Gethsemane

Every soul can at least dimly understand the nature of the struggle that took place on the moonlit night in the garden of Gethsemane. Every heart knows something about it. No one has ever come to the twenties – let alone to the forties, or the fifties, or the sixties, or the seventies of life – without reflecting with some degree of seriousness on himself and the world round about him, and without knowing the terrible tension that has been caused in his soul by sin. Faults and follies do not efface themselves from the record of memory; sleeping tablets do not silence them; psychoanalysts cannot explain them away. The brightness of youth may make them fade into some dim outline, but there are times of silence – on a sick bed, sleepless nights, the open seas, a moment of quiet, the innocence in the face of a child – when these sins, like specters or phantoms, blaze their unrelenting characters of fire upon our consciences. Their force might not have been realized in a moment of passion, but conscience is biding its time and will bear its stern uncompromising witness sometime, somewhere, and force a dread upon the soul that ought to make it cast itself back again to God. Terrible though the agonies and tortures of a single soul be, they were only a drop in the ocean of humanity’s guilt which the Savior felt as his own in the Garden.

Fulton J. Sheen, Life of Christ