The Last…
A Lenten Meditation — Part 21
Salvador Dalí, The Sacrament of the Last Supper, 1955. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Day Forty-Five
There’s a moment in Season 5, Episode 4 of The Chosen where they’re sitting at the table and begin reciting a version of Dayenu—“it would have been enough.”
I didn’t hear it as a song. It felt… more like a memory with each line, naming something they had been given… and letting that be enough on its own.
It happens during the Last Supper, but it doesn’t try to explain anything about what’s coming.
It just sits there. At a table. With a few voices. And something quietly understood.
It would have been enough.
I didn’t always understand that phrase.
It sounds a little like settling. Like stopping short. Like accepting less than what was possible.
I have spent most of my life reaching for something. Understanding. Becoming. Trying to make something of what I had been given.
Even this series… started as one meditation on an old friend’s favorite musical, Godspell. And then, it became something else.
Something I followed.
Something I stayed with.
Something I didn’t fully understand while I was in it.
And now, sitting here at the end of it… I find myself back at that table again. A table of confiding. Maybe one of confusion. One of communion.
Not the kind that explains anything or resolves what came before.
Just a table.
Bread. Wine. Voices.
People who don’t fully understand what’s happening… but are there anyway.
If I had only been the one who kept the show running… and never been the one anyone noticed…
it would have been enough.
If I had only learned how to stay… and not spent so many years trying to run away… to become something else…
it would have been enough.
If I had only loved the people I was given… and not tried to understand everything about why they were given to me…
it would have been enough.
If I had only written a few honest pages… and never found a way to share them…
it would have been enough.
If I had only stood behind the desk…
said hello…
folded towels…
and been present for the life in front of me…
it would have been enough.
If I had only made it this far…
still here…
and still not have figured out what any of it meant…
it would have been enough.
If I had only lived a life, justified by the past, reasoned by my brokenness… and at the end of it, found no justice, no reasoning… even if there was no redemption…
Life… my life?
I have to say…
I need to say…
it would have been enough.
I didn’t live it that way.
I was always asking for more. Reaching for more. Trying to understand more.
I spent a lifetime trying to make it all… add up.
Maybe it was me, sitting in traffic, complaining about traffic, while being traffic. And maybe that wasn’t wrong. Maybe that was part of it too.
And I don’t know what comes next. I don’t know how any of this continues.
But I’m here.
At the table.
In stillness, still.
There was a time I thought faith meant understanding more. Now it feels closer to something simpler.
To see more clearly today than I did yesterday.
To love another… and myself more dearly in this moment than I did the previous one.
To follow the Way more nearly… than I ever have.
Day by day, I suppose. Not building toward anything. Not even arriving anywhere.
Just… staying with what’s here while it’s here.
And sitting here now… it feels different.
Just before another sun rises on another Sunday morning, it feels quieter. It less like something I need to complete… and more like something I was, already inside of.
I don’t know that I would have believed that before.
That any one of those things… on its own… would have been enough.
But something in me is beginning to see it, not as a conclusion or even as an answer.
Just… as it is. A life.
Not fully understood. Maybe even misunderstood.
Not fully resolved. Possibly never resolved.
Or even close to finishing in the way I thought it would.
And still…
I’ve come to a point where I want to say…
it would have been enough.
TW