A reflection on Jesus’ prayers at Gethsemane

Going a little farther, he fell to the ground and prayed that if possible the hour might pass from him.—Mark 14:35 NIV

We are brought down to the dust; our bodies cling to the ground. Rise up and help us; redeem us because of your unfailing love.—Psalm 44:25-26 NIV

I was on my knees in the dirt. It was wet and cold and gray. I didn’t have proper boots, so my feet were soaked through. My thick leather gloves should have offered protection, but even they were useless minutes into the task at hand. I knew the day’s forecast offered no promise of sun or warmth. I could already feel a crick in my back, an ache in my thighs. I shuffled my feet through furrows, head bent, fingers moving slowly around stems and leaves.

It was a good day for staying low to the ground. I was thankful for the focus of farm work, and the weather matched my spirits. I had spent two long weekends as a chaplain at the hospital. A burn death, a family wailing in the hallway, a 13-year-old murdered by her father, a 28-week-old baby—she was perfect but too small to live: a few of 54 visits in and out of rooms during those two shifts of work. In the intervening week I read about the intersection of violence and poverty and climate change. Maybe I had faced too much death.

My mind was not busy, I was just working, plunging my hands into the ground as best I could manage. Grab, dig, pull. Repeat. I had no great intention of prayer.

But there, in the midst of the wet and cold and gray, I noticed. I stood up and refocused my eyes, drew a sharp breath. I was surrounded, immersed in a sea of green. Things were growing everywhere, thick and tangled. I had been tearing growth out in fistfuls, scouring the teeming ground with my soggy fingers. Things were growing between the rows, growing under the black canvas laid to block growth, growing in the quarter-inch of nutrient-forsaken clay displaced on top of the canvas.

When I fell to the ground in sorrow that December morning, I rose overwhelmed not by gray or cold or despair but by life. Life was rising up all around me in droves. Life was so abundant it had become disorderly and unwieldy. All that green growth called out to the sky, reached and stretched to God in the heavens, sunk its clambering roots down to the Creator of the mud below. Life was pulsating, spreading, filling every inch of space, every crack and crevice, even and especially the most unlikely places.

The best part: the rows I was weeding were long. This was no fleeting refection on the tenacity of life, no agrarian poetic moment. I was stuck in the muck. I continued, creeping along, crouched in the dirt for another hour, water settling further in my shoes, mud seeping through my gloves. My body clung to the ground. And it saturated me—literally—with life.

Catherine Thiel Lee is a chaplain and a regular preacher at Chapel Hill (N.C.) Mennonite Church.