Tonight I Will Keep Watch
A Holy Thursday vigil in the garden.
Tonight you will find me in the garden.
It is Holy Thursday.
I might be barefoot on the grass, weight pressing into heavy clay soils still so full of winter wet that they bounce underfoot. I will be smelling the night air, searching for the last whisper of fading March hyacinths on the breeze, staring into the sky and hoping the clouds allow me a glimpse of moon or star.
This nocturnal ritual is something I feel driven to do twice a year, on the two nights that enliven my soul like no others.
One is Christmas Eve. Perhaps such an unsurprising choice, it verges on cliché. We all grow up unable to sleep on Christmas Eve, straining our ears for the prancing and pawing of each little hoof upon the rooftops. Some of us never grow out of it. Growing up is realising Santa Claus absolutely does exist.
The other is today: Holy Thursday.
Tonight receives rather less attention than Christmas Eve, yet both are nights of almost unbearable waiting. One for a moment of unfathomable joy, one for a day of unimaginable horror.
They are both nights of spectacular cosmic drama. Strange and unknowable things happen beyond the veil, things far beyond our comprehension and yet inexorably connected to our own personal salvation. Standing under the night sky, I can feel their force.
We approach them with our breath held tight in expectation, a breath we let out in glorious exultation at the arrival of the Christ Child; a breath we release in sobs of despair at the torment of Christ the man on the Cross.
Our waiting on Christmas Eve is in a moonlit stable, gathered around a manger, throats coarse with hay dust and hands running through the coarse warm fur of donkey and ox. We wait and we pray with mother and father and maybe we cast our eyes to the skies to the moon and stars, all outshone by one preternatural light. I step outside into the December cold to look upon those stars and wonder which of them the Holy Family might have seen that night.
Tonight I will look again, and this time imagine which of those stars saw not only that holy night, but shone down on our Lord 33 years later in his fiercest agony. Not in a stable, but in a garden. Not embraced by his loving mother and father, nor with the comforting nuzzle of a caring beast. Not even with a friend.
Alone.
Gethsemane was not a garden as mine is. It was most likely an olive orchard, and possibly walled. A place of function and food, not beauty. And yet the cool night air would have been alive with the noise of insects, perhaps the sound of the water hydrating the trees. It was spring, so tiny white flowers may have adorned the branches like fairy lights. Would Christ have seen so small a flower in the moonlight?
We have an olive in our garden, and its little flowers have no smell. Jesus smelled only wet earth and the gentle green scent of olive leaves as he knelt and prayed for his trial to pass.
Alone.
As I stand beneath tonight’s full moon, memories will swirl. Of watches taken before the Altar of Repose at the end of Holy Thursday Mass, as the choir sings Stay With Me, surely the most heart-rending of all Taizé chant.
Of Jim Caviezel’s haunting turn in The Passion of the Christ, tempted and taunted by Rosalinda Celentano’s unsettling portrayal of Satan. A depiction that moves beyond scripture to draw on the visions of the mystic Anne Catherine Emmerich, visions of the dreadful horrors that besieged Christ in his last moments of freedom.
He fell on his face, overwhelmed with unspeakable sorrow, and all the sins of the world displayed themselves before him, under countless forms and in all their real deformity. He took them all upon himself, and in his prayer offered his own adorable Person to the justice of his Heavenly Father, in payment for so awful a debt. But Satan, who was enthroned amid all these horrors, and even filled with diabolical joy at the sight of them, let loose his fury against Jesus, and displayed before the eyes of his soul increasing awful visions, at the same time addressing his adorable humanity in words such as these: ‘Takest thou even this sin upon thyself? Art thou willing to bear its penalty? Art thou prepared to satisfy for all these sins?’
Christ faced these terrors as his apostles slept. An understandable moment of human frailty yet also an act of treacherous abandonment, leaving their Lord, their friend, to face his nightmare alone. Soft chalky earth, barbed with shards of flint, pressing into his knees and forehead, dust coating his nostrils and eyes, in desperate supplication to the Father. Beset by all the horrors of the devil and certain of the earthly torture to follow. Alone.
To me this is Christ at his most relatable as a man, so vulnerable and frightened and wanting to be strong. Yet it is also a night in which we see Christ at his most awesome, saying yes to his monstrous burden.
I find the agony in the garden almost too much to contemplate. Tomorrow the pain will become more visceral, as we follow our Lord up the path to Calvary and eventually to the tomb, in yet another garden.
But tonight I will stand in my own garden, and feel the earth and the air and smell the trees and seek out the celestial lights and remember, and imagine, and do my best, if only for a time, to stay, remain, watch and pray.
If you are keeping watch tonight, I would be glad to hear how you are passing the night.