In the Garden

It is Maundy Thursday, and my evening didn’t go as planned. I wanted to make a feast and had planned to wash my husband’s feet, if he would let me, which is doubtful. I think it would have been a moving experience, washing each other’s feet in our kitchen at this time we are stuck in quarantine. I got out the bowl and the cloth and towel. Then I got so tired from my recent chemo that I went to bed for a long, long nap and barely managed some leftovers before coming back to bed.

I’ve always found the Triduum, which I never called that until about a decade ago, exhausting. As a kid I really deeply experienced grief on Good Friday, a day we had off from school and which we kept pretty sacred around the house, cognizant of Christ on the cross from noon to three. My mother said there was never good weather on Good Friday, and it seemed true.

When we were Catholic, before my mother’s conversion when I was twelve, we always went to the Maundy Thursday liturgy. It was long. It was really long. But mostly, the story was just devastating.

First there is the Passover dinner, the Last Supper, and the ritual washing of feet. But then, after that, Jesus and the disciples go to the Garden of Gethsemane where Jesus prays. And, to my great shame, although he begs them to stay awake with him, the apostles fall asleep. Sitting through that long liturgy as a kid, I knew that I, too, would have fallen asleep. Even if I’d wanted to stay awake, I would have fallen asleep. Jesus is so disappointed. But more than that, he is aware of his great loneliness, he is isolated in that moment.

And then there is that prayer. “Father, if possible, let this cup pass from me.” He doesn’t, in his humanness, want to go through with it. No one willingly chooses to suffer. Not even Jesus. Finally, the best he can do is to say, “Not my will but thine be done.” He doesn’t come around to the idea. He submits to what has already been put in motion, what must be done.

As someone living with cancer, I can say that by far the most excruciating time was the week between becoming aware that what I had was certainly cancer and the morning in the oncologist’s office where he laid out the plan for treatment. I knew what was wrong with me, more or less, but I had no idea what it would mean, how it would play out. The oncologist could tell me I’d be fine after treatment, or tell me that I’d be dead in three months. Either option was in play. In fact, when he said that the average life span for someone at my stage of disease was 2-3 years, I was relieved. That was enough time to treat, and there were treatments available, and I could live even longer, I knew. The treatment could be successful. I was going to die of this disease, but not soon– maybe not for a long time. There was a lot of hope in the specifics of treatment.

Jesus in Gethsemane is in that space of knowing but not quite knowing. What comes next? The hierarchy have been after him for quite a while, pursuing him, and now the time has come. He knows it, but he cannot know the details yet of all that will unfold. He prays, and the story is devastating to us in the pews, because although we have heard the story so many times before, we cannot make the disciples stay awake this time. And we know what is coming and how painful it will be for Jesus.

The next few days will unfold and I will engage with the story as I can. It is a devastating story, and yet we pass through it every year. And I will again, knowing that I will come through with Mary Magdalene and the women on Easter Sunday to the empty tomb, Resurrection, and the beginning of the story still unfolding today of God’s presence in the world.

I have had particular difficulty with Holy Week since my diagnosis. Even the two years I was in remission, I didn’t attend the special liturgies. This year, I’ve been doing an online retreat with Bach’s Passion of St. Matthew, reading the texts and listening to the music and reflecting. It is a retreat about grief and sorrows. And I thought it might help me to engage a bit with my own grief and sorrow, which are still inaccessible to me. But what I discovered the first day is, it is not time. It is not time for me to go to Gethsemane. It is not my time in the garden. I am still in the middle of things. I am still in the full living of my life.

I will know when it is time. There will be tears enough then. And I know the story, because this is the story of my faith. I will still read the story, and pray the story, and weep with the disciples over their sleep, with Peter over his betrayal, with Mary over her loss. I will pray for and weep with those losing loved ones this year at an alarming rate from the virus. But it is not my time.