December 12: Names of Jesus III
♫ Music:
Day 10 - Tuesday, December 12
Title: Names of Jesus III
Scripture: Isaiah 9:6c
“Wonderful Counselor”
Poetry:
Possible Answers to Prayer
By Scott Cairns
Your petitions—though they continue to bear
just the one signature—have been duly recorded.
Your anxieties—despite their constant,
relatively narrow scope and inadvertent
entertainment value—nonetheless serve
to bring your person vividly to mind.
Your repentance—all but obscured beneath
a burgeoning, yellow fog of frankly more
conspicuous resentment—is sufficient.
Your intermittent concern for the sick,
the suffering, the needy poor is sometimes
recognizable to me, if not to them.
Your angers, your zeal, your lipsmackingly
righteous indignation toward the many
whose habits and sympathies offend you—
these must burn away before you’ll apprehend
how near I am, with what fervor I adore
precisely these, the several who rouse your passions.
OUT OF THE FOG
In Anna Mgaloblishvili’s Butterfly, we find a figure paused in a moment of delicate meditation, focusing, perhaps pensively, on a vivid butterfly that has alighted upon his hands. The butterfly’s presence seems unlikely—miraculous even—for around the figure stirs a history of stormy movement. His right forearm, in particular, remains smudged with previous flailing, and to his left the three white streaks suggest the futile graspings of splayed, useless fingers. The entire scene quivers with nervous, frustrated energy and yet that tension has vanished in the small space of the figure’s gaze. The butterfly, once elusive, lands only now that the hands cease their fray and come together in awkward, unaccustomed stillness.
Scott Cairns explores this same conflict in “Possible Answers to Prayer.” Here, however, it is the supplicant who proves elusive. The poem shrewdly upends our expectations about God’s distance from us. Cairns disarms us from the start—God reflects with an almost bureaucratic fatigue upon the unacknowledged motives that creep into our devotional rhythms. The lines mirror to us what we see all too clearly in that unfortunate Pharisee in Luke 18 who “prays:” “God, I thank you that I am not like other people--robbers, evildoers, adulterers--or even like this tax collector.” It’s easy to imagine God’s distance from us as a fact of his transcendental holiness. One thinks of God and Moses conferring at a remove from the people of Israel upon a mountain and enclosed in “thick darkness.” But here Cairns imagines us “obscured beneath /a burgeoning, yellow fog of frankly more / conspicuous resentment.” The poem’s tone stages God’s relationship to the addressed petitioner as a tolerant (if occasionally sardonic) parent addressing a selfish and tempestuous child (one thinks, again, of the stormy lines surrounding Mgaloblishvili’s weary figure). But then God abandons His litany of our embarrassing and counterfeit pieties to reveal a love whose ultimate claim upon us seeks to unite us even (and perhaps especially) to those we cannot stand; a love which will not abide the prejudice and distrust that masquerade as devotion.
Isaiah prophecies that when Christ comes, He shall be “Wonderful Counselor.” The promise of counsel is, on the face of things, reassuring. Christ comes as our advocate, bringing his wisdom and knowledge to our aid. This impression is maintained by my tendency to hear this phrase accompanied by Handel’s triumphant and booming choir. But the truth is that counselors prove indispensable to clients, princes, and monarchs for their determination to reveal perspectives and advice that are often unwelcome and unpopular. The counselor who refuses to present the truth, but instead flatters me, or remains silent when I embark on a reckless course, helps betray me and my neighbor to my worst self.
In the Incarnation, Christ submits Himself to our woeful condition. He is here, in the midst of our fog. But He comes to deliver us from this state; not to confirm it. God’s counsel seeks to purge these frailties in order to reveal and strengthen his Spirit within us that we may delight in the pursuit of his kingdom.
Prayer:
Lord, May it be the real I who speaks. May it be the real Thou that I speak to.
Amen.
(Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer by CS Lewis)
Phillip Aijian
English Department, UC Irvine
About the Artwork:
Butterfly, 1996
Anna Mgaloblishvili
Oil on canvas
110 x 85 cm
Butterflies are deep and powerful representations of life. Many cultures associate the butterfly with our souls. In Christianity, the butterfly is seen as a symbol of resurrection, hope, and life. The life cycle of the butterfly seems to transcend life; with the caterpillar disappearing into a cocoon, appearing dead, just as Christ was laid in the tomb after the crucifixion, but both then emerge, having transformed into something ever more beautiful than before.
About the Artist:
Anna Mgaloblishvili is a Georgian painter and art historian. She studied painting at the I. Nikoladze Art College and the Tbilisi State Academy of Fine Arts, where she was part of a group of students who established an experimental studio of Church Murals and Icons. It was one of the first attempts to bring ecclesiastical art into the university after the fall of the Soviet rule in Georgia. She has regularly participated in exhibitions in Georgia and abroad, and has curated several art projects. Since 2006, she has been an assistant professor of the Department of Art History and Theory at the Tbilisi State Academy of Arts, and since 2008, she has been one of the supervisors of the research directive Religious Art in the Modern World.
About the Music:
“Near Light” from the album Living Room Songs
About the Composer and Performer:
Icelandic composer and multi-instrumentalist Ólafur Arnalds (b. 1986) combines electronic loops and acoustic instruments to bridge ambient, pop, techno, and classical music. He sees music as a constant conversation between artist and listener, and his goal is to always inspire creativity in his audience.
About the Poet:
Scott Cairns (b. 1954) is an American poet, memoirist, and essayist. Cairns earned a BA from Western Washington University, an MA from Hollins University, an MFA from Bowling Green State University, and a PhD from the University of Utah. Cairns has served on the faculties of Kansas State University, Westminster College, University of North Texas, Old Dominion University, and University of Missouri. While at the University of North Texas, Cairns served as editor of the American Literary Review. Cairns is the author of eight collections of poetry, one collection of translations of Christian mystics, one spiritual memoir, and a book-length essay on suffering. Dr. Cairns is currently the program director of Seattle Pacific University’s MFA in Creative Writing program.
About the Devotional Writer:
A PhD student in English at the University of California at Irvine, Phillip Aijian’s current research focuses on early-modern drama, specifically investigating Shakespeare's dramatic theology. Phillip lives in Fullerton, California, with his wife, Janelle, their son Malcolm, and a cat named Cleopatra.