And we enter the darkest days of Lent. The days when we’re asked to do the same small thing that Jesus asked of the disciples in the garden, ‘watch and pray.’ And like the disciples we struggle, fail, fall short. I know I do. And after this very long year that is now tipping into two, we’ve also see failings in ourselves as a human race – not that this is a new thing. It’s just against the backdrop of Covid, we’ve been like people holding silence in a theatre where our lives are being played upon the stage. We’re horrified and we desperately want the curtain to drop and it won’t.

These are the days that are made for all our anguish, weakness, and failure, because not only did Jesus say ‘watch and pray’, he also said, ‘stay here while I pray.’ Jesus then went further accompanied by Peter, James and John, but left them too and went further yet. He went alone and then on into the work that only he could do.

Quicken

I’ll bring
my unsettled,
uncentered self, to you.
This week it’s all ‘the holy’ I have.
Emotions scattered,
resolves shattered,
not because of anything,
it’s just well, everything, and
I don’t want it to go back
to the way it was. Not entirely. There.
I said it. Whispered it
our into your silence.

Can this atom of, I don’t know – hope?
be enough for you to split
and quicken me back to life?

© 2021 Laurel Archer – all rights reserved

Title: Hope
Pen & Watercolour on 140 lb. cold press watercolour paper, 6×9 inches
Artist: Violet Nesdoly

PS – I didn’t give Violet an easy task this week. My poem didn’t have many visual images. And yet it’s all here, the dark mystery of something buried and “lost.” Also the suggestions of work in the tools and gloves. We know even our failings as work, don’t we? But we also come to know the work of Jesus as work we know needs doing. In acceptance comes understanding. So thank you Violet for your interpretation and partnership in this conversation.