhood in a church that is almost as liturgy-free as a church can be.) I’m a great lover of liturgy, and fully convinced of its vital importance to the virtuous life.

Even so, there are some genuine limitations to what can be done in church. Repetition is an integral part of liturgy, and the idea is to habituate the faithful, and to train their sensibilities through regular (although appropriately varied) practices. Habituation is essential to forming one’s character properly, but it can’t do everything. Habituation is supposed to help us (among other things) to have the proper emotions at the proper times, but there are some emotions that repetitive practices will be unable to summon – surprise, for instance.

Then we have to consider that going to church normally means going to the same place repeatedly, with more or less the same people, to be edified by the same priest and the same choir. This can be good in that the familiarity may help you to screen out irrelevant details in order to focus on the important parts of the liturgy itself. But it also means that, together with the important parts, you’re also likely to be habituated to inessentials (the shape of the pews, the tenor of your own priest’s voice, the feel of your missal in your hand) until they are also, if not inseparable, at least highly instrumental to your being able to get the most out of Mass. Your church becomes for you a place of safety, comfort, familiarity and solace.

What to do, then, with a day like Maundy Thursday, when appropriate emotions to summon to mind might include terror, shock, betrayal and abandonment? If we trust our priest and feel comfortable in our church, nothing we do there under his direction is likely to be terrifying. If we do it every year, it won’t be shocking. And it’s hard to feel betrayed and alone in company with the community that you hold dear.

It’s always good when we find a way in Holy Week to glimpse through the trappings the unvarnished, raw horror of the events that the days commemorate. Mel Gibson’s The Passion has helped many of us to capture this on Good Friday. I don’t know of an easy way to catch the character of Maundy Thursday, but it came home to me in Holy Week seven years ago, the year I was studying abroad in Jerusalem. On Maundy Thursday our program leader, Fr. David Burrell, took all 15 students in the program to a Mass in the Old City, and afterwards to dinner. Then he announced that we were going to do something else: we would climb partway up the Mount of Olives to a place that he knew where there was a large garden filled with olive trees. Then we would spread out, and all would spend an hour in meditation “as Our Lord asked us to do.”

The garden was large enough and the night dark enough that I was able to find a place where none of my companions could be seen or heard. The night was quite still, but very slightly cold, enough to leave my skin tingling. Cloaked in the intimate darkness, and feeling that vulnerability that comes from being alone and defenseless in a strange place, my imagination began churning with a particular force, and it seized greedily on the story of what had happened on that mountain as something familiar and yet completely new. Had it happened in that very place, possibly? It could not have been more than half a mile or so from where I was sitting. In my mind’s eye I could see torches flickering through the trees; I imagined people approaching, with intentions far from friendly. Thinking of the apostles, the thought popped into my mind with dreadful clarity: “They must have been terrified.”

What could be more obvious? We know that their fear was sufficiently great for them to abandon the teacher they thought they loved, great enough even to lead Peter to deny his Lord three times in an effort to save his own skin. The apostles themselves were presumably in danger of dying a very ugly death; who wouldn’t be frightened? And yet somehow the raw, desperate, crushing terror of that night, and the awful gut-wrenching dread of what was to come, had never really come home to me before. It’s not an easy emotion to come to grips with in the comfort and safety of your parish church. When we go to Mass on Maundy Thursday, we know we’re in for a couple of sad days, but after Mass we’re probably already rummaging through the attic for our boxes of Easter decorations, or shopping for hams and fancy cheeses in preparation for the big feast. Needless to say, the apostles didn’t know all along that everything was going to work out for the best. And if we never get a glimpse of their terror and their dread, we won’t fully appreciate the desperate plight from which we are freed on Easter Sunday.

There isn’t very much of a practical upshot to this post, except to say: for all the wonderful value of liturgy, we should not forget to look beyond it as necessary in order to grasp those parts of the story that church services aren’t well-equipped to give us. In some instances imagination can do more, although generally speaking, life equips us with the experiences that we need to empathize somewhat with the apostles in their dark hour. Terror, dread, abandonment and betrayal don’t always arise in the liturgically appropriate season, but nearly every life is marked with them at one time or another. Perhaps we would do well to reflect on some of these experiences on the evening of Maundy Thursday.