There is a particular kind of spiritual writing that refuses the comfort of resolution, and this Maundy Thursday meditation from Wayfare lands squarely in that tradition. What the piece offers is not uplift but excavation — a first-person descent into the gap between the person one intends to be and the person who actually showed up that week.
The author, Mark, a writing and literature professor at BYU-Idaho and author of four poetry collections, structures the meditation around the stations of the communion sacrament — from the opening invocation of God's name through the blessing of bread and water to the Spirit that follows. But the piece refuses the liturgical arc's usual logic. Grace does not arrive here as relief. It arrives as reckoning.
The Anatomy of a Bad Week
Before any theology can take hold, Mark catalogs the week's wreckage with a kind of unsentimental precision that gives the piece its particular authority. A friend who wouldn't stop talking. A relative assumed to be "sidewinding." A child who wouldn't listen. The anger, he writes, "leached out in passive-aggressive moves against my wife, who admitted she found it hard to breathe when she heard the edge in my voice, my facial lines crinkling, aging me ten years in five minutes."
That image — a spouse unable to breathe, a face that ages a decade in five minutes — carries more moral weight than any doctrinal statement the piece might offer. It does not editorialize. It simply observes what cruelty looks like in a house where no one is technically being cruel. The passive-aggressive pivot. The door left. The hours lost to MLB.com and LinkedIn, where, as the piece puts it, "those photos scintillated with an intoxicating veneer, cruise-like waves, and opening night spotlights."
This is one of the meditation's sharper cultural observations: social media functions here not as distraction but as self-punishment, a way of measuring one's own interior mess against the curated exteriors of others. The scroll becomes its own purgatory — not restful, not pleasurable, just a sustained low-grade immolation of whatever remained of the evening.
Then came the rationalizations. "The mumbled murmurs, 'But then . . .' and 'I never . . .' and 'How do you expect me to . . . ?'" The piece is exact about the grammar of self-justification — the incomplete sentence, the trailing ellipsis, the argument that never quite forms but never quite stops either.
The Congregation as Mirror
One of the meditation's most quietly ambitious moves is its portrait of the congregation. After cataloging his own failures, Mark turns outward to the people seated around him, and the effect is disorienting in the best way. Here is a sister who uses a walker and teaches weekly classes. A young man who stutters but shows up to mop the gym floor when others don't. A calloused-handed tradesman in the back, his grammar loose, his presence steady. A forty-year-old woman, recently arrived from another country, enrolled in college for the first time, "looking at the floor, perhaps wondering about rent and debt."
And the octogenarian who taps him on the back and says "Gotcha" for the fifth time that month, his eyes "at once coherent and vacant."
These figures are not offered as inspiration. They are offered as fact. The piece does not moralize about them or use them to make a point about humility. They are simply present — ordinary, carrying their own weights, showing up. The effect is to dissolve the narrator's solipsism without announcement. He notices other people, and briefly, the inward spiral stops.
Critics might note that this gallery of congregants risks a kind of tokenism — the disabled woman, the stuttering young man, the immigrant newcomer arrayed as spiritual scenery for the narrator's self-examination. The piece does not entirely escape that tension. But Mark's own admission of slipping back into solipsism immediately after the gallery — "I look over my knuckles, open and close my hands into fists" — suggests some awareness of the irony. The gaze outward does not hold. That, too, is part of the confession.
The Theology of the Body
The meditation's most formally striking section is its treatment of the Atonement. Where the prose has been expansive and searching, here it compresses into single words, stacked like stones:
"Frayed. Cracked. Fractured. Split. Severed. Broken. Torn. Whipped. Shredded. Cut. Slashed. Rent."
And then, in the section on blood, a different list: "Wine. Pores. Sweat. Platelets. Hematidrosis. Consanguinity. Flagrum. Thorns. Press. Cup. Hemothorax. Shed."
This is a deliberate shift in register — clinical and ancient at once, the medical terminology ("hematidrosis," "hemothorax") sitting alongside the liturgical ("cup," "shed"). The effect is to make visceral what ritual has made routine. The bread and water passed weekly in those small cups are, the piece insists, proxies for something the body actually underwent. Wayfare is not letting its readers aestheticize the sacrament. It is asking them to stay with what it points to.
The section titled "Willing" turns this outward. Mark admits that willingness, spoken aloud in an air-conditioned chapel, is easy. "I'm willing to shovel snow in the middle of July. I'm ready to garden when the harvest is thick." But the gap between that declared willingness and actual availability — the late-night text he hesitates to answer, the barn burning across town that he finds pretexts to ignore — is where the piece finds its sharpest edge. "Not now lingers like 6:00 o'clock traffic." The simile is almost comic, and exactly right.
Seasonal Faith and Its Drift
The piece is honest about the rhythms of belief in a way that much devotional writing is not. "I find it easier to remember specifically during Christmas and Holy Week," Mark writes. "Often, though, budget analysis, travel songs, and baseball season lure me away." He describes tripping over "petty arguments," tumbling "down the slippery slope of a news story's bitterness," sidling "up to the rumors of increased property taxes."
This is faith described from the inside of ordinary life, not from the elevated vantage of devotional confidence. The prayer "God, be merciful to me, a sinner" — drawn from Luke 18:13 — is offered with a telling qualification: "I keep hoping the line will act like a mantra even when it doesn't." The honest admission that the liturgy sometimes fails to deliver its promised stillness is rarer in religious writing than it should be.
"I want to use his name less like punctuation, routine, or doorstop. More like the feeling that arrives after a first snowfall or when I've heard my children breathe at night."
Counterpoints are worth raising here. The piece is deeply interior — even confessional — and readers outside its specific theological tradition may find the LDS liturgical markers (the "ordinance," the "emblems," the ward structure) opaque enough to create distance. The meditation assumes a reader who knows what it means when young men administer the sacrament, who understands the geography of a chapel with adjacent hallways. This is not a criticism of the piece's authenticity but an observation about its radius. It is writing from deep inside a particular community, and it does not pause to translate. Whether that limitation is also a kind of integrity is a fair question.
The Close
The meditation ends not with resolution but with a physical memory. Mark describes leaving the hospital with his wife after the birth of a child — "Wind and rain pushed us off the curb and into the parking lot" — and leaning into "that pure singular presence." It is the only moment in the piece where grace arrives not as aspiration but as recalled fact. Something that happened. Something that held.
The final sentence pulls that memory into the present tense: "It kept my broken heart then — and even now — secure and driving through the viscous October air." The viscosity is precise. The air has weight. The driving continues. This is not arrival. It is continuation.
The piece's title frames the occasion as Maundy Thursday — the night before the crucifixion, the night of the Last Supper, the night of betrayal. Wayfare chose this particular liturgical moment to publish a meditation on the distance between intention and action, between the self one presents and the self one's wife cannot breathe around. The calendar choice is not incidental. Maundy Thursday is specifically the night things fell apart before they were made whole. The piece inhabits that interval without rushing through it.
Bottom Line
This Maundy Thursday meditation from Wayfare earns its ambitions through specificity — the spousal argument, the social media spiral, the lineup of ordinary congregants — refusing the consolations of devotional abstraction in favor of something more demanding and more honest. It is a piece about the gap between declared faith and lived faith, written by someone with no apparent interest in flattering the distance. Readers who want their Holy Week reading to leave them feeling good will need to look elsewhere; readers willing to sit with the Thursday before the Friday will find it precisely calibrated.