Ash Wednesday is celebrated this year on March 1. For the first month of the Season of Lent, I'm presenting six works by international artists from the Sacred Art Pilgrim collection showing Jesus in prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane (the Mount of Olives). This opening scene in the drama of Christ's Passion, recorded in the three Synoptic Gospels (Matthew 26:36-46, Mark 14:32-42, Luke 22:39-46), has been represented in sacred art under the title The Agony in the Garden. The new art works just added to The Prayer in the Garden page of The Passion of Christ gallery of The Life of Christ section range from a pouchoir print postcard of a flaxen-haired Jesus in Gethsemane by Italian Art Deco Designer Giovanni Meschini to the multi-racial Savior (left) of American Artist Janet McKenzie's contemplative oil painting of the scene. We get an up close and personal glimpse of the anguished Christ asking his Father to let the cup of suffering and death pass from him in a photogravure of a study Czech Artist Emanuel Krescenc Liska made for his monumental 1886 painting, Christ on the Mount of Olives. In contast, a tiny Christ casts his eyes upward toward a remote and clouded Heaven in American Artist F. Lennox Campello's strongly vertical charcoal sketch. Czech Printmaker Vladimir Komarek offers an earthbound version where Christ prays against an eerie white on black background grove of olive trees. The most unusual work among this month's art selections is a handwoven wool wall-hanging of Christ in Gethsemane by Peruvian Textile Artist Nilda Amaro Oscanoa. (John Kohan)