Keeping Watch
The Simple Grace of Vigil
I am writing this from the chilly foyer of our church. It is the night of Maundy Thursday, several hours after sunset, and I am keeping vigil. Rather, I am helping others keep vigil, for now at least, until midnight when my hour comes up.
Our parish has an occasional tradition of “keeping watch” between the Maundy Thursday service and sunrise on Good Friday. The idea, sort of, is to beat the disciples of Jesus, who could not watch “even one hour” during the darkest night of Christ’s life, spent in suspense and torment in Gethsemane, a garden just outside Jerusalem, immediately preceding his betrayal by Judas Iscariot.
As these sorts of churchy things don’t happen unless someone makes them happen, and as this is, for some reason, my favorite part of the whole Holy Week, I am the one making it happen this year. Warden for the night. I have set up a little “garden” altar, with a plastic chair and a wooden kneeler. There is a small icon of Christ, alone in the garden, two large pillar candles, greenery from our land (laurel from the hedge, which has just come into bloom; rosemary for remembrance; honey locust for its vicious thorns; a small bouquet, cut by Emily).
I like the plants. A church is not really a proper indoor place at all, or at least it should not be. It is good to bring the wild into it, often and thoughtfully, in the same way that it is good to bring the ceremonies of the church outside as often and as thoughtfully as possible.
The nave of the church is dark, except for a little light at the back, for walking, and those candles. Into that darkness, people are coming by ones and twos (parent/child or spouses) to watch. Someone has committed to every hour of the night, right through the “wee sma’s.” (Benjamin will tell me if I got that apostrophe right from memory. Anne of Green Gables, I think.) I have a Stanley thermos of chamomile tea and a package of off-brand “Pinweasels”, which is what my grandfather used to call those marshmallow Pinwheel cookies. After eating a couple, I feel ready to tackle Herod.
Five minutes before the top of each hour, I get up and open the door to let in the next watcher. We don’t have to whisper, but we will. It’s just how it works. I have known most of these people for years. A few of them I do not know more than a “peace of Christ” on Sundays. I know that there are all sorts of stories coming in with each of them—great joys and great griefs and great in-betweens. I am used to seeing these faces in the daylight, but here we are in the watching hours. It feels like another world, merely by being night, by being this night.
On the outside, we are in Portland, Oregon in the year 2026. But on the inside (and I must stress that this inside is something totally different from pretending), we are in Gethsemane, and Jesus is in the dark, all alone, and he is crying. He is crying, and no one is going to watch with him.
I look out the window. Across the street, a security guard for a nearby building casually trails a disheveled man who is limping down the sidewalk bent in the “fentanyl fold” that we see so often in the city here. There is a rabbit that has emerged onto the lawn from the church azaleas. It begins to eat dandelion leaves.
We might pray in the dark by the garden altar when we go in, but we are not going in there to pray. We are not going in to sing, or to read psalms, or to think big spiritual thoughts or anything, really. We’re going in there so that we can be in there. When it is my turn, I will go and kneel, and it will be like the other years that I have gone and knelt. It will simply be watching. It will be waiting. Bearing witness. Staying awake. Being with him, because who else is there to be with him besides us?
There is a sweetness in this Thursday vigil that I do not feel in any other moment of the church year. It is the intimacy of being by a sickbed, by just being there as a friend collapses. There is honor in it. We are allowed into this, allowed to be needed, to be leaned upon.
Over the years, I have sometimes wondered how I have not lost my faith. So many of my friends have—people with whom I grew up, or was educated, people who listened to all the same gusty sermons that I did, who sang the same hymns, read the same books, who, in many cases were absolutely better Christians than I could ever be—more thoughtful, more faithful, more educated, more intelligent, more kind, more socially aware, more everything. I do not think it was because I did anything right, or anything different.
This seeming inability to lose my faith was not for a lack of trying on my part, I think. I pretty well kicked (or popped) the tires on everything I was taught in the Christianity of my boyhood before finding that actually those tires I thought were so necessary were hung on the side of a boat, and that old barque of faith sailed better than ever without them flopping from the deck. Meat chewed but bones spat, bathwater thrown but baby kept, all that. Still, there have been plenty of reasons, on the surface of it, for the believing thing in me to have died, or to have mutated into something shrunken or cruel.
Whatever has kept me, it has not been rational, social, or religious, strictly speaking. It is the thing that I encounter in the dark watching of this Thursday night. It is something that captures me in the beauty and sheer grace of the emptied Christ. He rhymes, perfectly, with something whole and wordless and wonderful. I feel it in the gut. It is a simple magnetic pull, an “I’m with him.” It is a gift of presence, not only his presence with me but of my presence with him.
“Could you not watch even one hour?” That is not the cry of the untouchable Almighty. It is much better than that. He became as we are that we might become as he is. The light shines in the darkness, but it is so little and so thin right now. It shakes so much. Will it go out? I feel for a minute, with Peter, the desperate, wild sentiment: where else shall we go? With you are the words of eternal life.
“Grace is the life of God,” writes Archmandrite Sophrony (On Prayer). Tonight, in thinking about this statement, I thought for the first time of grace as respiration; as circulation. “Unmerited favor,” goes one definition of grace, and even though that’s a little pat, it’s not so bad. To think of this love and blessing as holding the same place in the nature of the Trinity that blood and oxygen do for me is interesting.
It is this grace, which (inhale) seeks to bring all things into its very self and (exhale) give itself in turn to all things that forms the divine respiration, whose “shape” is mimicked at every level of the world, from abstruse doctrines of the Eternal Procession of the Holy Spirit to human reproduction, to the triumphant exchange of carbon from photosynthetic algae, to the fusion of plasma in an unnamed star which will burn for eons utterly beyond the sight or knowledge of humanity.
My friend Dan roasts his own coffee. It is very good, and he has just brought me some as he walks in to watch for his hour. He thought ahead and brewed it just for me, and that’s grace, and he roasted the beans, and that’s grace too. Those beans were grown by someone, off in Colombia or somewhere, and that was grace, and the fact that plants have fruit and can eat the sun and drink the rain, and that we can usually eat the fruit that just pops out of stuff—well, isn’t that grace too? And the behavior of light is grace, and so is gravitational physics, and so is the time-space continuum, and so is all the quantum stuff that just gets wilder the closer you look at it, because maybe it is just all actually made of thought and there is nothing else except for Someone thinking all this right now, and if that’s the case then love love love love love must be what that Someone is thinking because the world is almost solid all the way through, there’s just a few holes in it, really. Grace.
“Could you not watch with me one hour?” Jesus said to his disciples. They were tired, and they fell asleep. I have all the sympathy for them in the world. (Dan wasn’t roasting coffee yet.) Watching is hard, and staying awake is not a given. But we have to try, don’t we? And even if we fall asleep, grace, and if we stay awake, grace all the more.
Tomorrow will be Good Friday. It will be dark, but all its darkness begins here, on this night before. Thursday is the night of Judas, of the fanged kiss. The cross will stand quite awful and red in the light, but even that desolation is rooted here. And so, in the great Trick, the great Paradox, all the light and consolation is rooted here too, perhaps. Even so, not my will but thine be done. Those words have infinity folded up inside them. I am in them right now, and have barely begun to explore.
I write this last bit after completing my hour. I stood for most of it, and sang. Partly because it is not often one gets an hour alone in a dark, lovely church with wonderful acoustics, but also partly because it’s what you do as a forty-year-old man to not fall asleep. There were no major epiphanies, but the hour flew, and each quiet minute was alive.
I am sleepy, and will get twenty minutes here if I can after I post this. Next stop, 2 AM. This night has more inside it than than a year of sermons. At least that’s how I feel, but maybe it’s just the last Pinweasel talking.
Anyway, see that little light? Do not let it go out.
Watch it.
"He rhymes, perfectly, with something whole and wordless and wonderful. I feel it in the gut. It is a simple magnetic pull, an “I’m with him.”" Natural, elemental, respiratory, circulatory. Thank you. I just love what you've written here, from beginning to end and beginning again.
I have prayed that often, "Where else would I go?" When I make my bed in the depths, he's there. When I run to my doubts and wrestle with my dissatisfaction with modern Christianity, still his hand guides me. I used to worry about letting go, but his right hand holds me fast. The darkness is as light to him, as you experienced watching in the garden last night. Lovely meditation. Thank you.