April 17: The Forsaken
♫ Music:
Wednesday, April 17
Christ’s Last Prayer
Scripture: Psalm 22: 1-18
My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, from the words of my groaning? O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer, and by night, but I find no rest. Yet you are holy, enthroned on the praises of Israel. In you our fathers trusted; they trusted, and you delivered them. To you they cried and were rescued; in you they trusted and were not put to shame. But I am a worm and not a man, scorned by mankind and despised by the people. All who see me mock me; they make mouths at me; they wag their heads; “He trusts in the Lord; let him deliver him; let him rescue him, for he delights in him!” Yet you are he who took me from the womb; you made me trust you at my mother's breasts. On you was I cast from my birth, and from my mother's womb you have been my God. Be not far from me, for trouble is near, and there is none to help. Many bulls encompass me; strong bulls of Bashan surround me; they open wide their mouths at me, like a ravening and roaring lion. I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint; my heart is like wax; it is melted within my breast; my strength is dried up like a potsherd, and my tongue sticks to my jaws; you lay me in the dust of death. For dogs encompass me; a company of evildoers encircles me, they have pierced my hands and feet. I can count all my bones—they stare and gloat over me; they divide my garments among them, and for my clothing they cast lots.
Poetry:
From “Holy Week: Illuminations”
by Lisa Russ Spaar
Wednesday
Runic Y of twisted beech, bleach and scar
of sycamore lifting a clean fillet of hosannahs
beseechingly at the road’s edge,
I am your disciple, your nun, scribbling at your feet,
rummaging with my soul’s quill in the crabbed nest
of brush and weeds. Why look here for what I’ve lost?
Reproach me, doves mourning on the high wires,
snowy foolscap font of a daybright moon,
but here’s my sacred text: merkin thatch of fieldmouse
foetal in silt and a nest of indian grass,
needle bones and tiny cape of fur pressed flat
as an old ear beside the puddle’s swallowed clouds,
A clearing like the place I made with my love,
where we lay and watched a far-off hawk watching us
through an aperture of stirring pinetops,
passing over our small, blessed bodies
like God in the fine, high story of heaven--
and then, without looking for it, I found it in his nearer hand.
Look, the coronary dartings of a sparrow drinking there:
its straw-script flickerings, the sharp why not of its beak--
THE FORSAKEN
On a spring afternoon in 1937, the city of Guernica witnessed the horror of blitzkrieg as it fell from the skies at market time. Stonewalls, bone, and flesh were all torn, or dissolved, under the fire and concussive power of new, barbarous technologies. The bombing of Guernica was a gruesome harbinger of what would be visited on much of the world between 1939 and 1945.
When news of bombing reached Picasso, it found him working on a mural-scale painting; he was slated to represent the Spanish Republic at the international exhibition in Paris to be held in the summer of 1937. Abandoning his previous concepts for the painting, he worked furiously on what was to become the great visual lament of the 20th century. Appropriately, he employed the complex vocabulary of fractured spaces and figures, which he had formed over more than 20 years. Picasso completed Guernica in 35 days.
The resulting composition is a vision of pathetic figures into a tableau of frantic misery and fragmentation. The horizontality of the painting only reinforces the inescapability of the terrestrial plane. Most of the figures in the painting strain against this horizontality as they wail upward and out of the picture, mouths and limbs crying out in distress, looking for salvation that the black sky does not offer. Near the apex of the massive monochromatic painting, only an impassive electric light bulb dully lights the scene, exposing but not illuminating. Guernica is both lament and horrible premonition of the war to come, of all that it would visit on quiet houses, and it is a vision of forsakenness. Despite all the painting’s power, angels did not descend from heaven, nor did our better angels emerge from within us, to prevent the war.
Now from the sixth hour darkness fell on the land until the ninth hour. About the ninth hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice saying, “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?” that is, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken Me?”
As Jesus faced his final, inevitable moments, under an open spring sky that had suddenly gone black, he began reciting an ancient prophetic song. As its hauntingly specific events were unfolding in front of him, Jesus grunted out at least the opening lines of Psalm 22, and its most central and ancient of human questions: God, why have you forsaken me? This is Job’s question, taken up by King David, and this same crying question fills each of our mouths when an infant dies, when anger fills our homes, when bombs erase entire lives without warning or reason on a spring afternoon.
As this question inhabited Jesus on the cross, he filled it with meaning. He affirmed that to whisper, groan, or scream this question is a true act of faith–especially when no answer comes. All of the suffering and death that surrounded him, and which surrounds us, is unnatural. To feel despair, and to ask God where he is in all of this loss is a perfect and righteous response. It begs for intimacy and justice, and is the antidote to hopelessness. To cry out, even from our deepest sense of abandonment, is to believe, against all we see, that God hears and that God will come.
Prayer:
Dear reader,
I cannot offer you any words to pray today.
Pray the deep fearful questions in your hearts to God now. If your own words fail you, recite King David’s. If your own tears fail, let the women in Guernica weep in your place. And if your voice falters, know that Jesus, his lungs filling with fluid, his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth, is singing over you.
Jonathan Puls
Associate Dean, School of Fine Arts and Communication
Associate Professor of Art History and Painting
Biola University
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:
Guernica, 1937
Pablo Picasso
Oil on canvas
3.49 M X 7.77 M
Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain
Pablo Picasso created Guernica in response to the bombing of Guernica, a town in Northern Spain, by Nazi Germany and Italian warplanes at the request of the Spanish Nationalists. Upon completion, Guernica was exhibited at the Spanish display at the Paris International Exposition in the 1937 World's Fair, and then at other venues around the world. The touring exhibition was used to raise awareness and has since gained monumental status by becoming a perpetual reminder of the tragedies of war.
About the Artist:
Pablo Picasso (1882-1973) was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, stage designer, poet, and playwright who is considered to be one of the most influential artists of the 20th century. Known as the “Father of Modern Art,” there has been no other artist, prior to Picasso or since, who has had such an impact on the art world. Picasso’s free spirit, his energetic style, and his complete disregard for what others thought of his work, made him a household name during his lifetime. Picasso’s development of Cubism and Modern Expressionism, both art movements that abstracted reality to express the artist’s inner vision and emotions, made his work a catalyst for generations of artists to follow. His career spanned a 75-year period in which he created 13,500 paintings, 100,000 prints and engravings, 34,000 book illustrations, and 300 sculptural and ceramic works. Picasso's genius is especially witnessed in his drawings; with often just a single, well thought-out line in pencil or chalk, he was able to express a simplicity of form that represents the power found in abstraction.
About the Music:
“My God, My God, Parts 1 & 2” from the albumPrecious Remedies Against Satan's Devices
Lyrics:
My God, my God, I cry to Thee;
O why have You forsaken me?
Afar from me, You do not heed
Though day and night for help I plead
But You are holy in Your ways
Enthroned upon Your people's praise;
Our fathers put their trust in Thee
Believed, and You died, set them free
They cried, and, trusting in Your Name
Were saved, and were not put to shame;
But in the dust my honor lies
While all reproach and all despise
My words a cause for scorn they make
The lip they curl, the head they shake
And, mocking, bid me trust the Lord
Til He salvation shall afford
My trust on You I learned to rest
When I was on my mother's breast;
From birth You are my God alone
Your care my life has ever known
About the Composer, Lyricist and Performers:
Welcome Wagon is a Gospel/Indie pop band from Williamsburg, Brooklyn, New York. The group consists of Presbyterian minister Thomas Vito Aiuto and his wife, Monique. Their debut album, Welcome to the Welcome Wagon, was produced and arranged in 2008 by Sufjan Stevens. Their hymns are modest and melodic takes on a vast history of sacred song traditions, delivered with the simple desire to know their Maker—and to know each other—more intimately. Vito Aiuto heads the Resurrection Presbyterian Church in Brooklyn, which he started in 2005. Both natives of Michigan, Vito studied literature at Western Michigan University before moving on to Princeton Theological Seminary, while Monique moved to New York to study art and works as a preschool teacher.
About the Poet:
Lisa Russ Spaar (b. 1956) received a BA from the University of Virginia in 1978 and an MFA in 1982. She is the author of several poetry collections, including Orexia (2017), Vanitas, Rough (2012), and Glass Town (1999). The Boston Reviewnotes, “Lisa Russ Spaar’s intensely lyrical language—baroque, incantatory, provocative—enables her to reinvigorate perennial subject matter: desire, pursuit, and absence; intoxication and ecstasy; the transience of earthly experience; the uncertainties of god and grave; the dialectic between fertility and mortality.” She is also the author of The Hide-and-Seek Muse: Annotations of Contemporary Poetry (2013), a collection of poetry history and criticism, and she was a 2014 finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Citation for Excellence in Reviewing. She has edited multiple poetry anthologies, including Monticello in Mind: Fifty Contemporary Poets on Jefferson (2016). Spaar has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Library of Virginia Award for Poetry, and a Rona Jaffe Award, among other honors and awards. She is a professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Virginia.
About the Devotional Writer:
Jonathan Puls
Associate Dean, School of Fine Arts and Communication
Associate Professor of Art History and Painting
Biola University
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. Jonathan's ongoing drawings and paintings pull their imagery from contemporary life, mingling these with compositional concerns from art historical sources. His teaching, studio production and historical research focus on the relationship between immediate observation and compositional synthesis.