email: whitpresby@charterinternet.com
Spiritual readings "Greetings from Whittier Presbyterian Church"
March 2005
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Moltmann & World Day of Prayer |
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“Your date book is your creed” |
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Calvin on music |
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Yeats poem, “The Second Coming” |
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John Donne Poem “Batter my heart…” |
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Music’s role in prayer. |
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Remembering the poor. |
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The power of forgiveness. |
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Darkness & the garden of Gethsemane |
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Grunewald crucifixion painting |
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Music in the midst of grief & war |
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Easter Poem by Walter Brueggemann |
This comes to you late because there was no way to send it from the Companions retreat I attended this last week. Today is the World Day of Prayer of church Women United. Here’s a great story of that day and its significance in one part of the world. It comes from the book “The Source of Life” by Jurgen Moltmann, Fortress Press, 1997. It’s in the chapter entitled “What Are We Doing When We Pray?”
“Depending on the possibilities and powers available, informed prayer is followed essentially by ‘praying action’. In many countries the Women’s World Day of Prayer has triggered off unexpected initiatives and activities. The prayers for peace held n Monday evenings in the Protestant churches in Leipzig are another good example of informed prayer and its results. These prayers were a leftover from the massive peace movement at the beginning of the 1980s, when people in West and East Germany demonstrated against the introduction of Cruise missiles. For ten long years, some very small, politically quite insignificant groups met in Leipzig to pray for peace. Then came the unforgettable peace demonstrations of 1989, which took 300,000 people on to the streets. It was the Monday evening prayers for peace which first sparked off the demonstrations and the commitment to non-violence. Against ‘prayers and candles’ the full martial force of the state power of East Germany was helpless. These Leipzig prayers for peace and peace demonstrations brought down the Berlin wall, and because they were non-violent they may be considered the first successful revolution in Germany.”
“The first successful revolution because it was non-violent.” Did you catch the power and sweep of that statement? Do you know of some other great examples of the power of prayer? I’d like to hear some. Something like the World Day of Prayer, the national Day of prayer or a prayer summit (we have one of those in Whittier) may produce results that may not be as dramatic or noticeable as this, but the value and power of prayer can never be overestimated. May you find a moment today to pray for some big result somewhere in the world. If there is a World Day of Prayer event near you, consider attending.
Grace & peace
Geoff
My original inspiration for these twice-weekly emails came from Rev. Mark Rasbach, Pastor of Hope Lutheran Church in West Hollywood, California, http://www.hopelutheranchurch.net/. I still get his emails and here is the one from Jan. 5, 2005.
“Your date book is your creed. What you believe in, you have time for.
Times flies so quickly, Lord. There is so much to be done! Help me to have a discerning heart and mind to follow your plan. Amen”
Indeed it is our everyday activities that indicate the truth about our faith. The date book is the example here. At stewardship time we use the checkbook as an indicator of how our faith is expressed in our use of money. What we do in the world, with physical objects or other people and creatures will be based upon what we believe life to be all about. We can see our faith expressed in our cars, clothes, homes, etc. The list could go on. What part of your life is most telling about your faith?
May you find during this day one new way to integrate your faith with your daily life.
Grace & peace
Geoff
My love of music will not be news to readers of these emails. This Sunday (see below) we will be treated to our annual Lenten/Easter Cantata. I found some references to music in an article about the spirituality of John Calvin. The article is by Belden C. Lane and its found in the first volume of the journal, “Spiritus.” Go here for more http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/scs/
“…when the melody is added (to a word), that word pierces the heart much more strongly and enters within.”
(Calvin learned from Plato re: music) “…there is scarcely anything in this world more capable of turning or bending higher and thither the customs of men(sic).”
(Music) “…has a secret power, almost unbelievable, to move morals in one way or another.”
My personal favorite expression about music and our faith is the one attributed to St. Augustine of Hippo: “Those who sing, pray twice.” How often do you sing your faith? The other day I found myself depressed while I drove to a meeting. I turned off my car radio and sang and hummed hymns to myself. I felt better by the time I got to the meeting. Praying twice indeed.
May God’s music be sung in you today.
Grace & peace
Geoff
In honor of St. Patrick’s Day this Thursday, I wanted to do something Celtic, having just done a week’s retreat on the Celtic Cross with Companions on the Inner Way. Alas, to my chagrin I found I have no Celtic spirituality in my library. I plan to remedy that condition soon. So, how about some Irish poetry? William Butler Yeats was not only Irish but arguably the greatest English Language poet of the last century. Here is my favorite of his poems, if not his most famous, called “The Second Coming.” It comes from my Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. 2, Revised, W. W. Norton & Company, 1968. The poem itself is from 1920 or 1921.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of “Spiritus Mundi”
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born
According to my anthology footnotes this poem “expresses Yeats’s sense of the dissolution of the civilization of his time, the end of one cycle of history and the approach of another.” I wonder what Yeats would say in our time!
On that light note, happy St. Patrick’s Day!!
Grace & peace
Geoff
W. B. Yeats was the poet used in Tuesday’s Email. One of the influences upon him was the 17th Century poet, John Donne, who wrote this sonnet. It comes from the Everyman Library edition of the Complete English Poems of Donne, edited by C.A. Patrides, new edition, 1994.
“Batter my heart, three person’d God; for, you
As yet but knocke, breathe, shine, and seeke to mend;
That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow mee, `and bend
Your force, to breake, blowe, burn and make me new.
I, like an usurpt towne, to`another due,
Labour to `admit you, but Oh, to no end,
Reason your viceroy in mee, mee should defend,
But is captiv’d, and proves weake or untrue,
Yet dearely’ I love you, `and would be lov’d faine,
But am betroth’d unto your enemie,
Divorce mee, `untie, or breake that knot againe,
Take mee to you, imprison mee, for I
Except you `enthrall mee, never shall be free,
Nor ever chast, except you ravish mee.
I’ve kept the language and punctuation as I found it, though I thought my spell-checker would crash my computer! Most of us English majors loved Donne for his way of putting different images together and having them make sense. I liken it to the vision that God has for us humans, putting all these different folks together and having it make sense. Alas, that vision is hard to see and either we need to have our hearts battered to see God’s vision or in the living of life, we get battered and need the mending that God brings. However you are able to see God’s vision for you and your world, may you see at least part of it this day.
Grace & peace
Geoff
In honor of our community labyrinth walk tomorrow, here is part of the email of Dec. 17, 2004 on labyrinths. . In his book “Labyrinths: Walking Toward the Center” Crossroads Publishing Co. New York, English translation, 2003, Gernot Candolini has this little epigram.
“If life is viewed as a maze, every mistake is an unnecessary detour and a waste of time. If life is a labyrinth, then every mistake is a part of the path and an indispensable master teacher.”
March 21, 2005, Tuesday of Holy Week
Each year I make a special effort with Holy Week emails, getting one out each day of this most special week for Christians. This year we will focus upon the events of Jesus’ last hours as presented in Matthew’s gospel and set to music by J.S. Bach. I was inspired by a book I bought in San Anselmo in January, “The St. Matthew Passion; a text for voices” by John Reeves, Eerdmans publishers, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 2001. I’d like to provide you the ability to listen to the particular sections of the Bach piece referred to each day, but that is beyond my technical ability. There will be some special links, starting on Wednesday, that will enable you to listen to at least part of the piece, if so choose. Reeves weaves his own life experiences in and out of his listening to the Bach masterpiece. He writes a poem for several of the sections and we will share commentary and parts of some of those poems throughout the week. For today, we open with some of Reeves’ words on music itself.
Even
prayer cannot span the great gulf
fixed between earth and far heaven
so surely as these simple tunes.
Especially now, this holy week,
this good day: all the linked
pain and courage caught and sung, the bleak
solitude, the silence figured forth in sound;
and everywhere love, opening like a wound.
May this special week be also sacred for you, as you journey with Jesus through his last hours.
Grace & peace
Geoff
March 22, 2005, Tuesday of Holy Week
Each year I make a special effort with Holy Week emails, getting one out each day of this most special week for Christians. This year we will focus upon the events of Jesus’ last hours as presented in Matthew’s gospel and set to music by J.S. Bach. I was inspired by a book I bought in San Anselmo in January, “The St. Matthew Passion; a text for voices” by John Reeves, Eerdmans publishers, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 2001. I’d like to provide you the ability to listen to the particular sections of the Bach piece referred to each day, but that is beyond my technical ability. There will be some special links, starting on Wednesday, that will enable you to listen to at least part of the piece, if so choose.
Reeves weaves his own life experiences in and out of his listening to the Bach masterpiece. He writes a poem for several of the sections and we will share commentary and parts of some of those poems throughout the week
For the Tuesday of Holy Week, here are some words on the issue of ever-present poverty in our world. First from the introduction to this poem:
The poet finds himself in Brazil, in the town of Ouro Preto—once in Bach’s day, a center of great mining wealth, now fallen into near destitution, with little to show for its former affluence but elegant baroque buildings.
A portion of the poem itself:
The poor are always with us. Everywhere. Whose sad
plight here is seldom heeded by state
or church: governments prefer repeatedly
to rule rather than to serve; and prelates fail
grotesquely often to pause by the way and see
their neighbor Christ in the fellow-traveler who fell
among thieves, lying forsaken beside
the blind road—indifferent, the Brazilian sun
glares down, flies multiply in the lurid
wounds, and no one kneels to anoint the son
of man against his burial.
The story of Jesus is not fully told if it does not include the reminder of the poor and how our faith is less than full if not inclusive of and compassionate towards those left on the trash heap of society. We recall that Jesus was crucified on a kind of trash-dump hill.
May our consciences be reminded this day of the compassionate dimensions of our faith.
Grace & peace
Geoff
March 23, 2005, Wednesday of Holy Week
This year’s Holy Week emails focus upon the events of Jesus’ last hours as presented in Matthew’s gospel and the musical setting of them by J.S. Bach, from the book “The St. Matthew Passion; a text for voices” by John Reeves, Eerdmans publishers, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 2001. See the note below if you’d like to try and listen to some of the music. Today we hear Reeves re-visiting the story of Peter on Jesus’ last night. Peter follows, Peter denies Jesus, the cock crows, Peter weeps bitterly. Reeves weaves his experience of sitting in St. Peter’s church in Rome. Here is his poem based on that experience.
“This church, thick with gold and self,
parades before the whole world a colossal
ambiguity: half, unabashed grandeur; and half,
enduring monument to his abject denial
whose name it bears. Recall:
bitter air
in the forecourt; someone had lit a fire; he warmed
himself; others nearby, accusing; fear
rank in the throat, retching up the deformed
cut of disavowal; three times; and then
the crowing of the cock. How can
that degrading
hour and this magnificence, this bastion
of power, agree?
Only, perhaps, by taking
the edifice, quite literally, at face value:
If it says, as indeed it does,
that buildings matter more than people, who
can dispute that so saying the place denies
its founder’s teaching? Or who
wonder that thousands
nowadays, hearing unmistakable the far denouncing
cry of the dispossessed, withdraw their chilled hands
from the provided warmth, the easy refuge, renouncing
its failure and theirs, and stumble blindly
out into the dark, weeping bitterly?”
In his commentary Reeves notes:
“For all Christians, this passage is a spur to their own consciences to consider how many times they themselves have denied Christ, in ways both large and small, with much less excuse than Peter (whose very life was at risk)—prompted, far too often, by shabby meannesses of spirit. This, for them is always a matter for grief. And if there is also ground for hope, it consists in this: Peter was forgiven, moved on to sanctity, and this can be true for them.”
Indeed, this can be true for us. It is this whole story, all its pathos, its depth of betrayal and its clarity of human portrayal, that speaks to me so deeply during this one week of the year. May it do so for you as well.
Grace & peace
Geoff
For those interested and able, go to this web site and you will find 60 seconds worth of the section of the Bach Passion that you can listen to. Click and you will be instructed how to download the software. This may be more trouble than you want to take, but at least here is the opportunity to hear brief bits of this music without purchasing the whole 3-CD set.
Today’s selection is found down the list, under disc 2, #14.
Mar. 24, 2005 Thursday of Holy Week
This Maundy Thursday we focus upon another part of the events of Jesus’ last hours as presented in Matthew’s gospel and the musical setting of them by J.S. Bach, from the book “The St. Matthew Passion; a text for voices” by John Reeves, Eerdmans publishers, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 2001. See the note below if you’d like to try and listen to some of the music. This selection, the English translation of which is “I would beside my Lord be watching,” reflects the longing or wish believers might have to be a companion to Jesus in this time of trial. Imagining ourselves in a darkened church, during the Tenebrae (darkness) service, let us listen to this part of Reeves’ poem.
Lord, I kneel here
in this black silence: from far ago
The echo of pain rings that no prayer
can mute; and the sweat runs, clammy on brow
and hand. Mind’s eye travels
blind
over time to that hurt garden: below
the olives, three prone figures, unmanned
by sleep; stone’s throw distant, a fourth
wakeful, mired deep in animal fear
(built in, ineluctable, since birth),
struggling up out of that near
despair onto the thin ledge of resignation.
Moon almost full, intermittently obscured
by ragged clouds: Passover eve, the
preparation
(and this shall be a sign to you: deliverance
assured).
Faintly visible along the ridge, a few
bare trees, stark arms mutely
reaching our for a kinder time, new
leaves: presage and remind:
another tree
lifted up on another hill. Threefold
prayer. Accept.
Not long now.
Mind returns. On
stripped altar the veiled
cross summons: him and us.
Sorrow
numbs the will. Not all endure.
For me, the prayer in the garden is one of the most powerful, and beautiful, moments in the gospel story. Parts of it are acted out in Maundy Thursday services. Maybe you can find the time & energy to attend one in your area. May you be convicted, then blessed by the power and beauty of this story.
Grace & peace
Geoff
For those interested and able, go to this web site and you will find 60 seconds worth of the section of the Bach Passion that you can listen to. Click and you will be instructed how to download the software This may be more trouble than you want to take, but at least here is the opportunity to hear brief bits of this music without purchasing the whole 3-CD set.
Today’s selection if found down the list, under disc 1, #26
Mar. 25, 2005, Good Friday
We continue looking at Jesus’ last hours as presented in Matthew’s gospel and set to music by J.S. Bach, using the book “The St. Matthew Passion; a text for voices” by John Reeves, Eerdmans publishers, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 2001. For Good Friday, Reeves provides a meditation upon the painting by Matthias Grunewald of the crucifixion. See below for links to the painting, the artist and the music. Here is part of Reeves’ poem based on this painting.
“Consider: this
is no ordinary portrayal:
custom has sugared art, elsewhere, to coat
the event in limp crust of genteel reverence,
pallid as dough, making a mere anecdote
of the real sweat and anguish, the blood, the violence
to every felt inch, the havoc: but
not here:
here, nothing is glossed over; pain
contorts the entire frame from cramped finger
and riven palm to feet in iron ruin;
torn head bowed over gaunt
thorax; face, torso, limbs grimly
suffused with death, greenish hue of incipient
rot, corpse-color, rancid, sickeningly
true to the filth and stench of this charnel
hour—worse, though beyond worst
woe of body, mind’s damage, total
desolation of knowing such ill forced
upon him, uncaring, by those he lived for us.
Light dies in the withering day: sight
dwindles: but mind’s eye retains this,
dour image of our good bought
with his grief: not then only
but now and every year of his grace;
for whom, oh, let the stave cry
aloud on the callous ear with such distress
as may, sharp as love, pierce the heart
with this sword, the knowledge of his hurt!
Grunewald could be related to Mel Gibson I guess, at least artistically. But the reality of a crucifixion is all too often glossed over and this poem and the painting that inspired it shatter all that gloss. To see the Grunewald painting, go here:
http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/grunewald/crucifixion/crucifixion.jpg
For some brief information on Grunewald, go here
http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/grunewald/crucifixion/
May you find the love of Christ piercing you to the heart this day, the more to feel and respond to that love.
Grace & peace
Geoff
For those interested and able, go to this web site and you will find 60 seconds worth of the section of the Bach Passion that you can listen to. Click or copy & paste into your browser and you will be instructed how to download the software. This may be more trouble than you want to take, but at least here is the opportunity to hear brief bits of this music without purchasing the whole 3-CD set.
Today’s selection is found down the list, under disc 3, #15
Our last look at Jesus’ last hours as presented in Matthew’s gospel and set to music by J.S. Bach, using the book “The St. Matthew Passion; a text for voices” by John Reeves, Eerdmans publishers, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 2001. In today’s selection Reeves recalls a concert performance of the St. Matthew Passion which he heard as a young man in London, England, during the Nazi blitz of that city. Bethnal Green is a neighborhood in London and Kathleen Ferrier a soloist of some note at the time.
“Wars
end, this day will pass, the dark
at noon lift; peace and resurrection will happen.
Meanwhile, I stash the shovel I work with clearing
debris from bomb sites in Bethnal Green,
homes once, and journey across intervening
time and distance, by tube, to Bach and Calvary:
and hear, oh apt to this town and year,
sung by Kathleen Ferrier, of any century
the supreme contralto, eternal woe: the
Daughter
of Zion grieving at the place of skulls; her Golgotha
and ours—“Ah, Golgotha! Unhappy Golgotha””
Reeves adds in his notes
“It is a sure sign of hope for the human spirit that in the very darkest hour of World War II the first large-scale recording ever of “The St. Matthew Passion” was made in Germany, in Leipzig…(including)…the choir of Bach’s own church, the Thomaskirche.”
Surely one of the hopes of the resurrection of Jesus is that there will come a time when there will be no more war. But one of the other hopes, present with us now, is the human spirit, itself a gift from God, that imagines and creates better visions than those of the present. May you see into the nature of God’s love in the pain of the current days and the promise of the days to come.
Grace & peace
Geoff
No email tomorrow. Experience the resurrection celebration at your local place of worship
For those interested and able, go to this web site and you will find 60 seconds worth of the section of the Bach Passion that you can listen to. Click and you will be instructed how to download the software. This may be more trouble than you want to take, but at least here is the opportunity to hear brief bits of this music without purchasing the whole 3-CD set.
Today’s selection if found down the list, under disc 3, #9
I hope you had a joyous Easter. Still my favorite comment about the shift from Lent to Easter comes from Kathleen Norris’ book “Cloister Walk.” She talks about an Easter party she attended in a monastery. “Maybe these people can enjoy Easter because they also observe Lent well enough to be happy to see it go.” I welcome Lent every year, but I too am glad to see it go.
Walter Brueggemann is perhaps the best known Old Testament theologian of the last generation. In 2003, a book of his prayers, “Awed to Heaven, Rooted in Earth,” Fortress Press, Minneapolis, was published. Here’s one for Easter, entitled “We Are Baffled.”
“Christ is Risen
He is risen indeed!
We are baffled by the very Easter claim we voice,
Your new life fits none of our categories.
We wonder and stew and argue,
and add clarifying adjectives like “spiritual” and
“physical”
But we remain baffled, seeking clarity and explanation,
we who are prosperous, and full and safe and tenured.
We are baffled and want explanations.
But there are those not baffled, but stunned by the news,
stunned while at minimum wage jobs;
Stunned while the body wastes in cancer;
Stunned while the fabric of life rots away in fatigue and despair;
Stunned while unprosperous and unfull
and
unsafe and untenured….
Waiting only for you in your Easter outfit,
waiting for you to say, “Fear not, it is I.”
Deliver us from our bafflement and our many explanations.
Push us over into stunned need and show yourself to us lively.
Enter us in honesty;
Enter us in fear;
Enter us in joy,
and let us be Eastered. Amen
May you be “Eastered” this day and throughout the days to come.
Grace & peace
Geoff
