Ezekiel 37:3-3 — quoting “Slaveships” by Lucille Clifton

Mark 5:25-34 — She doesn’t think to herself “why not” but instead feels a compulsion in her heart that she does not understand but understands that it requires action.  The scripture tells us that Jesus feels “virtue” or “power” go out of him, and maybe what this unnamed woman first felt when she heard the name of Jesus was pain going out of her–and she went to find the man who had the name that could make this miracle come to pass.  …  There is not a person reading these words … who does not have, festering somewhere, a bullet in them. Sitting down to write these thoughts was the first time I ever considered all the other people around Jesus when he healed that woman with the issue of blood. They, too, had their issues of blood. It’s a wonder Jesus didn’t shatter from the sheer pressure of all those unspeakable pains around him. But then, eventually, I guess he did.

Mark 14:32-42 —“Not my will, Lord, but yours.” That’s Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane before the Roman soldiers come to take him to his death, just after he has sweated blood, begged God to let the cup of suffering pass him by, and wept to leave this world that he has come to love so completely and, it seems, helplessly. And then: Not my will, k Lord, but yours. It’s difficult enough to pray a prayer like this when you’re thinking of making some big life decision. It damn bear impossible when your actual life is on the line, or the life of someone you love, when all you want to pray is help, help, help.

Luke 20:18 — (But this sort of self-destruction, according to Weil, does not work. Is too late. The self that is destroyed from the outside rather than from the inside is subject only to degradation and humiliation, an erasure that raises nothing in its wake. Whosoever shall fall upon that stone shall be broken, says Jesus, but on whomsoever it shall fall, it will grind him to powder.)

John 11 — “Love Song,” Adélia Prado
“Ah,” said Martha and Mary, “if You had been here,
our brother would not have died.”  “Wait,” said Jesus,
“let me cry first.”
So it’s okay to cry?  I can cry too?

… Jesus weeps even though he knows what is going to happen:  he will raise Lazarus from the dead.  His knowledge spares him nothing.  It’s almost as if “what is going to happen is contingent upon human grief, as if fact had to pass through feeling in order to be fact.  That the fact here is a miracle only intensifies the strangeness.
… The scene with Jesus suggests that time itself becomes sclerotic without proper sorrow.

1 Kings 19:1-18 — I’ve been through the cycle enough times to know what happens after the period of tears, the downward spiral, and the temptation to flee. After that there is nothing. A quiet mind. Darkness that reveals starlight, a blanket of strange comfort. 
Mark 1:15 — Benedictines pledge to an outwardly paradoxical life of simultaneous conversion and stability—a constant evolution of mind an spirit within the rootedness of a particular community. … adsum. I am here.