Sometimes I find myself thinking about the word ‘excruciating’.

There is just so much contained within it…events and experiences that many of us have never had, but feel like we know because we know about them. Not because they’re ones we’ve lived through.

I hear that word, excruciating, and I think of a very specific sort of pain, something that is full of an agony that feels familiar, it has texture and a shape I recognize, it’s slow and unrelenting. It doesn’t let up, you’re there, nailed and hanging, to sit with whatever is happening. You’re not going anywhere. Pain becomes a presence, not an abstraction, but something tangible, something dimensional. Something that changes moment to moment, like a face changing from one expression to the next, sometimes subtly and sometimes not. 

I think of Christ on the cross, which is where the root of that word originates, maybe not from his crucifixion, but of those like his, of which there were many, hundreds maybe thousands. Enough there needed to be a whole word for it, and words to describe the experience to others. At certain times of the year, I think about it especially, because I think about the specific agony of knowing that you’ll be giving yourself up to die, to be tortured, in this very particular way, in this most agonizing and painful way—and that’s another word we gloss over, but pain full is to leave no other room for joy, only pain, so imagine that sort of unrelenting pain, what happens to it over time?

How painful does something have to be to leave no other room for anything else? For there to be not a single iota of ease or pause in it? And of that excruciating kind, no less? A kind that pins you to your spot, makes you feel inconsequential and small, and leaves you there to hang, not an instant death, but one that happens little by little, which is to say with the consciousness of it happening.

Which is what life often is: a slow death where we occasionally know it's happening, but mostly ignore with all that's in us. “In the midst of life, we are in death.” And so too, our idea of what pain is, what pleasure is, is perhaps off. Askew. That’s another great one, askew. A single, five-letter word that means a little off centre, not quite plumb. Such a pleasure, a word like that, a momentary pause. Which is what pleasure is, a brief respite from the pain.

A vice is only a momentary escape from reality, from the reality of life that is an ongoing pageant of death, of endings, even if it’s not our immediate own. And pleasures are similar, little breaks in the fabric of an unrelenting, mostly unknowable—I mean, unknowable on purpose—existence where we think we know things, but we really don’t. We grasp at straws and find air.

I wonder if Christ knew that the agony in Gethsemane was only just preliminaries? I wonder if it caused him to realize how much humans suffer within the body before anything has really happened to it? I wonder if the pain of crucifixion seemed understandable in the moment he was experiencing it, as a real event, because the earlier agony—as real as it may have appeared—was all in his mind?

I wonder if Christ, while he was on the cross, had any moment of revelation about his life and its end.

Did it make any difference for him to suffer that agony in his imagination beforehand? Did it make the pain of being nailed to a cross to hang until you died any more understandable or manageable? Or was it just another sort of pain that left you hanging, because in your head, unresolved, without an answer, just a sort of mental pacing that only wore holes in your thought making, but didn’t actually solve anything real?