St. Ignatius Loyola, in his Spiritual Exercises, encourages retreatants to meditate on the Last Supper in order to experience what he called dolor. Dolor is a Spanish word which can mean physical pain, like the pain of a backache or a toothache, but dolor can also mean mental pain. At some points, Ignatius directs us to seek out this mental pain, grief, sorrow, anguish, distress, misery, sadness, and torment.
The Last Supper was marked by this kind of dolor. Usually, when you go to a supper, you are looking for the opposite of dolor. You look for things like happiness, pleasure, satisfaction, relief, alleviation, good cheer. Not this time, though. Don’t spend this holy day seeking all of your usual pleasures, but instead, seeking their opposites, seeking dolor as Ignatius suggests. Make yourself moderately uncomfortable (but not extremely so) and practice denying your own self-will, so that the next time your big ego tries to make a selfish decision you will be strong enough to resist it. Furthermore, when you unite your own dolor to Christ’s dolor, you become closer to him, and you work with him in his mission of salvation.