“And they came to a place which was named Gethsemane” (Mark 14:32; Matt. 26:36).
Matthew and Mark name the place on the Mount of Olives where Jesus came after the Last Supper as Gethsemane. Luke calls it simply “the place” (Luke 22:40) and tells us that it was Jesus’ custom to come there (22:39). John calls it “a garden” (John 18:1). The place name seems to derive from the Aramaic and Hebrew for “olive press,” suggesting that an olive press may once have stood there. A grove of olive trees does stand to this day at the traditional location of the Garden of Gethsemane, including eight giant trees, three of which have been shown (through radiocarbon dating) to be more than 800 years old (and it is possible that their root systems are far older than this). These ancient trees have massive, hollow trunks; their branches are bent and gnarled.
In his poem “Gethsemane,” Rowan Williams exploits both the twisted forms of these ancient trees and the etymology of the place name. An olive press suggests a weight pressing down, because in the ancient production of olive oil, the harvested olives were first crushed and then forcibly pressed with a heavy weight under leverage to extract their oil. The idea of a weight pressing down runs throughout the poem. In the first stanza, he imagines the trees of Gethsemane as themselves pressed down by a weight:
Who said that trees grow easily
compared with us? What if the bright
bare load that pushes down on them
insisted that they spread and bowed
and pleated back on themselves and cracked
and hunched? Light dropping like a palm
levelling the ground, backwards and forwards?
In the poem’s thought world, the trees of Gethsemane assume their twisted forms under pressure, pushed down by the light, that “bright / bare load” that presses down on them, “like a palm / levelling the ground, backwards and forwards.” The trees must endure the pressure of this hand laid upon them, the light’s weight that shapes them.
The image of a hand pressing down links the first stanza with the second, where it is developed and transformed. Here it is explicitly “the hand of God” that exerts pressure, and what it presses are the stones that make up the Western Wall of the Temple Mount.
Across the valley are the other witnesses
of two millennia, the broad stones
packed by the hand of God, bristling
with little messages to fill the cracks.
As the light falls and flattens what grows
on these hills, the fault lines dart and spread,
there is room to say something, quick and tight.
Williams skillfully introduces the themes of history and of prayer by evoking the image of notes stuffed into the cracks of the Western Wall. He evokes the specific history of the Holy City since the time of Christ: the destruction of the Temple by the Romans, the conquests and the crusades, the sufferings and the struggles of the Jewish people down through the millennia — all of it conjured by the imagery of the Western Wall, the Wailing Wall, the Kotel. And the “little messages” that “fill the cracks” also stretch the horizon of the poem to encompass the longings of all humanity. Because those papers crammed into the cracks of the Kotel are the prayers of “all sorts and conditions of men”: Jewish pilgrims and Christian pilgrims, paupers and pop stars, presidents and popes, they all have come here and have touched those “broad stones” and have filled the cracks with their “little messages.” The Holy Stones bristle with “the hopes and fears of all the years.”
The Rabbi of the Western Wall receives tens of thousands of written prayers each year, through the post office and the internet, to place between the Holy Stones. Hundreds of them are addressed simply to God in Jerusalem. Twice a year, at Rosh Hashanah and at Passover, the rabbi’s team clears the notes from the Kotel, using wooden tools. They carefully collect all the notes and bury them ceremonially in the Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives. You can watch a video of the removal, in which there is a striking moment when a worker digs hundreds of notes out of a large crack, and the notes keep coming and coming, pouring out of the stones, prayers drifting at his feet.
The phrase “the hand of God” also suggests a biblical idiom for suffering. Thus, for example, regarding a plague that afflicts the inhabitants of Ekron, the Scripture says that “the hand of God was very heavy there” (1 Sam. 5:11). Or again, Job in his sufferings cries out,
Have pity on me, have pity upon me, O ye my friends; for the hand of God hath touched me. (Job 19:21)
Here the touch of “the hand of God,” or its heaviness, its pressure, is a way of speaking that lends meaning to suffering. A similar idiom is present in the prayer book tradition. For example, the classical rite for the Communion of the Sick has a prayer for God to have mercy “upon this thy servant visited with thine hand.” It is risky language to be sure, but might it not dissuade us from thinking of suffering as simply random or devoid of meaning?
A hand suggests purposefulness, after all, even if that purpose is undiscoverable by us. It seems to me that such language, coupled in a firm conviction in the goodness of God, can be a source of comfort. A passage from St. Peter suggests how it might be so: “Humble yourselves therefore under the mighty hand of God, that he may exalt you in due time: casting all your care upon him; for he careth for you” (1 Pet. 5:6-7).
The final stanza of Williams’ poem returns our gaze to the olive trees at Gethsemane, returning to the themes introduced in the second stanza, and connecting them with Christ’s Agony in the Garden:
Into the trees’ clefts, then, do we push
our folded words, thick as thumbs?
somewhere inside the ancient bark, a voice
has been before us, pushed the densest word
of all, abba, and left it to be collected by
whoever happens to be passing, bent down
the same way by the hot unreadable palms.
The imagery of the paper prayers placed between the stones of the Western Wall becomes that of words “folded” and pushed into “the ancient bark” of the olives in Gethsemane. And Williams calls our attention to the most significant of these words, “the densest word / of all,” the “abba” of Christ’s prayer in Gethsemane:
And they came to a place which was named Gethsemane: and he saith to his disciples, Sit ye here, while I shall pray. And he taketh with him Peter and James and John, and began to be sore amazed, and to be very heavy; And saith unto them, My soul is exceeding sorrowful unto death: tarry ye here, and watch. And he went forward a little, and fell on the ground, and prayed that, if it were possible, the hour might pass from him. And he said, Abba, Father, all things are possible unto thee; take away this cup from me: nevertheless not what I will, but what thou wilt. (Mark 14:32–36)
Christ’s cry of “Abba” is “the densest word of all,” not only phonically, but because it contains within itself all other prayers. Packed within its spare syllables are the prayers of the whole world, “the hopes and fears of all the years.” His prayer contains perhaps even the longing of the whole creation, which “groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now” (Rom. 8:22). Christ has left his prayer for us, Williams suggests, left his densest word for “whoever happens to be passing,” bent down by the weight of affliction, bent down by “the hot unreadable palms,” by the weighty “hand of God.” His prayer is there for us.
Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows. (Isa. 53:4)
Christ’s “densest word” speaks for us, for all who are weighed down and hard-pressed, for “all who labor and are heavy leaden” (Matt. 11:28).
Likewise the Spirit also helpeth our infirmities: for we know not what we should pray for as we ought: but the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered. (Rom. 8:26)
Rowan Williams helps us to see that, in the Garden of Gethsemane, Christ has left his prayer “to be collected” by us, his prayer which collects all other prayers, which encompasses all affliction, his “densest word,” which is our rest and our peace.
The Rev. Christopher Yoder is rector of All Souls’ Episcopal Church, Oklahoma City. Raised in western Pennsylvania, he studied at Wheaton College and Duke Divinity School.