The Sorrowful Mysteries are, in many ways, the easiest to pray ‘incarnationally’. The humanity of Jesus is on full display, and our own experience of suffering typically provokes us to prayer more readily than does joy. What we find in the pairing of the Sorrowful and Glorious Mysteries parallels the traditional stages of the interior life, the active or ascetical followed by the contemplative. We put to death the desires of the flesh in order to rise in a spiritual manner and follow Christ to the Father.
How do we recapitulate the Agony in the Garden? Clearly, we do this when we are faced with a situation that brings with it fear, an indication that we may anticipate pain of some kind in our future. So when duty requires us to say difficult things to someone, or to begin a new job outside of our present competence, we are confronted with our human nature wishing that there were some way around these unpleasant experiences.
These situations can be somewhat abnormal, however. Our Lord’s agony can also be a spur for the small, quotidian sacrifices that discipleship requires. Not looking with lust or not harboring anger in my heart might not immediately cause me great suffering, in the sense that we think of suffering. But it does require me to expend effort in a negative way that doesn’t seem to produce much fruit. It is an inconvenience to be borne, and this bearing of irritations and uncongenial actions is at the heart of the quintessential monastic virtue of patience. The Latin patior means both ‘to suffer’ and ‘to allow’. When I take Christ’s instruction to heart literally, I must suffer or allow all kinds of minor discomforts. Each morning, we should join Christ in the garden seeking that the Father’s will be done in us. In our small, hidden sufferings, by which we uproot any affection for even venial sin, we will give glory to the Father, and Christ will be more clearly present in us.