The Painted Prayerbook

They went to a place called Gethsemane;
and he said to his disciples, “Sit here while I pray.”
—Mark 14.32

From a lectionary reading for Palm/Passion Sunday: Mark 14.1-15.47

Reflection for Passion Sunday

In story and in myth, gardens often present themselves as idyllic. Yet as the scriptures lead us through the gardens of Eden, the Song of Songs, Gethsemane, and beyond, we find they are complicated places. Against the backdrop of the cycles of growth, decay, and rebirth, a garden eventually exposes everything: the difficult dance of union and separation, our sharpest desires, our capacity for betrayal, and the possibility of new life.

The garden as a place of life and death becomes especially evident on this night that Jesus and his disciples make their final visit. Jesus exhorts them to stay with him as he prays. Soon he finds them asleep. Repeatedly. In Matthew and Mark, he wakes them three times. Luke’s Gospel, in a gracious move that mentions their slumber only once, states that the disciples sleep “because of grief.”

The disciples’ slumber suggests they weren’t fully aware of what was going on in the garden—or that they couldn’t face it. It strikes close to home, this desire to insulate ourselves from what we do not want to face.

Some years ago, as I struggled through a period of fatigue, I spoke about it with my spiritual director over the course of several months. When she asked me what it felt like, I described a layer of gauze, thin, but always present between me and the world. One day she asked me what I thought my tiredness was trying to tell me. I didn’t know, but I took the question with me, and not long after, while going about my normal routine one morning, the answer surfaced. I immediately felt a shift in my energy. The fatigue didn’t vanish entirely in that moment—a mild dose of thyroid medication, exercise, focused work on the issue that had sapped my energy, and the healing passage of time would get me farther down that road—but my waking had begun. The gauze had fallen away, and with that gesture came an intimation of resurrection.

I remembered this recently when I saw a new painting by my friend Chuck Hoffman. On the canvas, Christ wakes up with gauzy burial cloths wrapped loosely around his head and arms. He screams with the shock of coming to life.

It’s no wonder the disciples sleep. It is hard work sometimes to remain present with Christ, to stay awake to him, to God’s longing for us, to the demands of resurrection. Something in us knows that to stay awake will mean traveling through the terrain of grief as well as joy. The possibility of a transformed life asks something of us. It propels us into a landscape beyond what is familiar and challenges us to allow Christ into the hollows of the grave-spaces within us, the places that are dead or dying. There is grief in this, sometimes, and the desire to go numb may be strong. But even in our weariness, in our numbness, in our most resistant and dead places, there is something that remains wakeful, open, alert. The bride in the Song of Songs tells it this way: “I slept, but my heart was awake. Listen! My beloved is knocking’” (5.2a).

Blessing for Staying Awake

Even in slumber,
even in dreaming,
even in sorrow,
even in pain:

awake, awake,
awake my soul
to the One who keeps vigil
at all times with you.

—Jan Richardson

2016 update: “Blessing for Staying Awake” appears in my new book Circle of Grace: A Book of Blessings for the Seasons.

This reflection is adapted from Garden of Hollows: Entering the Mysteries of Lent & Easter © Jan L. Richardson.

[To use the image “Gethsemane,” please visit this page at janrichardsonimages.com. Your use of janrichardsonimages.com helps make the ministry of The Painted Prayerbook possible. Thank you!]

This entry was posted on March 31, 2012 at 11:05 PM and is filed under art, blessings, Gospel of Mark, lectionary, Lent. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.