The 24 Hours of the Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ
Thanksgiving Prayer
after each hour of Agony in the Garden
O my sweetest Lord, I thank you for being pleased to have me in your company at least for an hour during your tremendous agony in the garden. Oh, my good Jesus, how little comfort did you find in me. Yet, your infinite love and the overflowing charity of your merciful heart make you find relief even in the least act of compassion that the creature shows you. I will never forget the sight of your adorable person trembling, struck down, crushed, humiliated in the dust, and all covered with the blood you sweat, in the dark horror of Gethsemane! O Jesus, I have experienced that to be with you in your sufferings, to feel even one drop of the distressing bitterness of your divine heart is the greatest fortune which anyone can have on earth.
O Jesus, I gladly renounce all vain and earthly things. I only want you, my oppressed, suffering, afflicted Lord. From this garden, to Calvary, I always want to give you my faithful and sweet company.
O Jesus, make me be captured with you, and dragged to the courts with you. Let me share in the abuses, the insults, the spit and the slaps your enemies are going to cover you with. Take me with you from Pilate to Herod and back to Pilate again. Tie me to the column with you, and let me feel a part of your scourgings. Jesus, pierce me with some of your thorns. Let me be condemned to death by crucifixion with you: you, as victim of love for me, and I as victim of atonement for my sins.
Give me the portion of the Cyrenian, to follow you to Calvary; and there, let me be nailed to the cross with you, and then agonize and die with you.
O sorrowful mother, you have given me help to sympathize with agonizing Jesus in the garden. Help me now to be crucified with you on the same cross of Jesus, and to know how to offer him the most worthy reparations with the same merits of his passion and death on the cross. Amen.
