March 6: Return to Me
♫ Music:
Day 21 - Tuesday, March 6
Title: Return to Me
Scripture: Joel 2:12-17
“Yet even now,” declares the Lord,
“Return to Me with all your heart,
And with fasting, weeping and mourning;
And rend your heart and not your garments.”
Now return to the Lord your God,
For He is gracious and compassionate,
Slow to anger, abounding in lovingkindness
And relenting of evil.
Who knows whether He will not turn and relent
And leave a blessing behind Him,
Even a grain offering and a drink offering
For the Lord your God?
Blow a trumpet in Zion,
Consecrate a fast, proclaim a solemn assembly,
Gather the people, sanctify the congregation,
Assemble the elders,
Gather the children and the nursing infants.
Let the bridegroom come out of his room
And the bride out of her bridal chamber.
Let the priests, the Lord’s ministers,
Weep between the porch and the altar,
And let them say, “Spare Your people, O Lord,
And do not make Your inheritance a reproach,
A byword among the nations.
Why should they among the peoples say,
‘Where is their God?’”
Poetry: Repentance
By George Herbert
Lord, I confesse my sinne is great;
Great is my sinne. Oh! gently treat
With thy quick flow’r, thy momentarie bloom;
Whose life still pressing
Is one undressing,
A steadie aiming at a tombe.
Mans age is two houres work, or three:
Each day doth round about us see.
Thus are we to delights: but we are all
To sorrows old,
If like be told
From what life feeleth, Adams fall.
O let thy height of mercie then
Compassionate short-breathed men.
Cut me not off for my most foul transgression:
I do confesse
My foolishnesse;
My God, accept of my confession.
Sweeten at length this bitter bowl,
Which thou hast pour’d into my soul;
Thy wormwood turn to health, windes to fair weather:
For if thou stay,
I and this day,
As we did rise, we die together.
When thou for sinne rebukest man,
Forthwith he waxeth wo and wan:
Bitternesse fills our bowels; all our hearts
Pine, and decay,
And drop away,
And carrie with them th’ other parts.
But thou wilt sinne and grief destroy;
That so the broken bones may joy,
And tune together in a well-set song,
Full of his praises,
Who dead men raises.
Fractures well cur’d make us more strong.
THE LENTEN FAST
Fasting is perhaps the spiritual discipline most strongly associated with Lent. From traditional meatless Fridays to signing off social media channels, the arrival of Ash Wednesday signals for many Christians the first of forty days of abstinence from some material good. When fasting, we can easily succumb to a number of pitfalls: fasting as dieting, as self-improvement, or worse, as an attempt to earn forgiveness for our sins. Yet, when we attend most closely to the model of scripture and the Church’s practice, we see that fasting often accompanies periods of heartfelt repentance.
Indeed, the discipline of fasting benefits us in many ways. It gives us an opportunity to practice the virtue of temperance—and yet its goal is more than to make us temperate. It makes us aware of the sufferings of others—and yet its goal is more than to make us empathetic. Rather, to fast is to redirect our desire to the God who is the true source of all our comfort and pleasure.
The Lenten fast in particular is a penitential fast—one that awakens us to the ways we have sinned in seeking comfort and pleasure apart from the will of God. As Joel reminds us, our repentance and return to God is characterized by “weeping and mourning.” This is not because our sorrow can erase our sins, but rather because we recognize the gulf between our sinfulness and the goodness of God’s mercy.
For the Church, this recognition leads to a greater reliance on and gratitude for the sacrifice of Christ. When we fast, we are like Mary and the Apostles in Giotto’s The Mourning of Christ, choosing to gaze on Christ’s suffering and not turn away. We fast, not to purge our sins by the depth of our suffering, but to turn our attention to Christ and His great goodness towards us. To do so is to fix our desires on their truest source, knowing He alone can fulfill them.
When we turn to Christ in penitential fasting, we are acknowledging our sin and frailty. It is in this recognition of our weakness as human beings that we are able to rest secure in the strength of Jesus. It is this that Herbert brings to our attention when he says that; “Fractures well cur’d make us more strong.” When we fast, just as when we repent of our sins, we expose our brokenness to the only One who can heal us. We do so, with our gaze fixed on Christ’s act of mercy towards us. May He grant us the strength not to turn away.
Prayer:
“Because You have given us the spirit of discipline, that we may triumph over the flesh, and live no longer for ourselves but for Him who died for us and rose again, your Son Jesus Christ our Lord.”
Texts for Common Prayer,
Anglican Church of North America
Jonathan Diaz
Instructor, Torrey Honors Institute
Biola University
About the Artwork:
The Mourning of Christ
Giotto di Bondone
c.1304 – 1306
Fresco
7' 7" x 7' 9"
Arena Chapel, Padua, Italy
This fresco about the Mourning of Christ is located in the Arena Chapel in Padua, Italy. The artist Giotto creates a highly emotional story with elements from traditional Byzantine paintings and early Renaissance. All of the human and angelic mourners intently face the body of Christ. The angels are unique individuals, each conveying their own grief, making the sense of personal loss even stronger for the viewer. The body of Christ is held gently by the three women and at the center of the group is a young man who bears the iconographic symbols of St. John. The tree stands as a symbol of the tree of knowledge in the Garden of Eden, as well as the cross, thereby extending the narrative to a multi-layered biblical teaching. Giotto has expressed the corporate act of mourning and lamentation in a simple yet profoundly way.
About the Artist:
Giotto di Bondone (1266-1337) was an Italian painter and architect during the Late Middle Ages. He is often appreciated for his innovations in painting as he imbued his figures with personality by giving expression to their faces and bearing, as is clearly visible from the frescoes in the Arena Chapel. Giotto's style heralded a new development in the art of the late Middle Ages. The sacred art of the Byzantine period that preceded it had a solemn and holy beauty of its own, but was two-dimensional, immobile, and largely symbolic. Giotto initiated a more natural, emotionally expressive human style, which was thought to be inspired by the spirituality of St. Francis of Assisi. Italian poet Dante proclaimed Giotto more important than Cimabue, the Italian artist considered the most important until then, and probably Giotto’s teacher. Few works may be ascribed with absolute certainty to Giotto: a series of frescoes in Padua, more frescoes and altarpieces in the Santa Croce in Florence, a painting of the Madonna, and the famous fresco series on the life of Saint Francis in the St. Francis of Assisi Church.
About the Music:
“Instrumental Lament” from the album Ordo Virtutem
About the Composer:
Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179) was a German religious teacher, prophetess, and abbess. She was a prolific writer, particularly of musical poetry, and was known for her prophetic visions. She was dedicated as a tithe to the Church by her parents at a young age to become a nun. Although Hildegard was plagued by sickness most of her life, her illnesses did not prohibit her from accomplishing astounding things. She was elected as the leader of her religious community in 1136. One of her works, the Ordo Virtutum, is an early example of liturgical drama, and arguably the oldest surviving morality play. She wrote theological, botanical, and medicinal texts, as well as letters, liturgical songs, and poems, while supervising miniature illuminations in the Rupertsberg Manuscript of her first work, Scivias, a volume that depicts 26 religious visions she experienced.
About the Performers:
Sequentia is one of the world’s most respected and innovative ensembles of medieval music. It is an international group of singers and instrumentalists united in Paris under the direction of the legendary performer and teacher Benjamin Bagby who is dedicated to the performance and recording of Western European music from the period before 1300. The repertoire being performed, and ranges between instrumental/vocal duos to large vocal ensembles determine the size and disposition of the ensemble. Based on meticulous and original research, intensive rehearsal, and long period of development, Sequentia’s virtuosic performances are compelling and surprising in their immediacy, and strike the listener with a timeless emotional connection to our own past musical cultures.
About the Poet:
George Herbert (1593-1633) was a Welsh-born English poet, orator, and Anglican priest. Herbert’s poetry is associated with the writings of the metaphysical poets, and he is recognized as “a pivotal figure: enormously popular, deeply and broadly influential, and arguably the most skillful and important British devotional lyricist.” Throughout his life Herbert wrote Christian poetry with a precision of language and a masterful use of imagery. Some of Herbert’s poems have been turned into hymns that are still being sung today.
About the Devotional Writer:
Jonathan Diaz lives in Whittier, California with his wife, Abigail. He holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Notre Dame, and is a faculty member of the Torrey Honors Institute at Biola University. His poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from Zócalo Public Square, American Literary Review, Saint Katherine Review, and The Cresset.