Preview: Lent in the Garden of Gethsemane with St. Thomas More

On Monday, February 22, Anna Mitchell, Matt Swaim, and I will start a Lenten series on the Son Rise Morning Show--at my usual time (7:50 a.m. Eastern/6:50 a.m. Central) on the EWTN Radio network. We will discuss, every Monday during Lent, Saint Thomas More's meditation on the Agony in the Garden, which More wrote while he was in the Tower of London. Listen live here or on your local EWTN affiliate.

I'm glad to see that my home state of Kansas has 14 (fourteen) EWTN affiliates!! (How many does your state have?)

If you want to read along, The Sadness of Christ is readily available from Scepter Publishers--or check with your local Catholic bookstore.

The Sadness of Christ is the English translation of De Tristitia Christi--More wrote this book in Latin. His granddaughter, Mary Roper Bassett, Margaret More Roper's daughter, translated it from Latin into English with the title Of the sorowe, werinesse, feare, and prayer of Christ before hys taking in the 1557 collection of Thomas More's works published by William Rastell, The Workes of Sir T. More in the English Tonge.

More also wrote a longer meditation on the Passion of Christ in English, A Treatise on the Passion and A Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation, also in English, while in the Tower--evidently during the first months of his incarceration, after April 17, 1534. I have the Yale Edition with the Treatise on the Passion, but it has not been published in a modernized version yet.

We know that when he was finally questioned again in 1535 about taking the Oath of Supremacy by Cromwell and others--according to letters he wrote to his daughter Margaret--he had dedicated much of his time in the Tower to meditating on Our Lord's Passion and preparing for his own death by natural causes or execution. More had written to Margaret that he was happy to have the time and leisure to meditate and pray more attentively and deeply on the Passion of Christ. He had devoted Fridays to this meditation while living at home, but now in the Tower he could think about it all the time.

In his meditation on detachment he wrote: "To think my most enemies my best friends, For the brethren of Joseph could never have done him so much good with their love and favor as they did him with their malice and hatred." Therefore, Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell had done him a favor by locking him up in the Tower, as Joseph's brothers had done him a favor (and themselves) a favor by selling him off in to slavery so that he ended up in Egypt as Pharaoh's right-hand man!

Sometime after those late April and early May 1535 meetings, Richard Rich and two others came to More's cell and gathered up his writing materials and some books--but left these manuscripts and other writings behind--so he was left with charcoal to write his last letter to Margaret. Margaret and William Rastell gathered those books and materials after More's execution, just as Margaret recovered her father's head before it could be tossed from Tower Bridge.

In writing this meditation, More reflected on all four accounts of the Agony in the Garden, chapter 26 in St. Matthew's Gospel, chapter 14 in St. Mark's, 22 in St. Luke's, and 18 in St. John's. As he does in the Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation, More warns his readers about the trouble to come, not the possible invasion of the Turks in Hungary, but the loss of faith in the Church. He exhorts them to remain awake, be steadfast and prepared, to be attentive--not like the Apostles who fell asleep and could not watch one hour with Jesus--and neither presume to be fit for martyrdom nor too weak to be faithful. Jesus in the Garden is his model for us to imitate: throughout this series on the Mondays of Lent, Matt Swaim, Anna Mitchell and I will discuss More's counsel on how to imitate Jesus.

Image Credit: Jesus Praying in the Garden of Gethsemane from the Vaux Passional. This file is made available under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.