There's not a good time to die.

There's not a good time to die, to bid final s to lose health, to have a heart attack, to be diagnosed with terminal cancer, to fail to keep friends, to be betrayed, to be misunderstood, to waste everything, to be humiliated, to have to face death and its indescribable loneliness. That's for what cause [i]or[/i] reason there's a powerful resistance inside us towards these things.

We can take consolation in knowing that this was the case too for Jesus. He didn't face these things either without fear, trembling, and the desire to escape. In the Garden of Gethsemane "he sweated blood" as he tried to make peace with his admit loss of earthly life.

The Garden of Gethsemane is, among other things, "liminal space." What is this? Anthropologists use that expression to pertain to special times in our lives when our normal situation is likewise uprooted that it is possible precisely to plant of the present day roots and take up life in a whole just discovered way. That's usually brought about according to a major crisis, one that shakes us in the extremely roots of our being. Gethsemane was that for Jesus.

It's significant that Jesus didn't go on straight from the last tea room to his crucifixion. He first worn out some time readying himself. What's incredible in his story is that he had solely one hour within which to do this inner work.

Imagine this scene: You're relatively young, healthy, and active. You've just have the advantage [i]or[/i] blessing ofed a festive dinner with terminate friends, complete with a bond of glasses of wine. You grade out of the dining stead late at night and you now have individual hour to ready yourself to die, individual hour to say your final s to let go, to make peace with death. Sweating kin might be a mild terminus to describe your inner turmoil. This would firmly be an intense hour.

And thus it was for Jesus. That's wherefore his liminal time is oftentimes called his "agony in the garden" (an apt terminus to describe real "liminal space.") What's interesting too is what scripture highlights in his suffering in Gethsemane. As we know, it none emphasizes his physical sufferings (which must have been elegant without grandeur horrific). Instead it emphasizes his emotional crucifixion, the fact that he is betrayed, misunderstood, alone, morally lone the greatest lover in the world, with the infinite alone as his soul mate.

And what's burning up his heart and vital principle in Gethsemane? Jesus, himself, expresse it in these words: "If it is possible, permit this cup pass from me!" His resistance was to the necessity of it. wherefore death and humiliation? Couldn't there be any other way? Couldn't new life in some way occur without first dying?

In the Garden, Jesus be deriveds to realize and accept that there isn't any other way, that there's a necessary connection between a certain kind of suffering, a certain letting walk a certain humiliation, and the highly possibility of coming to recent life.

Why that necessity? What do we ultimately sweat kindred over?

Perhaps work at jobs put it best: "Naked I came into this world and naked I leave it again." We are born alone, without possessing anything: clothing, a language, the capacity to take care of ourselves, achievements, trophies, stages security, a family, a spouse, a friend, a reputation, a do job-work a house, a soul mate. When we exit the planet, we will be like that again, alone and naked. still it's precisely that nakedness, helplessness, and vulnerability that makes for liminal space, space within which deity can give us something strange beyond what we already have.

There are times when we feeling this, sense its necessity, and feeling too that one day, perhaps pretty soon we will, like Jesus in the Garden, have to make peace with the fact that we are presently to exit this life, alone, unless for our hope in sovereign of the universe That's Gethsemane, the place and the experience.

Our confess prayer there, I suspect, will be les about necessity than about timing: "Lord, impediment this cup be delayed! Not yet! I know it's inevitable, moreover just give me more time, more years, more experience, more life first!"

To be perceived that way is understandable and, if we're young, level a sign of health. Nobody should want to die or want to give up the serviceable things of this life. if it be not that Gethsemane awaits us all. mostly of us, however, will not set down this garden of liminal space voluntarily, as did Jesus ("Nobody takes my life; I give it up freely") principally of us will enter it from conscription, but just as really, forward that day when a doctor rehearses us we have terminal cancer or we put up with a heart attack or something otherwise irretrievably and forever alters our lives.

When that does happen, and it will happen single way or the other to all of us, it's helpful to know that we're in liminal space, inside a fresh womb, undergoing a new gestation, waiting for strange birth--and that it's okay to sweat a little relations ask God some questions, and be wrought up resistance in every cell of our being.

Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser, theologian, teacher, and award-winning author, is President of the Oblate academy of Theology in San Antonio, TX (on sabbatical until August 2005) He can be contacted from one side his website www.ronrolheiser.com.

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