Asleep With Grief

Opening my eyes during a long sermon, I saw them all of them looking at me, all three of the kids, and Kathy too. They were kind of smiling. I remember this vividly, from one Sunday in our pew at Gesu Church 20 years ago, when the kids were all visiting from college. As we walked home after Mass, I asked them why they were smiling at me. They divulged that they had a kind of bet among themselves whether I would weep or sleep first, whether I’d be overcome by emotion or by sleep deprivation.

Reading the Passion, I was stopped by words I don’t remember seeing before: “He found them sleeping from grief.” He’s weeping over the city he loves, grieving so intensely that he breaks into a sweat. They escape into sleep.

Tears became an active part of my emotional life all at once on a retreat when I was in my late twenties. Drawn into the depth of prayer during an 8-day retreat at the nearby Jesuit Retreat Center, a subterranean spring in me pushed through my northern European constraint and began to gush. From that time, when I am taken to deep places, tears come. They are not tears of grief, like those shed in Gethsemane, but tears of what I’d describe as awe, as being moved beyond words. Gesu has always been blessed with worship that is shot through with God; it is an awesome place. So I’d often be moved to tears during good homilies, or simply looking at the faces of people in our congregation. The kids had become accustomed to the little sounds that would erupt despite my attempts to constrain them as my chest burst with racking sobs.

But a contrasting practice they came to expect from me was gently sleeping during the homilies that didn’t grab me. I’d found a technique to save myself from embarrassment by crossing my arms, placing one fist sideways under my chin as a prop, and closing my eyes as if in reverent meditation. It was in this latter pose that they had caught me that Sunday, and I realized that I had reached the age of being a dad who is the sport of his adult children.

Sleep or tears. What shall it be for us this Lent, this time walking through the passion and death of this good man to whom we are companion?

The kids are watching me again now, watching for tears, listening for weariness, smiling at me with love as we all move toward my heart surgery - Kathy too, but not in visits or phone calls, but right beside me. I’m not going to be nailed to a cross, to face humiliation and death; I’m going into a well-practiced procedure with a 99% rate of success. But these four who love me most, and especially the one who is constantly at my side, are in a situation like in this Good Story. They’re stuck being my companions. And I find consolation for them in this line – “He found them sleeping with grief” –suggesting that Jesus was not hurt or angered by their sleeping. He understood. Sometimes we are called to attention, but sometimes we are called to inattention, to acceptance of our helplessness, to rest in trust.

When are we called to weep? When are we called to sleep? When are we called to face things we can change, to accept things we can’t? God help us discern the difference. God help us accept our role, active or passive, not in the drama of Gethsemane, but in our daily lives.


 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.