Retrieve Lament, Day 5 (art meditations + suggested resources for Lent 2013)

"Once, ritual lament would have been chanted; women would have been paid to beat their breasts and howl for you all night, when all is silent. Where can we find such customs now? So many have long since disappeared or been disowned.

That’s what you had to come for: to retrieve

the lament that we omitted."
 (Ranier Maria Rilke, from Requiem For A Friend)

During Lent I'll share almost-daily meditations of Scripture, hymns, and art reflecting this time of tension between dying and birth.

Won't you join me?




February  17, Day 5 

Today I was confirmed into the Anglican communion.  Part of the liturgy included a call and response between the Confirments and the Bishop

The Bishop asked, "Do you reaffirm your renunciation of evil?" 
We said, "I do."

The Bishop asked "Do you renew your commitment to Jesus Christ? 
We said, "I do, and with God's grace I will follow him as my Savior and Lord."

And when I read Jesus' battle with the devil those forty hungry days in the desert I hear the words of renunciation.  When I look at Duccio's visual interpretation of the God-Man who did not play a Divine-trump card to renounce evil -- who fought the enemy by the very Word of God, angelic aid on the ready -- I see the physicality of renunciation.  

Like His own Son, I renounce evil with God's help.

Luke 4:1-13

English Standard Version (ESV)

The Temptation of Jesus

4 And Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness ² for forty days, being tempted by the devil. And he ate nothing during those days. And when they were ended, he was hungry. ³ The devil said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become bread.” ⁴ And Jesus answered him, “It is written, ‘Man shall not live by bread alone.’” ⁵ And the devil took him up and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time, ⁶ and said to him, “To you I will give all this authority and their glory, for it has been delivered to me, and I give it to whom I will. ⁷ If you, then, will worship me, it will all be yours.” ⁸ And Jesus answered him, “It is written,

“‘You shall worship the Lord your God,
    and him only shall you serve.’”

⁹ And he took him to Jerusalem and set him on the pinnacle of the temple and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here, ¹⁰ for it is written,

“‘He will command his angels concerning you,
    to guard you,’

¹¹ and

“‘On their hands they will bear you up,
    lest you strike your foot against a stone.’”

¹² And Jesus answered him, “It is said, ‘You shall not put the Lord your God to the test.’” ¹³ And when the devil had ended every temptation, he departed from him until an opportune time.

Temptation on the Mount
Duccio
1308

Suggested Resources for Lent:

• Practices and Resources for Observing Lent at Cardiphonia

• The Revised Common Lectionary + art and prayers: a service of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library

• Lent Library at Baylor University's Center for Christian Ethics

Now it's your turn!  What art are you enjoying this season? 

 Tell us about it in the  comments below.  

If you've written your own post, share the link.

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"Let him easter in us, be a dayspring to the dimness of us, be a crimson-cresseted east." Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Wreck of the Deutschland

Retrieve Lament, Day 4 (art meditations + suggested resources for Lent 2013)

"Once, ritual lament would have been chanted; women would have been paid to beat their breasts and howl for you all night, when all is silent. Where can we find such customs now? So many have long since disappeared or been disowned.

That’s what you had to come for: to retrieve

the lament that we omitted."
 (Ranier Maria Rilke, from Requiem For A Friend)

During Lent I'll share almost-daily meditations of Scripture, hymns, and art reflecting this time of tension between dying and birth.

Won't you join me?




February 16 , Day 4

Psalm 32

Happy are those whose transgression is forgiven,
   whose sin is covered.
Happy are those to whom the Lord imputes no iniquity,
   and in whose spirit there is no deceit.

While I kept silence, my body wasted away
   through my groaning all day long.
For day and night your hand was heavy upon me;
   my strength was dried up as by the heat of summer.
          Selah

Then I acknowledged my sin to you,
   and I did not hide my iniquity;
I said, ‘I will confess my transgressions to the Lord’,
   and you forgave the guilt of my sin.
          Selah

Therefore let all who are faithful
   offer prayer to you;
at a time of distress, the rush of mighty waters
   shall not reach them.
You are a hiding-place for me;
   you preserve me from trouble;
   you surround me with glad cries of deliverance.
          Selah

I will instruct you and teach you the way you should go;
   I will counsel you with my eye upon you.
Do not be like a horse or a mule, without understanding,
   whose temper must be curbed with bit and bridle,
   else it will not stay near you.

Many are the torments of the wicked,
   but steadfast love surrounds those who trust in the Lord.
Be glad in the Lord and rejoice, O righteous,
   and shout for joy, all you upright in heart.

A Song of Response:



Visual meditation:

Grid of Beauty, Sublimity and Grotesquery

Matthew Whitney

Vancouver Project at By/For

Suggested Resources for Lent:

• Lenten Daily Devotional from Christ Church of Austin, 2013
• Bread and Wine: Readings for Lent and Easter 
• Living the Christian Year: Time to Inhabit the Story of God, Bobby Gross

Now it's your turn!  What art are you enjoying this season? 

 Tell us about it in the  comments below.  

If you've written your own post, share the link.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

"Let him easter in us, be a dayspring to the dimness of us, be a crimson-cresseted east." (Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Wreck of the Deutschland)

Retrieve Lament, Day 1 (art mediations + suggested resources for Lent 2013)

"Once, ritual lament would have been chanted; women would have been paid to beat their breasts and howl for you all night, when all is silent. Where can we find such customs now? So many have long since disappeared or been disowned.

That’s what you had to come for: to retrieve

the lament that we omitted."
 (Ranier Maria Rilke, from Requiem For A Friend)

During Lent I'll share almost-daily meditations of Scripture, hymns, and art reflecting this time of tension between dying and birth.

Won't you join me?



February 13, Ash Wednesday

Three years ago I had an emergency surgery on Valentine's Day, gave up my gall bladder for Lent.  This year, on Ash Wednesday, my doctor burned away the lining of my uterus, once a blanket of sustenance for my children, no longer sustaining life but harming it.

Later in the day, after Brian'd driven me home from surgery, our priests arrived at the front door, carrying a baggie of ashes, a little wine, a little bread.  While my freshly-abused insides blistered healing, they applied a charry cross to my forehead.  I've never felt so attuned to the reality of decay.  A reverse sacrament -- visible signs of inward death.

I've never tasted sweeter grace -- breaking the medical fast with broken bread, sipping pungent wine.  After my surgery three years ago, I did not receive kindness well.  What was intended for love to me felt like pain. 

 Christ's life is growing in me.

This time, the kind care of the hospital nurses, the pastoral prayers of our priests, my husband's sign of the cross over me as I rolled into surgery, hugs and chocolate-covered strawberries from my concerned children, prayer messages sent from friends --  all of it -- reminding me that even while we remember death His easter is alive in us.

Jonah 3:1-4:11

The word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time, saying, ‘Get up, go to Nineveh, that great city, and proclaim to it the message that I tell you.’ So Jonah set out and went to Nineveh, according to the word of the Lord. Now Nineveh was an exceedingly large city, a three days’ walk across. Jonah began to go into the city, going a day’s walk. And he cried out, ‘Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!’ And the people of Nineveh believed God; they proclaimed a fast, and everyone, great and small, put on sackcloth.

 When the news reached the king of Nineveh, he rose from his throne, removed his robe, covered himself with sackcloth, and sat in ashes. Then he had a proclamation made in Nineveh: ‘By the decree of the king and his nobles: No human being or animal, no herd or flock, shall taste anything. They shall not feed, nor shall they drink water. Human beings and animals shall be covered with sackcloth, and they shall cry mightily to God. All shall turn from their evil ways and from the violence that is in their hands. Who knows? God may relent and change his mind; he may turn from his fierce anger, so that we do not perish.’

 When God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil ways, God changed his mind about the calamity that he had said he would bring upon them; and he did not do it.
But this was very displeasing to Jonah, and he became angry. He prayed to the Lord and said, ‘O Lord! Is not this what I said while I was still in my own country? That is why I fled to Tarshish at the beginning; for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing. And now, O Lord, please take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live.’ And the Lord said, ‘Is it right for you to be angry?’ Then Jonah went out of the city and sat down east of the city, and made a booth for himself there. He sat under it in the shade, waiting to see what would become of the city.

 The Lord God appointed a bush,* and made it come up over Jonah, to give shade over his head, to save him from his discomfort; so Jonah was very happy about the bush. But when dawn came up the next day, God appointed a worm that attacked the bush, so that it withered. When the sun rose, God prepared a sultry east wind, and the sun beat down on the head of Jonah so that he was faint and asked that he might die. He said, ‘It is better for me to die than to live.’

 But God said to Jonah, ‘Is it right for you to be angry about the bush?’ And he said, ‘Yes, angry enough to die.’ Then the Lord said, ‘You are concerned about the bush, for which you did not labour and which you did not grow; it came into being in a night and perished in a night. And should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who do not know their right hand from their left, and also many animals?’ 

Now it's your turn!  What art are you enjoying this season? 

 Tell us about it in the  comments below.  

If you've written your own post, share the link.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

"Let him easter in us, be a dayspring to the dimness of us, be a crimson-cresseted east." Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Wreck of the Deutschland

7 Quick Takes: Hoecake Hoedown, RIP Keith the betta fish, worshiping Jesus with a 9-year-old and more!

--- 1 ---

Normally, I post Quick Takes at the beginning of the weekend rather than the beginning of the week but we were busy celebrating lots of happy stuff the past few days and I'm just now getting to it.  Yesterday morning I posted (or re-posted, I should say) a few thoughts for the last Sunday before Lent (Transfiguration Sunday):  I don't want to miss the Present God, trying to trap down the Presence of God.  Could have let my weekend posts end there, but then I wouldn't be able to tell you about all the other good stuff I'd planned to tell you in the Quick Takes.  

--- 2 ---

For example, our HOECAKE HOEDOWN!

You've heard of Shrove Tuesday (keyword: pancakes)?  Well, we're Anglican now so we get to celebrate such delicious feast days.  But since we're also Texans now we get to feast on hoecakes instead.  At a hoedown, naturally.  And on a Friday night instead.

Yes, we danced.  A lot.

I'm especially impressed with myself for keeping up with Cotton-Eyed Joe this year.  And, just in case you missed it in the nifty collage, I was pretty excited about my Goodwill finds, helping me look as Texan as I could muster.

--- 3 ---

Next Sunday, Brian and I -- along with our daughter, Kendra -- will be confirmed into the Anglican communion.  This is a sentence I never expected to write in my lifetime.  If you'd told me this before about ten years ago I'd have laughed out loud.  I've been working out some words to share with you about the journey.  I'm hoping to post a few of them over the coming weeks. 

Also, I made a nifty series title pic...

--- 4 ---

Kendra helped me figure out how to post a screen shot of one of my all-time favorite facebook conversations.  

You need to know that Keith was my brother's betta fish from his bachelor days.  Ryan and -- his then girlfriend, now wife -- Macia discovered that underneath Keith's placid, neon surface he was quite an ornery son of a gun.  We always looked forward to getting updates on Keith's rowdy behavior.  Now he's gone from this earth and we'll miss him -- at least talking about him -- dearly.

You should also know that Trish is not a fish.  Keith and Trish broke societal boundaries with their betta-fish, Polly Pocket relationship.  First, though, Trish needed to work out some inner demons from her old life washed up on the Wildwood Beach.  

We all celebrated her conversion this past Christmas.  

As you can see in the comment thread above, we feel she came to Jesus at just the right time in life.

--- 5 ---

Some good blog reading this week:

Morning Prayer at Carrying Ballast:  During Advent my friend Haley wrote poems to her unborn daughter.  Now she's writing prayers for her four children to share throughout the day.  Beautiful.

Are you -- like me -- still deciding what to fast for Lent?  Here's some good encouragement for us both:

• It's OK to just fast at Homemaking Through the Church Year

• Lenten Rookie Mistakes at Simcha Fisher

I'd love to hear your hopes and plans the spiritual journey of Lent.

  Drop me a line, won't you?

--- 6 ---

Oh!  I almost forgot to tell you about the Lenten devotional published by Christ Church this year. I haven't seen a hard copy yet but the online version is gorgeous.  

Lenten Daily Devotional, February 13 - March 30 2013

(May I humbly share my own contributions on February 19 and March 5?)

--- 7 ---

As we enter a season walking with the Christ who suffers until the end of the world, I'm sharing the story of my nephew's classmate Kayla.  Our extended family has been praying for her family as they battle horrible, life-robbing cancer.  Last week her parents posted Kayla's Thank You slideshow, telling their story so far.  Kayla's own voice singing praise to her Jesus broke my heart of stone and led me in worship.

I suspect it'll do the same for you.

A beauty-filled and worship-bowed week for us all, dear ones.

For more Quick Takes, visit Conversion Diary!

I don't want to miss the Present God, trying to trap down the Presence of God (a Transfiguration Sunday meditation)

For Transfiguration Sunday, I'm re-posting an excerpt from my Sacred Practice series: Making Moments (originally written January 2009):

Some people appear to think that the "spiritual life" is a peculiar condition mainly supported by cream ices and corrected by powders. But the solid norm of the spiritual life should be like that of the natural life: a matter of porridge, bread and butter.... It is not the best housekeeper who has the most ferocious spring-clean, or gets things from the confectioner when she is expecting guests. "If any man open the door, I will come in to him"; share his ordinary meal, and irradiate his ordinary life. The demand for temperance of soul, for acknowledgment of the sacred character of the normal, is based on that fact -- the central Christian fact -- of the humble entrance of God into our common human life. (from The House of the Soul and Concerning the Inner Life, Evelyn Underhill; bolded font is mine)

For the same years I've been killing an addiction to the Grand Scheme I've been trying to understand how my relationship with God works in just the ordinary stuff of life. I have been trying to understand how to live from this place of contentment that David describes: 

God, I'm not trying to rule the roost, I don't want to be king of the mountain. I haven't meddled where I have no business or fantasized grandiose plans. I've kept my feet on the ground, I've cultivated a quiet heart. Like a baby content in its mother's arms, my soul is a baby content. Wait, Israel, for God. Wait with hope. Hope now; hope always! (Psalm 131: 1-3, MSG)

There have been Grand Moments in my life. More than any one person deserves. Moments when it seemed that all heaven and earth synced for just a glimpse of glory. Like Jesus taking his three best friends to the mountain to share in the wonder of such a transfigured Moment. 

There's much I'm sure I have to learn from this Gospel account, but one learning that has been pasted to the inside of my eyelids is that Peter could not get out of his head long enough to savor the moment. He missed or nearly missed -- I'm not sure from the telling -- the extreme grandiosity of God in this moment. He wanted to strategize, capitalize, theorize and theologize the Moment into something manageable and marketable. Something he could control.

I've lost track of the number of times my response has matched Peter's. Something in me is unable to rest, to savor, to soak in the Moment. My mind rushes on to ways that I can trap all the good feelings, pin the legs of the thing down and preserve it under glass. To build some kind of shrine to the Moment so that it will be available to me any time I rub the glass three times. And with all of that scheming I miss the voice of God: This is my Son, marked by my love, focus of my delight. Listen to him.

Transfiguration of Christ
Bellini, Giovanni, d. 1516

I've learned that my desire for the Presence of God on my terms and in my ideals blinds me to the Present God. The same God who shows up in a cow barn in the middle of the night and on a hike to Emmaus with old friends. When I am consumed with whipping up a plan to build some sort of shrine to the Moment I do not hear the knock on the door, Jesus standing at the door, hoping to be invited in for a meal.

What is the fear of surrendering fully to a Grand Moment? I know the answer for me. It's the coming down from the mountain part. That's the rub. It's Frodo trying to live in the Shire again. It's Mary's first case of morning sickness after Gabriel left the room. It's Cinderella, shoeless, back to sweeping soot. 

During this week's meditation I am reminded that I want to stop treating the rare Grand Moment like some kind of marketing research or science project. I want to sponge up the Moment so that I can walk away with it shining out of my eyes, and fingertips and the ends of my hair. (I shall tape a poster to my mirror, Tamara lassoes the moon.)

I want to develop my senses to recognize the Jesus of the ordinary; to notice sooner than the Emmaus travelers: Didn't we feel on fire as he conversed with us on the road? To live in the abundant presence of Christ that surrounds and infuses the ordinary joys and pains of every day rather than just plucking the blackberries of the few-and-far between Grand Moments.

This is hard because it involves death. Christ followed each moment from day to day and his journey took him through suffering and death. I don't like this Christ.

In The Choice to be Human Eugene Kennedy comments on the Matthew account of the Mount of Transfiguration  (bold font is mine):

 This is a mystery blinding in its intensity. We still do not like to look at the separations and deaths to ourselves that are inevitable in lives fully and lovingly lived. Better, with Peter in his boisterous enthusiasm, to stay at this high point of affirmation than to follow with Jesus as he accepts his own departure to Jerusalem and the final acts of his mission. The passage, ringing with glory, turns our gaze down the slopes toward the often shadowed valley in which most people lead their lives. There we find the setting for the kind of religious experience of which Jesus has been speaking. It has little to do with the minute observation of detailed rules. It concerns rather those things which cannot be measured at all: loving someone throughout a lifetime, making sacrifices in our lives for the benefit of those who follow after us, raising a child, keeping our word, forgiving each other for our failures, standing together in the bad weather of life. Our Exodus leads us not through strange and exotic places but through the very middle of our quite ordinary lives. 

If I am paying attention I will hear all the voices of other children of the burning heart through the centuries who find salvation and glory and sublime in the ordinary, draining, painful, exciting, mundane, sticky, dusty, hungry and thirsty, sweaty, peanut-butter-and-jelly, pot-scrubbing moments of each day. This must be what it means to live fully and lovingly. In other words, to worship at the shrines of Past Grand Moments is to live only halfly and meanly.

Years ago, this same truth was one of the greatest realizations I took from reading Kathleen Norris' Acedia & Me. Acedia is a stinginess of the soul that becomes disinterested in the time and place I find myself in right now -- this lower-case m moment. 

In the fourth century, Evagrius marked acedia as one of the spiritual afflictions, far more deadly than the more physical temptations such as gluttony or lust, or the melancholy arising from deprivation or anger. Acedia, he insisted, is something more, a weariness of soul that ‘instills in the heart of the monk a hatred for the place, a hatred for his very life itself, [and] a hatred for manual labor...(Norris is quoting Benedictine Mary Margaret Funk, whose name makes me giggle)

This, then, becomes a serious issue. Hatred of place and time is hatred of good gifts from my Father. It's ultimately a self-aggrandizement that says I could do it better if I were just given the chance. I might as well say what I'm really thinking: These piddly little moments are meaningless to me unless I get my own way. This is a dangerous place to live and, I'm becoming convinced, thwarts the hand of my good, giving Father in my daily life.

My reading from other saints last week introduced me to a warning from DietrichBonhoeffer: We prevent God from giving us the great spiritual gifts He has in store for us, because we do not give thanks for daily gifts…How can God entrust great things to one who will not thankfully receive from Him the little things? He wrote this from an illegal seminary in Nazi Germany. Enough said.

Where does this leave me, then? It leaves me humbled in the presence of the Present Christ. The Christ who leaned down to fear-stricken Peter, James and John on the mount and said Do not be afraid.

 It leaves me making the choice to be awake. To choose to notice and pay attention and be grateful. To quit day-dreaming of all the Grand Moments-yet-to-be and to enjoy the ordinary companionship with  Christ and his followers. It leaves me waiting in a cold Subway, hungry for lunch, working through the awkward tension of making conversation with a new friend. It leaves me noticing the beauty of wind-chapped cheeks and brightly colored scarves and mittens on a snowy hilltop. It leaves me in a wide-open stance, ready to receive all of Christ's gifts on earth and in heaven. It leaves me praying the unwitting prayer of Sylvia Plath (oh, how sweet for her to have found the present Christ, bold font is mine):

Black Rook in Rainy Weather

On the stiff twig up there
Hunches a wet black rook
Arranging and rearranging its feathers in the rain.
I do not expect miracle
Or an accident.
To set the sight on fire
In my eye, nor seek
Any more in the desultory weather some design,
But let spotted leaves fall as they fall,
Without ceremony, or portent.
Although, I admit, I desire,
Occasionally, some backtalk
From the mute sky, I can't honestly complain:
A certain minor light may still
Leap incandescent
Out of the kitchen table or chair
As if a celestial burning took
Possession of the most obtuse objects now and then --
Thus hallowing an interval
Otherwise inconsequent
By bestowing largesse, honour,
One might say love. At any rate, I now walk
Wary (for it could happen
Even in this dull, ruinous landscape); sceptical,
Yet politic; ignorant
Of whatever angel may choose to flare
Suddenly at my elbow. I only know that a rook
Ordering its black feathers can so shine
As to seize my senses, haul
My eyelids up, and grant
A brief respite from fear
Of total neutrality. With luck
Trekking stubborn through this season
Of fatigue, I shall
Patch together a content
Of sorts. Miracles occur,
If you care to call those spasmodic
Tricks of radiance miracles. The wait's begun again,
The long wait for the angel,
For that rare, random descent.

 -- Sylvia Plath