Watch and Pray

DAY 1 · Part I — The Practice

Watch With Me

And he cometh unto the disciples, and findeth them asleep, and saith unto Peter, What, could ye not watch with me one hour? Watch and pray, that ye enter not into temptation: the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.

— Matthew 26:40–41 (KJV)

In the autumn of 1901 a small Brazilian with a large mustache flew an airship around the Eiffel Tower and became the most famous man in Paris. His name was Alberto Santos-Dumont. He wore high collars, dined at Maxim’s, and had a complaint. When you are steering a machine through the air with both hands, you cannot dig a pocket watch out of your waistcoat to see how long you have been up. He said so over dinner to a friend. The friend was Louis Cartier.

Cartier’s answer, in 1904, was to take the watch out of the pocket and strap it to the wrist. A square case, a leather band, and eight small screws left showing on the front, where watchmakers had always hidden them. Nothing about it was decoration. It was a tool for a man who needed his hands free and still needed to know the hour.

Keep that picture. Hands full, and the hour still matters.

Now go to a garden outside Jerusalem on a Thursday night. Jesus has taken three friends a little apart from the others and asked them for one thing: stay here and watch with me. Watch, in the Bible’s English, does not mean look at. It means stay awake. Keep the vigil. He walks a stone’s throw farther, falls on His face, and prays so hard that Luke says His sweat fell like drops of blood. When He comes back, they are asleep.

What He says next is not what I would have said. He does not say, could you not pray for one hour. He says, could you not watch with me. With me. The Son of God, on the worst night in history, wanted company. He wanted His friends awake beside Him. The request goes to Peter by name, which is a story for tomorrow.

Then comes the line everyone knows: the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak. We hear it as a verdict. Read it again in the garden. It is not a verdict. It is a diagnosis, from a physician who is about to pay for the cure Himself. He knows exactly why they slept. He is not surprised. He will go through the night without them, and He does, and He does it for them.

Santos-Dumont did not need a watch in order to fly. He needed to fly and know the time at once. That is what a wristwatch is: time fastened to a body that has work to do. And that is what Jesus is asking for in the garden, and what this book is about. Not an hour carved out of life where you stop everything and hold still. An hour where your hands are full and God is still on your wrist. Watching is not a hobby for people with nothing to do. The wristwatch was invented for a pilot.

He is still asking. Not for competence; the three best men He had failed the test in the first hour. He is asking for company. Stay awake with me. And the strange grace of the story is that the One who asked stayed awake for us.

Lord, I have work in both hands. Keep me awake with You anyway. One hour. Amen.

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The LORD watch between me and thee, when we are absent one from another.

— Genesis 31:49, engraved on watches exchanged at partings since the 1860s

THE WATCH

Cartier Santos (1904). Watches had been worn on the wrist before this, mostly by women as jewelry, and soldiers had strapped pocket watches to their arms in the field. What Louis Cartier made for Santos-Dumont was different: the first wristwatch designed from scratch for a man to wear while doing a job. The prototype was made in 1904; the public could buy one from 1911, and Cartier still sells it today, shape unchanged.

The eight screws on the front are the famous part. Every other watchmaker of the day hid screws inside the case, the way a tailor hides stitching. Cartier put them on the face, polished, in a row along the frame. It was an engineer’s honesty applied to a piece of jewelry, and it made the Santos look modern twenty years before the word Art Deco existed.

Santos-Dumont wore his on the wrist when he made the first officially witnessed powered airplane flight in Europe, in a Paris park in 1906. The crowd that watched him land included men who would go home and start asking their jewelers for a watch like his. That is the moment the wristwatch stopped being a lady’s bracelet and became a man’s tool.

The line at the head of this section is from Genesis 31. Jacob and his father-in-law Laban, who had cheated each other for twenty years, are parting for good, and they pile up stones as a witness. Laban names the heap Mizpah, which means watchtower, and says: “The LORD watch between me and thee, when we are absent one from another.” He did not mean it kindly. He meant that since neither man could watch the other, God would have to, and God would see who broke the bargain. Then the Victorians found the verse, heard only the first half, and made it one of the most engraved sentences in the history of jewelry: on rings, on brooches, on lockets, and on the inside of watch cases, given by sweethearts and soldiers and mothers at partings, with the one word MIZPAH on the outside. A suspicious man’s treaty became the tenderest thing you could say to someone you would not see for a while. A verse worn every day does that. It was a watch verse before the wristwatch existed, and it is the right sentence for a chapter about being asked to stay awake with someone: the LORD watch between us, since I cannot always be there.

The design started from a need, not from a drawing: a man who could not spare a hand. Everything beautiful about the Santos followed from that.