January 4: Seasoned Love: Marriage as Martyrdom
♫ Music:
Day 35 - Saturday, January 04
Title: Seasoned Love: Marriage as Martyrdom
Scripture #1: Song of Songs 8:6-7 (NKJV)
Set me as a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm;
for love is as strong as death, jealousy as cruel as the grave;
its flames are flames of fire, a most vehement flame. Many waters cannot quench love, nor can the floods drown it.
If a man would give for love all the wealth of his house, it would be utterly despised.
Scripture #2: 1 Corinthians 13:4-7 (NKJV)
Love suffers long and is kind; love does not envy; love does not parade itself, is not puffed up; does not behave rudely, does not seek its own, is not provoked, thinks no evil; does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
Scripture #3: 1 John 3:16-18 (NKJV)
By this we know love, because He laid down His life for us. And we also ought to lay down our lives for the brethren. But whoever has this world’s goods, and sees his brother in need, and shuts up his heart from him, how does the love of God abide in him? My little children, let us not love in word or in tongue, but in deed and in truth.
Poetry:
“Entering St. Patrick’s Cathedral”
by Malachi Black
I have carried in my coat, black wet
with rain. I stand. I clear my throat.
My coat drips. The carved door closes
on its slow brass hinge. City noises—
car horns, bicycle bells, the respiration
truck engines, the whimpering
steel in midtown taxi brakes—bend
in through the doorjamb with the wind
then drop away. The door shuts plumb: it seals
the world out like a coffin lid. A chill,
dampened and dense with the spent breath
of old Hail Marys, lifts from the smoothed
stone of the nave. I am here to pay
my own respects, but I will wait:
my eyes must grow accustomed
to church light, watery and dim.
I step in. Dark forms hunch forward
in the pews. Whispering, their heads
are bowed, their mouths pressed
to the hollows of clasped hands.
High overhead, a gathering of shades
glows in stained glass: the resurrected
mingle with the dead and martyred
in panes of blue, green, yellow, red.
Beneath them lies the golden holy
altar, holding its silence like a bell,
and there, brightly skeletal beside it,
the organ pipes: cold, chrome, quiet
but alive with a vibration tolling
out from the incarnate
source of holy sound. I turn, shivering
back into my coat. The vaulted ceiling
bends above me like an ear. It waits:
I hold my tongue. My body is my prayer.
CALL ME MARA
Many waters cannot quench love, nor can the floods drown it.
- Song of Songs 8:7
Naomi was bitter. She left Bethlehem with her family to wait out a famine in Moab. While there, her husband and both her sons died. She was left alone to provide for her two Moabite daughters-in-law. In her grief, Naomi struggled to trust God’s unconditional love. She told Orpah and Ruth, “the Lord has turned against me” (Ruth 1:13). She saw a glimmer of His love when He again provided food for His people. But she lost sight of it on their way back to the land of Judah, when she stopped and encouraged her daughters-in-law to return to Moab to their families and, ultimately, to their pagan gods. Convinced of God’s love, Naomi, not Ruth, might have been the one to say, “let my people be your people, and my God your God.” Still overwhelmed by the floodwaters, she arrives in Bethlehem telling the townspeople, “Don’t call me Naomi,” which means pleasant, “Call me Mara, because the Almighty has made my life very bitter” (Ruth 1:20).
Malachi Black’s poem reflects the same struggle between trusting God’s love and being overwhelmed by floodwaters. The metaphors for disillusionment pile up as soon as the poem begins. The speaker’s coat is “black wet/with rain,” the city noises include whimpering. The door closes on what feels like hopelessness as “it seals/the world out like a coffin lid.” Inside, the church is dim, but there are glimmers of God’s love, the “blue, green, yellow, red” of stained-glass windows, and the “golden holy/altar.” Our speaker hints at resurrection. And for all his discouragement, he knows God hears because “the vaulted ceiling/bends above me like an ear.” He still can’t lean wholly into God’s love, but his body, his entire being, is his prayer. Like Naomi, he trusts God’s love, and he doesn’t.
Their struggles are our struggles but are completely unlike the heart of Christ represented by today’s artwork, Rosefire. It reflects Christ, sometimes called the Rose of Sharon, whose heart bears “flames of fire” (Song of Songs 8:6), unquenchable love, for His Father and for us.
George Matheson, who wrote the hymn “O Love,” experienced bitterness and heartbreak when his fiancée left him because he was going blind. Twenty years later, he was able to write this hymn for his sister’s wedding because God’s unconditional love pursued him throughout his life:
O love that will not let me go,
I rest my weary soul in thee;
And:
O joy that seeks me through the pain,
I cannot close my heart to thee;
Naomi and Matheson felt the floodwaters rise, and so do we. But as our verse and Patrick Hawes' song state, “many waters cannot quench love.” The flame of God’s love passed from the lineage of Boaz, Naomi’s kinsman redeemer, to Christ, our Redeemer.
Because of God’s unquenchable love, our trust in it, often like the poem’s organ pipes, skeletal, “cold, chrome, quiet,” becomes nothing but alive with a vibration tolling out from the incarnate source of holy sound.
Despite Satan’s plans to kill the Child, to crucify the Man, despite disillusionments that rise and hope that falls, despite bitterness and heartbreak, no waters can extinguish God’s unquenchable love. Instead, He transforms the floodwaters of Satan’s design, into what our hymn calls His “ocean depths” of love.
Prayer:
Oh Lord, we rejoice to know that all things are in Your hands, and that You love us with an everlasting love. No circumstances, no trials, no events in time can diminish or increase Your love; it is infinite, unchangeable, and everlasting. We rest in Your love today and forevermore.”
Amen.
- Charles Spurgeon
Jayne English
Essayist
For more information about the artwork, music, and poetry selected for this day, we have provided resources under the “About” tab located next to the “Devotional” tab.
About the Artwork:
Rosefire
Melissa Weinman
2015
Triptych altarpiece
Courtesy of the artist
As artist Melissa Weinman’s faith evolved, she reconsidered the power of art: “In the past, I thought it was art that was saving, but now I realized that it was light, the spiritual light, that was saving.” This new understanding found expression in a visual vocabulary she calls “rosefire.” The first examples were a series of triptychs designed as altarpieces. On the outside of the panels when the triptych is closed, she painted pink and white roses. On the inside of the panels when the triptych is opened, we see burning branches. “I was trying to represent the many layers of unfolding and unconditional love—I would call it divine love. There are many dimensions to it. Sometimes it’s a light whisper, sometimes deeper and less fleeting. On the outside, it might look like only a rose, but open it and you can see the fire, the passion inside.” Beauty took a beating in twentieth-century art, but we’re seeing a comeback of the beautiful in the work of painters like Weinman who acknowledge beauty as a central, even essential, aspect of their art. “Beauty is love in physical form,” she says. “I’m not interested in illustration anymore, like those paintings I made of the saints. I believe now that art and the beautiful in art can create an experience for the viewer, and that experience can be transformational.”
https://imagejournal.org/2015/07/09/art-on-fire-the-life-and-work-of-melissa-weinman-part-2/
About the Artist:
Melissa Weinman is an American artist who grew up in her mother’s painting and ceramic studio, on the prairies of southwest Minnesota where buffalo and prickly pear cactus are native. Weinman went to Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, where she double majored in creative visual arts and Chinese studies. She spent her junior year at Princeton University and studied painting with New York City artists Arthur Cohen and Howard Buchwald. Weinman pursued her M.F.A. under artists Ruth Weisberg and Ron Rizk at the University of Southern California, where she studied painting and printmaking. She began her teaching career as an assistant professor at the University of Richmond, Virginia, and at the University of Maryland. Her thirties brought Weinman to the Pacific Northwest, where she taught at the University of Puget Sound for fourteen years. In recent years, she has been a teaching artist at the Gage Academy of Art in Seattle, Washington. Currently, Weinman offers atelier-style, solvent-free oil painting instruction in her studio. Her solo museum exhibitions include the Frye Art Museum in Seattle; the Bowdoin College Museum of Art in Brunswick, Maine; and the Arnot Art Museum in Elmira, New York. A solo gallery show of Weinman’s was reviewed by Eleanor Heartney in Art in America.
http://www.melissaweinman.com/
https://www.joewadefineart.com/weinman.shtml
About the Music #1: “Many Waters” from the album Song of Songs
Lyrics #1:
As a seal
on your heart;
Set me there
upon your heart:
Passion cruel as the grave,
as fierce as any flame.
Love is strong,
strong as death.
Many waters
quench not
Love.
About the Composer: #1
In recent years, Patrick Hawes (b. 1958) has emerged as one of England’s most popular and inspirational composers. Born in Lincolnshire, he read music as an organ scholar at Durham University, and soon went on to make an impact in the world of choral music with his cantata The Wedding at Cana. It was with the release of his debut album Blue in Blue that Patrick first gained widespread public recognition. The standout track “Quanta Qualia” became a hit with audiences across the world. In 2009, the release of Patrick’s album Song of Songs, which consists of six choral pieces for strings and voices along with other works for choir and organ, was well received. The recording features the English Chamber Orchestra, Patrick’s own choir Conventus, and Welsh soprano Elin Manahan Thomas. The words were adapted by Andrew Hawes.
https://www.patrickhawes.com/
Performers #1: Conventus, the English Chamber Orchestra, and Elin Manahan Thomas
Composer Patrick Hawes founded Conventus in 2002, primarily to record the music for his highly successful debut album Blue in Blue. Some of the original sixteen singers already had a high profile on the choral music scene, notably Janet Coxwell, who assisted Patrick in auditioning a wide range of talented postgraduate students. The result was a choir with an engagingly pure and honest tone. Over the last few years, Rob Johnston has taken over the choir’s management and various newcomers have joined the ranks, bringing with them their own particular expertise and a genuine commitment to the group’s activities. Conventus performed at the premiere of Hawes’ Lazarus Requiem at the Cadogan Hall in 2008.
https://www.hyperion-records.co.uk/a.asp?a=A3243
The English Chamber Orchestra is the most recorded chamber orchestra in the world—its discography contains 860 recordings of over 1,500 works by more than four hundred composers. Benjamin Britten was the orchestra’s first patron and a significant musical influence. Recent tours have included the USA, Bermuda, China, Finland, France, Greece, Slovenia, and Austria, as well as concerts across the UK. The orchestra has recorded many successful film soundtracks, including Dario Marianelli’s prize-winning scores for Atonement and Pride and Prejudice, and also several James Bond soundtracks, and has taken part in a variety of other film and television projects. The ECO is proud of its outreach program, Close Encounters, which takes music education into many nontraditional settings within communities and schools around the UK and abroad.
Elin Manahan Thomas (b. 1977) is a Welsh soprano. A specialist in baroque music, she sang at the wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle in 2018. After auditioning for English conductor Sir John Eliot Gardiner, she joined the Monteverdi Choir, singing in many of the concerts of the Bach Cantata Pilgrimage which the choir completed in the year 2000. In 2001 she moved to pursue postgraduate vocal studies at the Royal College of Music in London. She then went on to sing with ensembles including the Sixteen, Polyphony, Cambridge Singers, and the Gabrieli Consort, as well as pursuing a solo career.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elin_Manahan_Thomas
About the Music #2: “O Love”
Lyrics #2:
O love that will not let me go,
I rest my weary soul in thee;
I give thee back the life I owe,
That in thy ocean depths its flow
May richer, fuller be.
O joy that seeks me through the pain,
I cannot close my heart to thee;
I trace the rainbow through the rain,
And feel the promise is not vain,
That morn shall tearless be. (x3)
O love that will not let me go,
I rest my weary soul in thee;
I give thee back the life I owe,
That in thy ocean depths its flow
May richer, fuller be.
O love that will not let me go,
I rest my weary soul in thee
Today's musical selection is based on “O Love That Wilt Not Let Me Go" (also known as “O Love”) was written on the evening of George Matheson’s sister’s marriage. Years before, he had been engaged, until his fiancée learned that he was going blind—that there was nothing the doctors could do—and she told him that she could not go through life with a blind man. He went blind while studying for the ministry, and his sister had been the one to care for him through the years. He was now forty, and his sister’s marriage likely brought a reminder of his own heartbreak. It was in the midst of this circumstance that Matheson penned this hymn, which he said was written in five minutes.
About the Composer #2: Lyrics: George Mattheson, Music: Elaine Hagenberg
George Matheson (1842–1906) was a Scottish minister and hymn writer and prolific author. At age twenty, Matheson was engaged to be married but began going blind. When he broke the news to his fiancée, she decided she could not go through life with a blind husband. He was educated at Glasgow Academy and the University of Glasgow, where he graduated first in classics, logic, and philosophy. In his twentieth year he became totally blind, but he held to his resolve to enter the ministry, and gave himself to theological and historical study. In 1879 the University of Edinburgh conferred upon him the honorary degree of D.D. In 1890, he became a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, upon the proposal of Sir William Thomson, Robert Flint, Hugh Macmillan, and James Lindsay.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Matheson
Elaine Hagenberg’s music “soars with eloquence and ingenuity” (ACDA Choral Journal). Her award-winning compositions are performed worldwide and frequently featured at American Choral Directors Association conferences, All-State festivals, Carnegie Hall, and other distinguished international concert halls from Australia to South America and throughout Europe. In addition to composing full-time, Elaine actively engages in bringing her music to life as the guest artist and featured clinician for professional conferences and festivals both in the US and abroad as a composer, conductor, and accompanist of her work. With over fifty commissioned works, she has composed new music for the American Choral Directors Association, professional choirs, colleges and universities, community choirs, high schools, and churches. “I Am the Wind” was named the winner of the 2020 ACDA Brock Competition for Professional Composers. Elaine has music in print with various publishers including Oxford University Press, G. Schirmer, Hinshaw Music, and Beckenhorst Press. Currently, she publishes her concert music independently through Elaine Hagenberg Music, which is distributed through GIA.
https://www.elainehagenberg.com/
Performers #2:
The Beckenhorst Singers are associated with Beckenhorst Press, a publisher of quality sacred music. Founded by John Ness Beck in 1972, the Beckenhorst Press catalog includes works by over one hundred fifty of today's leading composers, arrangers, and lyricists of church music.
https://beckenhorstpress.com/
About the Poetry & Poet:
Malachi Black is an American poet. He holds a B.A. from New York University, an M.F.A. from the University of Texas at Austin's Michener Center for Writers, and a Ph.D. in English with a creative writing emphasis from the University of Utah. A 2024–25 Fulbright US Scholar to Lithuania, Black is also the recipient of fellowships and awards from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Emory University, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Poetry Foundation, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and Yaddo. Black was the subject of an Emerging Poet profile by Mark Jarman in American Poets: The Journal of the Academy of American Poets, and his work has several times been set to music and has been featured in exhibitions both in the US and abroad. Black is an associate professor of English and creative writing at the University of San Diego.
https://www.malachiblack.com/about
About the Devotion Author:
Jayne English
Essayist
Jayne English is an essayist. She has a B.A. in Humanities from Florida Southern College. She has published devotional articles in various publications and articles on art and faith for Relief Journal’s blog. She is thankful daily for the beauty God brings her way in nature, poetry, and amazing family and friends. She lives in Central Florida, where she enjoys reading, writing, and the blue sweep of sky. You can find more of her writing at jayneenglish.substack.com