When you talk to people at church there is a vocabulary that it is expected people just understand. Knowledge is developed line upon line in every domain and religion is no different. It eventually becomes easy to use context to understand what others are referring to. For example someone may say in a lesson "In the garden…" It will likely be easy to determine from context if the subject is the Garden of Eden where Adam and Eve lived before the fall, the Garden of Gethsemane where Christ suffered for our sins and bled from every pore, or some other garden. Our familiarity with the different religious contexts can make it intimidating for others to be taught without feeling overwhelmed, inadequate or insufficient.
In the software industry, where I work professionally, there is a phenomena that happens after learning something. It goes as follows:
- You don't know something
- You learn what you don't know
- What you have learned is essential to what you do, and you use it constantly
- You forget what it is like to not know the thing you learned
- You expect everyone to know it
Because of this phenomena it's often hard to have someone advanced in a subject teach, those who are new to it. To compensate we deliberately focus on basics and start from a common ground. This problem is not unique to software but happens in most domains. Growing up in a highly religious home I was constantly hearing doctrine, but often times needed to learn the basics.
I remember an experience where our 'home teacher' came over to teach a spiritual lesson. He taught of Christ and mentioned Gethsemane. I asked a question which showed my ignorance in the area and he kindly stopped the lesson and talked to me directly. This may not seem like a big deal but being a middle child in a large family is an easy place to be overlooked and having a grown up pause the group conversation to talk directly to me was a notable experience. He taught me how before Christ was taken and crucifier He went to Gethsemane. Their Christ took all of our sins, pains, troubles, and sorrows upon himself. The burden caused Christ to bleed from every pore and he even prayed saying:
Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me: nevertheless not my will, but thine be done.
- Luke 22:42
I had known there was a place called Gethsemane and it was important but I didn't understand it was the place where Christ bore our sins and burdens. Until that individual lesson I hadn't understood that Christ actually bled from every pore.
As I grew I was helped to further develop my understand of what happened when my family was visiting our cousin's. We attended church together and I got to go to primary with my cousin. We learned of Christ and Gethsemane and the sacrifice that Christ endured their. The teacher then shared with us a personal story that helped me better understand what it means to "bleed from every pore." The man teaching us worked construction and a guy he knew had been in an accident. The guy's foot was run over by a bulldozer and it happened in a way that didn't break any bones. What it did do was put pressure on his foot, a lot of pressure. He didn't have any cut but his blood was pushed through the pores of his skin. The pressure from the bulldozer caused that man to blead from the pores of his toes. I remember him talking about the pain, but the thing that really stood out to me was the pressure that was placed on this man's foot.
Often when I sit during the sacrament I think of the pressure on Christ. The pressure Christ had was on both his body and spirit. I sometimes imagine a perfect mold of the body, that pushes pressure everywhere, and I think of the weight of a bulldozer just pushing everywhere at once on Christ's body. When I am restless I' even squeeze one of my fingers and try and push all the blood to the end of it until it hurts.
I don't know the exact mechanism that Christ's sacrifice took. The very name Gethsemane literally means "oil press" which again lends to the pressure Christ was under. I believe the sacrifice he paid was an individual sacrifice, meaning some portion of energy and effort he gave in that garden was specifically for my life. I wonder if it was his personal love for each of us that drove him to finish that bitter task. He could have set down the cup at any point.
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