February 19: There is Hope for your Future
♫ Music:
Day 6 - Monday, February 19
Title: There is Hope for your Future
Scripture: Jeremiah 31:15-21
Thus says the Lord,
“A voice is heard in Ramah,
Lamentation and bitter weeping.
Rachel is weeping for her children;
She refuses to be comforted for her children,
Because they are no more.”
Thus says the Lord,
“Restrain your voice from weeping
And your eyes from tears;
For your work will be rewarded,” declares the Lord,
“And they will return from the land of the enemy.
“There is hope for your future,” declares the Lord,
“And your children will return to their own territory.
“I have surely heard Ephraim grieving,
‘You have chastised me, and I was chastised,
Like an untrained calf;
Bring me back that I may be restored,
For You are the Lord my God.
‘For after I turned back, I repented;
And after I was instructed, I smote on my thigh;
I was ashamed and also humiliated
Because I bore the reproach of my youth.’
“Is Ephraim My dear son?
Is he a delightful child?
Indeed, as often as I have spoken against him,
I certainly still remember him;
Therefore My heart yearns for him;
I will surely have mercy on him,” declares the Lord.
“Set up for yourself roadmarks,
Place for yourself guideposts;
Direct your mind to the highway,
The way by which you went.
Return, O virgin of Israel,
Return to these your cities.
Poetry: Israel
by Carl Rakosi
I hear the voice
of David and Bathsheba
and the judgment
on the continual
backslidings
of the Kings of Israel
I have stumbled
on the ancient voice
of honesty
and tremble
at the voice
of my people
THERE IS HOPE FOR YOUR FUTURE
There’s something about a mother’s tears. They can break our hearts, they can bring us home when we stray, they can stop a rebellious youth’s wayward behavior. And a mother’s tears are often a kind of premonition. Moms know: they see what their husband doesn’t, what their other children do not. A mother’s lament is often a quiet, even wordless, inner pain of the heart that she carries well-hidden — shared only with an intimate few and, in best scenarios, with God.
A mother’s tears, in the life of women devoted to God, are mingled with prayer: deep, patient, enduring petition. They are cries to God in the night, through the day, between thoughts. We can surmise that James, the brother of Jesus, must have known the power of prayer from observing — among others — his own mother Mary, for he says in his epistle that the prayer of a righteous person “avails much” (5:16). Augustine’s mother Monica, he says in The Confessions, prayed fervently for her son, and he comments that “it cannot be that the son of these tears should be lost” (III.12.3). Carolyn Sharp of Yale Divinity School notes that Rachel’s weeping is significant in the telling of Jesus’ story in that her voice is a wail of sorrow that, for all its pain, has underlying it a hope — indeed, an assurance — that God is faithful, that He will make things right in the end.
But that’s another thing about a mother’s tears. They endure even when things look like they’re turning around. People impatient in grasping this might insist, “Cheer up, Mom!” But it’s not that simple. Moms know the depth of injury, of enduring pathos and tragedy; their tears are there for the hurts well below the surface. It’s why a mother’s hugs are so powerful. It’s why a mother’s ear is so attentive to our stories, her eyes so watchful of our eyes, our expressions, even our body language. Don’t try to hide it from Mom (or from Grandma).
Rachel’s weeping is symbolic of the sorrow for wayward Israel. Matthew mentions it in the context of the slaughter of male infants in Bethlehem (2:6). It’s a weeping that, while aware that a good end, redemption, is coming, yet lingers in its existential lament — a cry for what is, right now. Picasso’s “Weeping Woman” artwork shown here uses somber colors and a focus on eyes, hands and mouth in ways that accentuate inner pain welling up in a woman’s face and body. He suggests the kind of tears that come from down deep. Kronos Quartet’s “Cry of a Lady” has a piercing quality, cutting like a knife into our hearts, our souls, as we hear waves of grief tolling like a vocal belfry in voices echoing with deep emotion. We want to know more, yet the pain of it causes our souls to recoil. Can any but God bear this sorrow? Perhaps not. And so we need Him all the more.
Prayer:
O, God! Can you hear me? Do my stinging eyes and beating chest not call to you? Where are you in this dark place? Does the fever heat of my soul’s lament not reach you? In this quiet, this emptiness, I have no words. They escaped me long ago. Yet it’s here in this quiet place, as the wet on my face and my shaking hands move me closer to you, that I begin to hear you, to feel you — even in your silence — a hand on my head, on my back. You are there. It’s still dark; it still hurts. But thank you, thank you! I know you are. You were. And as the morning has followed night before, so it will again.
Amen
Michael A. Longinow, Ph.D.
Professor of Media & Journalism
Biola University
Information about the artists, poets, lyrics, artwork, composers, and musicians in the Lent Project may be found on the “About” tab located next to the “Devotional” tab.
About the Artwork:
Weeping Woman
Pablo Picasso
1937
Oil on canvas
608 x 500 mm
Tate Modern, London
One of the worst atrocities of the Spanish Civil War was the bombing of the Basque town of Guernica by the German Air Force who were lending their support to the Nationalist Forces of General Franco. Picasso responded to the horrific massacre by painting the vast mural entitled Guernica, considered one of the most powerful anti-war paintings in the history of art. For months afterwards Picasso made subsidiary paintings from Guernica based on one of the figures in the mural, including a weeping woman holding her dead child. Weeping Woman is the last and most elaborate of the series painted by Picasso. It depicts the suffering of an individual woman rather than being a statement about the suffering of war. The Mater Dolorosa, the Weeping Virgin, is a traditional image in Spanish art, often represented in Baroque sculptures with glass tears, much like the very solid one that flows towards this woman's right ear.
About the Artist:
Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer considered one of the greatest and most influential artists of the 20th century. Associated most of all with pioneering Cubism, alongside Georges Braque, he also invented the technique of collage and made major contributions to Symbolism and Surrealism. His work in pioneering Cubism established a set of pictorial problems, devices, and approaches, which remained important well into the 1950s. He is renowned for endlessly reinventing himself, switching between radically different styles. "Whenever I wanted to say something, I said it the way I believed I should," he explained. "Different themes inevitably require different methods of expression.” Although his influence undoubtedly waned in the 1960s, he had by that time become a Pop icon, and the public's fascination with his life story continued to fuel interest in his work. His famously charismatic personality and life has come to embody the bohemian modern artist in the popular imagination.
About the Music:
“Cry of a Lady” from the album Sunrise of the Planetary Dream Collector
About the Composer:
Terrence Mitchell "Terry" Riley (b. 1935) is an American composer and performing musician associated with the Minimalist school of Western classical music, of which he was a pioneer. His work is deeply influenced by both jazz and Indian classical music, and has utilized innovative tape music techniques and delay systems. He is best-known for works such as his 1964 composition entitled “In C” and the 1969 album A Rainbow in Curved Air, both considered landmarks of minimalist music. Riley also cites John Cage, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Charles Mingus, Bill Evans, and Gil Evans as influences on his work. Riley began his long-lasting association with the Kronos Quartet after he met their founder David Harrington. Over the course of his career, Riley has composed 13 string quartets for the ensemble.
About the Performers:
Dora Hristova (b. 1947) is the artistic director and conductor of the Bulgarian female vocal choir Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares, a professor at the Art Academy in Plovdiv in Bulgaria, and a graduate of the Bulgarian State Conservatory. She experiments in the fields of sonority and different vocal ensemble sounds. In 1990 Professor Hristova received a Grammy Award as the conductor of most of the pieces on the CD Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares, Volume II. Her international success includes approximately 1250 concerts in some of the world’s most prestigious halls, including Royal Festival Hall and the Barbican Centre in London; Avery Fisher Hall in Lincoln Center, New York; Washington’s Kennedy Center; Boston’s Symphony Hall; Symphony Hall in Chicago; the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam; Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles; and many other venues in North and South America, Europe, and Asia.
The Kronos Quartet, an American string quartet based in San Francisco, California, was founded in 1973 by violinist David Harrington from Seattle, Washington. The quartet has been in existence with a rotating membership of musicians for over forty years. The Kronos Quartet covers a very broad range of musical genres including: Mexican folk, experimental, pre-classical early music, movie soundtracks, jazz and tango, as well as contemporary classical music. More than 900 works have been written for them. With almost forty studio albums to their credit and having performed worldwide, they have been called "probably the most famous 'new music' group in the world" and have been praised in philosophical studies of music for the inclusiveness of their repertoire. They have worked with many Minimalist composers including John Adams, Arvo Pärt, George Crumb, Henryk Górecki, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Terry Riley, and Kevin Volans.
About the Poet:
Carl Rakosi (1903–2004) was best-known for being part of the Objectivist movement of poetry. Having been influenced by Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams as well as the Modernist movement, his introduction into the world of poetry began with his inclusion in the 1931 “Objectivist” issue of Poetry Magazine. Rakosi’s work seems hard to categorize though, even for him: “I am a visual poet, but I am also satirical at times and often meditative, and those three sometimes clash, but that’s just being a human being.” In 1967, at the encouragement of English poet Andrew Crozier, Rakosi began writing poems again after a hiatus of over 30 years, and he produced work steadily from that point, beginning with his book Amulet in 1967. He published widely following his return to poetry and in 1996 he won a PEN Award for his book, Poems 1923-1941.
About the Devotional Writer:
Michael Longinow is a professor of media and journalism at Biola. Longinow attended Wheaton College, earning a BA in Political Science, and completed a PhD at the University of Kentucky. He has not only been an educator, but has worked as a freelance reporter for the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times. He was a founding adviser member of the Association of Christian Collegiate Media (ACCM) and now serves as its National Executive Director. Longinow is a frequent workshop presenter and panelist at national conventions and has written chapters for five books dealing with journalism, history, media, religion, and the popular culture of American evangelicalism. Longinow lives in Riverside, California, with his wife Robin, and their three children, Ben, Matt, and Sarah.