Spiritual Quote of the Day (Denise Levertov, on the Final Agonies of Jesus)

“The painters, even the greatest, don’t show how,

in the midnight Garden,

or staggering uphill under the weight of the Cross,

He went through with even the human longing

to simply cease, to not be.

Not torture of body,

not the hideous betrayals humans commit,

nor the faithless weakness of friends (not then, in agony’s grip)

was Incarnation’s heaviest weight,

but this sickened desire to renege,

to step back from what He, Who was God,

had promised Himself, and had entered

time and flesh to enact.

Sublime acceptance, to be absolute, had to have welled

up from those depths where purpose

drifted for mortal moments.”—British-born American poet and Roman Catholic convert Denise Levertov (1923–97), “Salvator Mundi: Via Crucis,” from The Collected Poems of Denise Levertov, edited by Paul A. Lacey and Anne Dewey (2013)

The image accompanying this post is The Crucifixion with Donors and Saints Peter and Margaret, by Dutch painter Cornelis Engebrechtsz (ca. 1461–1527). This oil-and-wood painting now hangs in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.