Watch with Me
Lent of 2000 had been like every other Lent in my life. I had given up sweets or wine or something. Actually, I think that year I gave up my daily afternoon habit of running by the Dairy Queen for a large order of fries and a large Diet Coke. Anyway, I knew all about Lent, or at least I thought I did. It was a time of repentance, a time to examine my life, a time to think about Jesus on that cross. But Lent of 2000 would prove to be different for me.
You see, that was the year that God called me to really participate in Lent. God called me to the Wednesday morning Eucharist. God called me to confession which I did with a priest through The Reconciliation of a Penitent. But most important, for me at least, God called me to sit vigil before the Altar of Repose in the hours between Maundy Thursday and Good Friday.
I signed up to be in the church between 3 and 4 a.m. I got up at 2:30 and threw on my workout clothes. No need to shower or put on make-up because the church would be dark and there would be few, if any, people there with me. I took my Bible so that I could reread the Passion story in the quiet of the church. When I arrived, Reynolds Jarvis was there outside the church. Part of his call each year was to be there in the garden all night to provide a presence for those who chose to sit vigil. I slipped into the church through the south transept door. The church was dark and so very, very quiet. There was a person in the transept on the side opposite the memorial to Mary Cumming Cuthbert. I chose to situate myself in the nave, pulpit side, ten rows back beside the memorial window to Lt. Carter Burdell Hagler. I zipped up my jacket against the chill and placed my Bible beside me on the pew. It was much too dark to read. The only light in the church was in the chancel. I could see the reserved Sacrament on the altar. I could hear and feel to my bones the silence in that darkened church. I pulled down the kneeler to pray. But I was so overwhelmed by the holiness of the moment that all I could do was to kneel in the wonderful and magnificent presence of God.
Never before had I felt the weight of sin as palpably as I did that night. Oh, I had felt shame before. I had felt guilt. But never before had I experienced the actual heaviness, the suffocating density, and staggering burden of my sin. And to think that my thoughts, my words, my deeds had caused pain and suffering to those who love me… and especially to Jesus who bore the weight of my sins as he carried them, for me, to the cross. It was on this night that I, for the first time, realized why Easter, and not Christmas, is the holiest day of the Christian year. I had known intellectually that Jesus had died for me and been raised from the dead for me so that I could have eternal life. But not until I had come face to face with my own sin and wrestled with the horror of it all, did I really understand how beautiful Easter is. Not until that Good Friday morning had I gotten even a glimpse of what Jesus had done for me.
And so, this passage comes to mind, “(N)ow Peter and his companions were weighed down with sleep; but since they had stayed awake, they saw his glory…” (Luke 9: 32). Now, I’m not saying that I experienced the Transfiguration that night. What I am saying, though, is that staying awake with Jesus for that one hour did allow me to experience, as never before, the love that God has for me and the sacrifice that Jesus made for me.
Can you stay awake with Jesus one hour?
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