February 25: What He Has Done
♫ Music:
WEEK THREE - PRAYER
February 25 - March 3
In his Ninth Conference “On Prayer,” John Cassian (d. 435), purportedly quoting a monk named Isaac, writes that “before we pray we should make an effort to cast out from the innermost parts of our heart whatever we do not wish to steal upon us as we pray.” In this short utterance Cassian (and/or Isaac) connects prayer to both self-examination and repentance. In order to “cast out” (i.e., repent) the thoughts that may interrupt one’s prayer, the pray-er needs to examine the “innermost parts of [her] heart.” Thus, prayer follows self-examination and repentance, so that we enter into it fully free to make our petitions known to God without the taint of personal ambition or self-interest. And this is to be done again and again, for prayer is not something a Christian should do but something that all Christians must do: “when you pray….”
Day 12 - Sunday, February 25
Title: What He Has Done
Scripture: Psalm 66:16-20
Come and hear, all who fear God,
And I will tell of what He has done for my soul.
I cried to Him with my mouth,
And He was extolled with my tongue.
If I regard wickedness in my heart,
The Lord will not hear;
But certainly God has heard;
He has given heed to the voice of my prayer.
Blessed be God,
Who has not turned away my prayer
Nor His lovingkindness from me.
Poetry: A Cure of Souls
By Denise Levertov
The pastor
of grief and dreams
guides his flock towards
the next field
with all his care
He has heard
the bell tolling
but the sheep
are hungry and need
the grass, today and
every day. Beautiful
his patience, his long
shadow, the rippling
sound of the flocks moving
along the valley.
MAKING NOISE
To be “heard” is a central human need. To be heard by God, to know that something, someone, beyond our mortal plane is listening, may be all that makes human life bearable. Crying out, something we generally do only after exhausting all other possible activity, is really the beginning of faith. Vocalizing our helplessness, our need, our desire to become other than what we are, is also the door to worship.
At his triumphal entry, Jesus was asked to silence those who cried out to him; he responded simply that if the fragile human beings surrounding him were to stop, then stones would pick up where they left off. Humans have the first opportunity to participate in praise and pleading, but if we were to cease, God would simply assign something else to the task. So crying out simply must be done, it is inherent in the relationship of the created world to its Maker.
Maybe stones, if given the job, would stutter out some sort of rough, gritty praise, or crack open as they pleaded for mercy, or make persistent, patient, grumbling intercession on behalf of the short-lived humans constantly coming and going before them.
Or maybe after all this time the rocks have learned to sing. Psalmists and poets have the sacred task of transforming the chaotic noise of our cries into beautiful song. And by now the rocks have overheard thousands of songs–songs of shepherds, warriors, lovers, and children, all filled with longing, and sung to the listening Father they did not quite understand. The rocks must have innumerable songs stored up in them, waiting to be released at the appointed time.
Painters and sculptors, both practitioners in stone, have long understood this hidden potential. This is probably what drove artists from time immemorial to picture the very thing their materials cannot ostensibly hold–song. In today’s artwork, Jim Dine attempts to visualize the aural subject that has haunted, and always eluded, visual artists. Perhaps it is the uncanny silence of the material that triggers the painter’s desire to picture it crying out, or maybe it is the intuition that the material’s silence is only contingent. It might be that if humanity fails to cry out, the finely ground earthen pigments of Dine’s painting will burst forth with all that they now hold hushed.
The Psalmist in today’s passage sings of the most extraordinary and beautiful truth: God does hear our cries, our songs, and what is more He responds with lovingkindness. Jesus gave us a beautiful image of this reciprocity when he told us: “My sheep know my voice.” God hears the plaintiff cries of all of us, lost in dark, and calls out us in gentle and familiar refrains. I imagine he is always there in the dark, singing a song that puts the ground under our feet, so we can walk home.
Prayer:
Good Father,
The sorrows and joys of this world,
Are mingled in my cries.
Hear them again today.
Through your Spirit,
I sang them out into the dark,
In broken verse and faltering voice.
By the same Spirit,
Teach me to hear,
The tender call
From somewhere,
Just beyond view.
Amen
Jonathan Puls
Associate Professor of Art
Interim Dean, Fine Arts and Communication
Biola University
About the Artwork:
Poet Singing Beautifully
Jim Dine
2016
Cardboard intaglio with hand painting
156 x 113 cm
Jim Dine studied poetry at the University of Cincinnati before attending the University of Ohio where he received his BFA in 1957, consequently the subject of the painting is one with which he was deeply familiar. Dine is inspired by the power of simple images to be both familiar and symbolic and frequently works with subjects and images from his childhood, giving his work both a sense of innocence and shared nostalgia. The simplicity of this painting works so well. The open mouth of the poet, “singing beautifully” is the same straightforward action that the Psalmist describes in words: “I cried to Him with my mouth…”
About the Artist:
Jim Dine (b. 1935) is an American artist and poet known for his contributions to the formation of both Performance Art and Pop Art. He studied poetry at the University of Cincinnati before attending the University of Ohio where he received his BFA in 1957. After moving to New York in 1958, Dine became part of a milieu of artists including Allan Kaprow and Claes Oldenburg, with whom he began to stage performances, later known as “Happenings,” at various sites in the city. These “Happenings” challenged the elitism of Abstract Expressionism, de-emphasizing the art object in favor of a performative, interactive process. By the early 1960s Dine had switched his focus to painting with an interest in popular imagery and commercial objects. He currently lives and works both in New York, New York, and Walla Walla, Washington. His works are included in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Modern in London, and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, among many other institutions.
About the Music:
“The Apostles, Part II Introduction” from the album Edward Elgar: The Apostles
About the Composer:
Edward Elgar (1857–1934) was an English composer, many of whose works have entered the British and international classical concert repertoire. Among his best-known compositions are orchestral works including the Enigma Variations and the Pomp and Circumstance Marches. Although Elgar is often regarded as an English composer, most of his musical influences were from continental Europe. He felt himself to be an outsider, not only musically, but socially. In musical circles dominated by academics, he was a self-taught composer; in Protestant Britain, his Roman Catholicism was regarded with suspicion in some quarters; and in the class-conscious society of Victorian and Edwardian Britain, he was acutely sensitive about his humble origins even after he achieved recognition. Interest in his work began to revive significantly in the 1960s, helped by new recordings of his works. Elgar has been described as the first composer to take the gramophone seriously and between 1914 and 1925 he conducted a series of acoustic recordings of his works.
About the Performers:
Philharmonia Orchestra, conducted by Richard Cooke
The Philharmonia Orchestra is a British orchestra based in London. It was founded in 1945 by Walter Legge, a classical music record producer for EMI. Since 1995, the orchestra has been based in the Royal Festival Hall. Esa-Pekka Salonen has been the orchestra's principal conductor and artistic advisor since 2008. The Philharmonia Orchestra performs more than 160 concerts a year, tours widely, and also records music for films and computer games. Since its inception, the Philharmonia has commissioned more than 100 original compositions from composers that include Sir Harrison Birtwistle, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, Mark-Anthony Turnage, and James MacMillan.
Richard Cooke was appointed Conductor and Music Director of the Royal Choral Society in 1995, and has appeared with them in many concerts in the Royal Festival and Royal Albert Halls, and in many of the England’s cathedrals. He conducts the annual performance of Handel’s Messiah and the spectacular Christmas concert, both events taking place in London’s Royal Albert Hall. The Royal Choral Society performs a large and varied repertoire with leading professional orchestras, including many works from the Baroque and Classical eras with period instrument ensembles. As Music Director of the University of Essex Choir, Cooke has brought a similar level of artistic stature to the group since his appointment in 1981. Additionally, he was a chorister of St. Paul's Cathedral and the Choral Scholar in the Choir of King's College, Cambridge, and Conductor of the London Philharmonic Choir from 1982 to 1991.
About the Poet:
Denise Levertov (1923-1997) was educated entirely at home and claimed to have decided to become a writer at the age of five. When she was twelve, she sent some of her poetry to T. S. Eliot, who responded by encouraging her to continue writing. At age seventeen, she had her first poem published in Poetry Quarterly. Her poems of the 1950s won her widespread recognition and her book, With Eyes at the Back of our Heads (1959), established her as one of the great American poets. Levertov went on to publish more than twenty volumes of poetry, and was also the author of four books of prose. Levertov’s conversion to Christianity in 1984 was the impetus for her religious poetry. In 1997, she brought together 38 poems from seven of her earlier volumes in The Stream & the Sapphire, a collection intended, as Levertov explains in the foreword to the collection, to "trace my slow movement from agnosticism to Christian faith, a movement incorporating much doubt and questioning as well as affirmation."
About the Devotional Writer:
Jonathan Puls is a painter and an art historian. He is passionate about understanding the ways images are formed and how they form us in return. Puls received his BS in fine art from Biola University in 1998 and holds both an MFA in painting and an MA in art history from California State University, Long Beach. Currently he serves as the Interim Dean of the School of Fine Arts and Communication