Gethsemane 2025

I wake to the sound of the 3:15 a.m. bells –  splash water on my face – brush my

teeth and quickly run off to the chapel for morning vigils where the saints and

angels make their first prayers of the new day –

In the darkness I can not read the psalms in my hands but I remember them in my heart

I watch as the old monks come to prayer one by one

Monks with crooked backs and necks from the labors of their devotion 

A drop of holy water

A quick sign of the cross

To sit to stand to kneel to beg to plead – to be thankful

To wake into the arms of God

Into the pattern that has been their lives -over and again since they left their mothers

after the war in exchange for only Christ