One Foot on Earth

and the Other in Heaven: A Holy Thursday Meditation

My last thought before going to bed last night was, “Lord, the world is impossibly heavy to hold.”

And then—as if by magic—I heard the single clear voice of the first peeper of spring.

I went to sleep with one foot on earth and the other in heaven.

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It is Holy Thursday and I have a particular affection for this day—this day when Jesus eats his last meal with his disciples.

[Though he defeats death and comes back for fish over fire on the beach, and isn’t that just the kind of guy you want in your corner?]

The humanity of it is so weighty that I feel it in my own stomach, heavy as a belly-full of the bread Jesus breaks at the table when he says here, let me break myself for you.

As if he knows this room full of men need tangible things like flour mixed with water in order to understand the heavenlies.

As if he knows that—while their spirits stretch for glimmers of unseen kingdoms—gravity keeps them in bodies of dust and they still have to eat.

One foot on earth and the other in heaven.

The thing about Jesus is that he wants to eat this supper with them. I’ve earnestly desired it, he tells them, and I see his eyes shining in the upper room. He doesn’t leave the eating and drinking for mere mortals; he is mortal, for this moment at least, and even at the foot of his suffering he pauses, he enjoys, he savors.

Agony knocks on his door, but he does not let it in yet. He draws a boundary around this sacred space—this pocket of treasure—so that it cannot implode from the pressure of this world, this startling viciousness called mortality.

He models how to be human here; how to be a citizen of earthly and glorious stuff all at once. When I take my eyes away from Jesus, gravity wins. But if I sit at this table—this place he last supped—and eat bread and drink wine alongside him, I am reminded by the crumbs in his beard¹ and the grape-stained grooves of his lips that it is possible to exist in two places at once:

in a world that feels impossibly heavy,

but also

in a moment where the first peeper of spring consumes my body with trembles of eternal promise.

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It is Holy Thursday, and we look to Jesus to learn

how to keep a foot in heaven

even while we walk this earth.

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1. A nod to my friend and poet,

Nicholas Trandahl

, and his genius poem, “After The Last Supper,” from his latest collection, Purgatory. Read it here, on The Way Back to Ourselves with

Kimberly Phinney

.