December 28: Blessed Are the Eyes Who See
♫ Music:
Day 31 - Tuesday, December 28
Title: BLESSED ARE THE EYES WHO SEE
Scripture: Luke 2:29-30; Luke 10:23-24
“Lord, now You are letting Your servant depart in peace, according to Your word; For my eyes have seen Your salvation.”
“Blessed are the eyes which see the things you see; for I tell you that many prophets and kings have desired to see what you see, and have not seen it, and to hear what you hear, and have not heard it.”
Poetry:
Old Fisherman
by Liu Tsung-Yüan (translated by J.P. Seaton)
Old fisherman spends his night beneath the western
cliffs.
At dawn, he boils Hsiang’s waters, burns bamboo
of Ch’u.
When the mist’s burned off, and the sun’s come out,
he’s gone.
The slap of the oars: the mountain waters green.
Turn and look, at heaven’s edge, he’s moving with
the flow.
Above the cliffs the aimless clouds go too.
BLESSED ARE THE EYES WHO SEE
We named our third son Simeon. The thought of this aged man, living out his life longing to see the consolation of Israel, having been given the promise that he would live to see the Messiah… Imagining him entering the temple, and greeting Mary, holding up the little one who was to fulfill the law and the prophets… The thought that he, of all the Israelites throughout history, had been blessed to see the pattern (oh, that lovely pattern overlaid on Kaltenbach’s painting!) and its fulfillment, the culmination of the story, the wisdom, the law, the history of Israel… To picture him saying: “Lord, now You are letting Your servant depart in peace, according to Your word; For my eyes have seen Your salvation…”
We were so moved by this faithful servant, so moved by thinking of our little son inheriting the name of this aged visionary, to think of our son not in terms of his youth and its possibilities, but to think of his life in terms of a life spent in longing, of seeing things far off, of a youth, and middle age spent not in fulfilment, growth, and joy, but in waiting, waiting until, at the very end, he saw his own end in the end of Israel’s waiting. A life spent waiting not for its own promise, its own fulfilment and culmination, but for a life he would witness only its nascence. For he, like Moses, participated in the promise of Israel only through a glimpse: Moses, with his vision of the promised land from afar, and Simeon by holding in his hands the one who would go on to be the consolation of Israel, but whose work he himself would not live to see.
Life is not necessarily about us. We are not the central characters of the story. Maybe the greatest things I do prove to be great and consequential indeed. Maybe. Or I am simply a minor character, and the way I play a role in history is simply by being a friend to one who goes on to play a minor role of teaching the teacher of the one who will do something “great…” or even some even lesser role. But that too, is good. For Simeon, one of the great saints of Israel, it was enough merely to see, and to see only the beginning of the most important life to be lived in the history of humankind. To be the center, the main character, to play an important role—that is not up to us, not in the least. Even to see, to witness, the great events of history is beyond our ability. We can hope for these things, invite these things through our hunger and thirst for righteousness, lives spent in contemplation of the word of God, and faithful obedience. But this at least we can do – to pour over Scripture, longing, as a second Simeon, for the return of our Lord.
Prayer:
“Lord, let your servants depart in peace. Let our eyes see your salvation.”
Devotion Author:
Dr. Adam Johnson
Associate Professor of Theology
Torrey Honors College
Biola University
For more information about the artwork, music, poetry, and devotional writer selected for this day, we have provided resources under the “About” tab located next to the “Devotional” tab.
About the Art:
Portrait of My Father
Stephen Kaltenbach
1972–79
Acrylic on canvas
114 x 170.75 in.
Crocker Art Museum
Sacramento, California
For all of his success as a conceptual artist, Kaltenbach is also known for paintings such as Portrait of My Father. In a California barn, the artist labored for seven years over this testament to life, love, and the loss confronting us all. That his pursuit was spiritual is evident in the manner by which light and color permeates each intertwining arabesque and intersection with whisker, brow, and pore. While a photograph provided its basis, this portrait is far removed from the cool detachment of the photorealists due to Kaltenbach’s prolonged engagement. Kaltenbach’s sole aim was to celebrate the human bond and make a memorial to his father that only he could create.
https://www.crockerart.org/collections/american-art-after-1945/artworks/portrait-of-my-father-1972-1979
About the Artist:
Stephen J. Kaltenbach (b. 1940) is an American artist and author based in Sacramento, California. He attended the University of California, Davis, between 1963 and 1967, earning a B.A. and M.A. After graduating, Kaltenbach spent three years in New York City, producing paintings and a variety of conceptual work including bronze time capsules, graffiti, sidewalk plaques, and hoax advertisements. He exhibited alongside artists Richard Serra, Eva Hesse, Alan Saret, and Bruce Nauman at the Leo Castelli Gallery show "Nine" in 1968, and had a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1969. In 1970 Kaltenbach left the New York contemporary art world and returned to California, taking up a position at California State University, Sacramento, where he taught until 2005. Kaltenbach chose to refashion his practice in California, abandoning conceptual work and instead adopting the persona of a "Regional Artist" with a focus on figurative sculpture and portraiture. A retrospective of his career entitled Kaltenbach: The Beginning and The End was exhibited at the Manetti Shrem Museum of Art at UC Davis in 2020. His most notable painting is Portrait of My Father (1972–79). Kaltenbach's work is part of a number of public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Crocker Art Museum, the Walker Art Center, and the Kröller-Müller Museum.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Kaltenbach
https://manettishremmuseum.ucdavis.edu/news/portrait-of-my-father
http://www.stephenkaltenbach.com/paintings
https://www.crockerart.org/collections/american-art-after-1945/artworks/portrait-of-my-father-1972-1979
About the Music:
“Salvation Is Created” from the album Live Volume Two
Lyrics (Traditional Russian Orthodox Chant):
Salvation is created in the midst of the earth, O God. Alleluia.
About the Performers:
The “intellectually, emotionally and musically rich” nine-member men’s vocal ensemble Cantus is known worldwide for its trademark warmth and blend of voices, and its engaging performances of music ranging from the Renaissance to the twenty-first century. Working without a conductor, the members of Cantus rehearse and perform as chamber musicians, each contributing to the entirety of the artistic process. Cantus performs more than sixty concerts each year both in national and international touring, as well as in its hometown of Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota. The group has released seventeen albums on its own self-titled label. This stirring rendition of Salvation is Created was recorded and released on their 1997 self-titled album Cantus.
https://www.cantussings.org/
About the Composer:
Pavel Chesnokov (1877–1944) was a prolific Russian composer, conductor, and teacher of mostly sacred choral music. He produced over four hundred sacred works, but near the end of his life under the religious oppression of the Soviet regime, he produced many more secular works, and eventually ceased writing music altogether.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavel_Chesnokov
http://www.arkivmusic.com/classical/Name/Pavel-Chesnokov/Composer/2188-1
Words:
“Spaséniye, sodelal” (“Salvation is Created”) is a communion hymn intended for the Russian Orthodox liturgy for Friday. Its text is based on Psalm 74. It is from a Kievan chant melody.
About the Poet:
Liu Tsung-Yüan (773–819) was a Chinese poet and prose writer. A major figure in the neoclassical movement of the T'ang dynasty, he is the acknowledged master of an important genre of Chinese literary prose, the landscape essay. At age twenty, Liu Tsung-yüan passed the literary examination and earned the chin-shih degree, one of the highest graduate degrees, and was appointed collator at the Imperial Secretariat and began his official career. After a failed push for political reform, Liu Tsung-yuan was exiled to the southern reaches of China. Thousands of miles from home and freed from the strictures of court bureaucracy, he turned his gaze inward and chronicled his estrangement in poems. Liu’s fame as a prose writer, however, overshadowed his accomplishment as a poet. However, three hundred years after Liu died, the poet Su Tung-p’o ranked him as one of the greatest poets of the T’ang Dynasty, along with Tu Fu, Li Pai, and Wei Ying-wu. Liu is largely unknown in the West, with fewer than a dozen poems published in English translation.
https://biography.yourdictionary.com/liu-tsung-yuan
https://poems.com/poem/two-poems-yuan/
About the Devotion Author:
Dr. Adam Johnson
Associate Professor of Theology
Torrey Honors College
Biola University
Adam Johnson is a theologian and a professor for the Torrey Honors College who focuses on the doctrine of the atonement, exploring the many ways in which the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ affect the reconciliation of all things to God. His most recent book is The Reconciling Wisdom of God: Reframing the Doctrine of the Atonement. He and his wife, Katrina, have been married nineteen years and have three sons. They love camping and exploring America’s national parks.