March 20, 1907 [The Life and Passion of Jesus Christ]

I waited for it, almost half an hour into The Life and Passion of Jesus Christ: The Mount of Olives when He asked to be spared, even as he knew He needed to be crucified. And there it was: the rock, the same rock in the picture I'll never forget from—where did I first see it? A missal or catechism given to me as a child? Within a dusty frame hanging on the wall of some relation's house, an aunt or grandparent? On a card sitting on a little table at a long-ago funeral?

It doesn't matter: His arms are always raised, He leans on the rock, the rock itself unyielding, the trees dark, all friends asleep. And while the moving picture—vari-colored and dutiful in its mild devotion—and the longest I've seen, 45 minutes or so—reminded me most of school pageants, of small-town Passion Plays—the costumes too new, the postures stiff, the wooden actors "sawing the air"—none of that mattered because the rock was the same, and His arms went up and His head bent down, and I was given again the opportunity to consider—in safety and comfort, no cold ground beneath me, no rough rock cold against my hand—what I might be asked to do—and have done, and have not done—in whatever dark nights I act out the moment, my costume cheap and stiff and my arms also raised and my head, at least for a moment, bowed, in some semblance of the real.