December 29: What Are You Seeking?
♫ Music:
Day 28 - Saturday, December 29
Andrew: The First Called
Scripture: John 1:35-42
The next day again John was standing with two of his disciples, and he looked at Jesus as he walked by and said, “Behold, the Lamb of God!” The two disciples heard him say this, and they followed Jesus. Jesus turned and saw them following and said to them, “What are you seeking?” And they said to him, “Rabbi” (which means Teacher), “where are you staying?” He said to them, “Come and you will see.” So they came and saw where he was staying, and they stayed with him that day, for it was about the tenth hour. One of the two who heard John speak and followed Jesus was Andrew, Simon Peter's brother. He first found his own brother Simon and said to him, “We have found the Messiah” (which means Christ). He then brought him to Jesus.
Poetry:
Clear Night
by Charles Wright
Clear night, thumb-top of a moon, a back-lit sky.
Moon-fingers lay down their same routine
On the side deck and the threshold, the white keys and the black keys.
Bird hush and bird song. A cassia flower falls.
I want to be bruised by God.
I want to be strung up in a strong light and singled out.
I want to be stretched, like music wrung from a dropped seed.
I want to be entered and picked clean.
And the wind says “What?” to me.
And the castor beans, with their little earrings of death, say “What?” to me.
And the stars start out on their cold slide through the dark.
And the gears notch and the engines wheel.
WHAT ARE YOU SEEKING?
It might be the most important question we can ask a person, and it is Jesus’ first question in John’s gospel--indeed his first words of any kind there: “What are you seeking?”
In this passage, upon seeing Jesus again, John the Baptist immediately defers to him, humbly sending his own disciples onward, saying, “Behold, the Lamb of God.” When the disciples then turn and follow Jesus, he asks them, “What are you seeking?”
Jesus’ question reminds us that we are all seekers. Humans are seeking creatures. We are all moving toward some vision of the good nestled in our hearts, some notion of what we want, however conscious or unconscious. We are led by what we love. And that is how it should be.
However, it’s important to ask, “What do I seek? What do I love? These are good questions because they pull from our hearts the often buried but powerful bundle of desires, hopes, dreams, aspirations, loves —sacred or shallow—that drive our lives. These are good questions also because we become what we love. (See James K.A. Smith, You Are What You Love.) “Watch over your heart with all diligence,” says the sage in Proverbs, because whatever is there will simply drive your life—for good or for ill (4:23).
Seek is a word Jesus will return to in John’s gospel:
‘Seek first the Kingdom of God’ (Mt. 6:33).
‘Seek, and you will find’ (Mt. 7:7).
‘Seek the glory . . . from the only God’ (Jn. 5:44).
And, not so happily, ‘the one who speaks on his own authority seeks his own glory,’ Jn. 7:18.
To ask ourselves before God, “What do I seek?” is often the first step to letting the Holy Spirit work in our deep, for the first time or the thousandth. In the words of the speaker in the poem “Clear Night,” it’s a question that can “pick us clean.”
Andrew (the only one of John the Baptist’s ‘two disciples’ named in this passage) apparently let Jesus’ question pick him clean. From the moment he saw Him, Andrew sought and followed Jesus all the way to the end, it seems. As legend has it and as the artist Francois Duquesnoy sculpts it, Andrew followed Jesus all the way to his own cross. And in losing his life—however that happened—he, of course, found it.
Prayer:
Holy Spirit, you who minister the presence of Jesus to me, open my heart. Show me without fear the things that I seek. For each good object of my desire, may I celebrate and give you thanks. Purge from me those seekings that lead me astray. Above all, rekindle in me the desire to seek Jesus and his kingdom.
Amen
Todd Pickett
Dean, Spiritual Development & Campus Pastor
Biola University
About the Artwork:
Saint Andrew, 1629-33
Francois Duquesnoy
Marble
16 ft. 9 in tall
Crossing niche, St. Peter’s Basilica, Rome
In this dramatic depiction St. Andrew, the first apostle called by Christ and brother of St. Peter, grasps the x-shaped cross on which he was crucified, according to tradition, his arm out-flung, head thrown back, and eyes raised to heaven. It is one of four monumental statues that frame the bronze baldachin (altar canopy) in the transept of St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. Each statue commemorates a venerated relic, which was the property of the Pope and St. Peter’s Basilica. The statue of Andrew was meant to honor the relic of the apostle's skull, which was believed to have been presented to Pius II by the Byzantine leader Thomas Palaiologos in 1461. In 1966 Pope Paul VI presented the relic as a gift to the Church of St. Andrew in Patras as a sign of friendship with the Greek Orthodox Church. Tradition has it that Duquesnoy was angry when sculptor Bernini managed to have his statue of St. Longinus placed in the southwest niche, the only corner to be hit by direct sunlight, which further enhanced the impact of Bernini’s figure.
About the Artist:
Francois Duquesnoy (1594-1643) was a Flemish Baroque sculptor, also known as Il Fiammingo (the one from Flanders) in Italy. He was the most famous non-Italian sculptor of his time. Arriving in Rome in 1618, he worked for ten years producing small-scale works in bronze, ivory, and wood, and restoring classical sculptures. His big break came when he was hired to work on the giant bronze baldachin (altar canopy) for the crossing of St. Peter’s Basilica with Gianlorenzo Bernini, and subsequently received commissions for two monumental marble sculptures: Saint Andrew, for St. Peter’s Basilica, the work for which he is best-known, and Saint Susanna for Santa Maria di Loreto in Rome, a sculpture greatly admired throughout the seventeenth century for its quiet grace and naturalism. Influenced by his close friend painter Nicolas Poussin, his style was more restrained and classical than Bernini’s, a balance for the extreme emotionalism that dominated the art of seventeenth century Rome.
About the Music:
“Piano Trio in D Minor, Op. 11: II. Andante espressivo” from the album Mendelssohn-Hensel: Chamber Music
About the Composer:
Fanny Mendelssohn Bartholdy Hensel (1805-1847) and after her marriage, Fanny Hensel, was a German pianist and composer. She composed over 460 pieces of music, a number of which were originally published under the name of her younger brother, Felix Mendelssohn. She first studied piano with her mother, and later in Berlin with Carl Friedrich Zelter. In a letter to author and statesman Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Zelter described Fanny's skill as a pianist with the highest praise for a woman at the time: "She plays like a man."
About the Performer:
Renate Eggebrecht (b. 1944) is a German violinist and record producer. Starting at the age of four, Eggebrecht received her initial music training from her mother, and went on to study at the Lübeck College of Music and the Munich College of Music. In 1986, Eggebrecht founded the Fanny Mendelssohn Quartet with which she gave the world premier performance of Mendelssohn’s “Piano Quartet in A-flat Major.” Along with Eggebrecht, musicians in the quartet include Mario Korunic, second violin; Stefan Berg, viola; and Friedemann Kupsa, violoncello. The quartet has contributed greatly to the discovery of worthwhile music by neglected composers. Eggebrecht, Korunic, and Kupsa are joined for this track by Stefan Mickisch on piano.
About the Poet:
Charles Wright (b. 1935) is an American poet known for his lyricism and use of lush imagery in his poems about nature, life and death, and God. He received a master’s degree from the University of Iowa in 1963 and then won a Fulbright Scholarship to the University of Rome. In his poetry, Wright reflects on some of the most eternal of human concerns—time, truth, nature, and death—with his unending search for transcendence with elements of the ordinary amid the ineffable. Wright won the 1996 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets for the collection Chickamauga (1995). For the collection Black Zodiac (1997) Wright won both a National Book Critics Circle Award and a Pulitzer Prize (1998). Among Wright’s poetry prizes were the Poetry Society of America Melville Cane Award and the Edgar Allan Poe Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for lifetime achievement (1993), the Griffin International Poetry Prize (2007), and the Bollingen Prize for Poetry (2013). In 2014–15 he served as poet laureate of the United States. He is now a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets and Souder Family Professor of English at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.
About the Devotional Writer:
Todd Pickett
Dean of Spiritual Development
Biola University
A native Californian, Todd Pickett has been an English professor for many years and is now the Dean of Spiritual Development at Biola University. He has degrees in classical languages and literature from Stanford University and Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland; an M.A. in Spiritual Formation and Soul Care from Biola University; and a PhD in English from the University of California, Irvine. He leads retreats, undertakes group and individual spiritual direction, preaches regularly, and speaks frequently to groups on Christian spiritual formation from an evangelical perspective. He lives in Costa Mesa, CA, and is married to Dottie Cox Pickett, a marriage and family therapist.