December 14: Names of Jesus V
♫ Music:
Day 12 - Thursday, December 14
Title: Names of Jesus V
Scripture: Isaiah 9:6e
“Everlasting Father”
Poetry:
Those Winter Sundays
By Robert Hayden
Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,
Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?
NAMES OF JESUS V
Age weakens even the strongest fathers, and, according to the most common pattern, children eventually lose their parents to death. A good father’s death is an exponential loss; the father who had carried his children through younger vulnerabilities no longer lives to do so in the wake of their loss of him. Not only the present, but future horizons, too, are altered by the pervasive absence of parents who simply aren’t everlasting.
When I returned to work after my own father’s death, I felt a new pang of loss as I suddenly recognized that he wouldn’t be thinking of me that day. I hadn’t even realized that I knew that my father, while living, would have been thinking of me on any given day until that first day I sat staring at my office walls, feeling the absence of his thoughts. Just one of the many groans of “what did I know, what did I know,” as I discovered dimensions of paternal care that were invisible to me until they were lost.
Also unknown to us is the suffering that stands beneath the givenness of paternal care acknowledged in “Those Winter Sundays.” The particular father pictured in this poem already bears the marks of his paternal labor in cracked hands and an aching body, yet he endures the bruising cold on a day of rest in order to protect his children from registering the quotidian costs of domestic warmth. One reason that love’s offices are “lonely” and “austere” is that they so invisibly weave the fabric of childhood that they will, of course, go unnoticed.
It may be that the desire to protect children from noticing all of its costs is embedded in the inclination of fatherly care. Today’s painting of father and child shows its viewer the menacing chill of exile from home. But its baby is covered sufficiently that we imagine it sheltered from some of the abrasions of the émigré’s suffering. Good parents hope it will be so.
That the eternally begotten Son of the Father is granted a fatherly office toward his people is only a subtle thread of the redemption tapestry. Jesus the Christ is not God the Father. He is the eternally begotten Son. But the prophet Isaiah tells us that Messiah will be a forever father to his people. And the Apostle Paul proclaims the life that unfolds from this promise: As in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive.
The Son shows his likeness to the Father when he utters to the woman healed by touching his cloak, who kneels before him in fear and trembling: Daughter, your faith has made you whole! The Son shows his likeness to the Father when he promises his disciples, soon to be bereft of him, I will not leave you as orphans, and sends another Comforter to abide with us forever.
Indeed, we need the only one who has seen the Father to be the one who makes the Father known to us. Happily, we catch a glimpse of the Father in the glory of His only son. Truly, Messiah—the Everlasting Father—in his wisdom and counsel, care and compassion, carries and covers his own at unfathomable costs to himself for endless benefits to us.
Prayer:
Holy Spirit, in whose comfort all our melodies and arpeggios give way to symphonic strings and inspired breath, help us to hear and feel the strength and warmth of the everlasting arms that gather us up and hold us together in endless life and infinite love, ours in Christ Jesus by the will of the Father.
Amen.
Dr. Melissa Schubert
Associate Professor of English, Torrey Honors Institute
About the Artwork:
Father and Child, 1946
Ben Shaun
Tempera on cardboard
101.5 x 76.2 cm
Museum of Modern Art
Manhattan, New York
Ben Shaun’s bold, simple rendering of this scene of a father’s protective love for his child evokes bonds of unconditional fatherly love and care, and was most likely inspired by his own family history of suffering and exile. Born in Lithuania, then part of the Russian Empire, to Jewish parents, Shaun’s father was exiled to Siberia for possible revolutionary activities in 1902. In 1906, the entire family immigrated and settled in Brooklyn, New York.
About the Artist:
Ben Shahn (1898–1969) was a Lithuanian-born American artist. He is best known for his works of social realism, his political views, and lectures. Although he often explored modern urban life, organized labor, immigration, and injustice in his art, he always did so with a compassionate tone. Shahn chose to employ pictorial realities around themes of allegory, the Jewish Bible, humanism, childhood, science, music, and the commonplace; and he used wit, candor and sentimentality to give his images poignancy. Ben Shahn's use of his art to counter social and political injustices came to exemplify Social Realism and socially conscious art. Shahn passionately believed in the role of art to help serve the human condition, to point out injustices, and to draw alliances rather than create dissention. Artists whose work is tied to social movements find both a visual and philosophical predecessor in Shahn's lengthy career.
About the Music:
“God of All Comfort” from the album Red Sea Road
Lyrics:
No one's too far.
No one's too broken.
God says His heart
Is full of compassion.
Everlasting arms,
Hold us together.
When we're falling apart,
He is the God of all comfort.
God of all comfort.
About the Composer and Performer:
Folk singer-songwriter Ellie Holcomb (b. 1982) was born and raised in Nashville, Tennessee. She comes from a musical family, and started her professional musical career in the same band as her husband, singer-songwriter Drew Holcomb. She has released multiple solo albums, most recently Red Sea Road. This latest release came out of a time of loss and suffering in Ellie’s community. Not only was she writing songs about her friends’ pain, Holcomb was faced with her own fear of the unknown during the project. Just prior to going into the recording studio, Holcomb’s father, famed music producer Brown Bannister, was diagnosed with cancer. Ellie and her siblings wrote the song “God of All Comfort” as they clung to God’s promises and rested in His embrace and peace.
About the Poet:
Robert Hayden (1913-1980) was the first African-American to be appointed as Consultant in Poetry to the U.S. Library of Congress. Hayden's formal, elegant poems about the Black historical experience have earned him a number of major awards. Poet Frederick Glaysher states in his introduction of Hayden's Collected Poems that, "Robert Hayden is now generally accepted as the most outstanding craftsman of Afro-American poetry." The historical basis for much of Hayden's poetry stemmed from his extensive study of American and Black History. Other influences on Hayden's development as a writer were poets W. H. Auden and Stephen Vincent Benét. Hayden spent twenty-three years teaching at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, where he was a professor of English, and he ended his career at the University of Michigan.
About the Devotional Writer:
Melissa Schubert teaches great books at Biola University's Torrey Honors Institute. She happily studies Early Modern English literature, finding the prolific pens of such poets as Shakespeare, Spenser and Milton to be plenty fascinating. She is especially interested in the intersections between theology and literature in the English Reformation. Beyond this, Melissa is serious about at least a few other things: gardening (unskilled amateur), Scrabble (skilled amateur) and being an auntie (aspiring professional). In 2016, she was awarded the Biola University Award for Mentoring Faculty.