April 8: Being Crucified with Christ
♫ Music:
Monday, April 8
Being Crucified with Christ
Scripture: Galatians 2:20
I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.
Poetry:
Easter Morning
by Amy Clampitt
a stone at dawn
cold water in the basin
these walls’ rough plaster
imageless
after the hammering
of so much insistence
on the need for naming
after the travesties
that passed as faces,
grace: the unction
of sheer nonexistence
upwelling in this
hyacinthine freshet
of the unnamed
the faceless
HEALED BY FAITH
Think of the story in the Gospels of the woman who has been bleeding for twelve years (Mark 5:25-34). This woman’s suffering has not come by choice or undisclosed sin, yet she is ostracized and isolated because of it. She has spent all of her money on doctors unable to help her. Her condition worsens by the year. Religious laws tell her not to be out in public. She is not to go to the temple. She may be an embarrassment to her family. She may have been disowned by her family. She is desperately poor.
From somewhere, she has learned of a healer, a Rabbi, a man who speaks with authority. She goes out into the country to seek him. She knows she’s in trouble, being out among the people, risking discovery and rebuke, or worse. Nevertheless, she presses on. A crowd approaches, moving along a road. The crowd surrounds the man she’s looking for. The crowd is perhaps larger than she anticipated. She moves to join it anyway.
And then, before her, in the midst of the many pressing bodies, there he is: The man she has heard about, not an arm length’s away. She takes a breath, and she reaches out, touches an edge of his clothing. She feels the change, immediately, in her body.
The man in this story, of course, is Jesus. Paul writes to the Galatians about his own experience with him: “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” Paul says that he no longer lives, but Christ lives in him. Despite the ways it troubles him (see 2 Corinthians 12:7), Paul has not rejected his body (“the life I now live in the flesh”). Indeed, his body is the vehicle by which he proclaims the good news. In a similar way, the body of the woman Jesus healed was both the vessel of her isolation and judgment and the means by which she found new life and freedom.
The longing for new life and freedom is expressed in all three of our artist’s works today.
Nina Simone, hemmed in by a system of racism that calls her—because of the color of her body—a second-class citizen, sings, stirringly, “I wish I could break / All the chains holdin' me / I wish I could say / All the things that I should say.” It’s also her body—and the enormous gift of her voice—that allows us to glimpse the joy of her potential freedom. (The words seem to convey, as Richard Neuhaus once put it, that “Babylon is our permanent circumstance,” while the music and Simone’s voice seem to enact the promise of his follow-up phrase: “Or at least until . . .”).
In Erica Grimm’s striking and poignant Ascending Arc, the human body is pictured stretching and twisting, in its remarkable abilities, toward an ascension that, in its earthbound limitations, it cannot quite achieve.
And in Amy Clampitt’s poem, the speaker seeks out a solitary Easter Morning, away from other bodies, to be temporarily free from the names that fix and the faces that demand, and to thereby be refreshed, perhaps as Jesus himself “often withdrew to lonely places and prayed” (Luke 5:16).
It is, of course, through the gift of our bodies that we first hear the proclamation of the Gospel (“faith comes by hearing” Rom. 10:17), and it’s through our bodies that we recognize each other as members of the Body of Christ. The woman in the crowd is indicative of Christ’s healing and of Christ’s power living in others. Jesus loved the woman. And it is this love—a love Paul too experienced—that the letter to the Galatians affirms. Paul wants his readers to stop acting as if there are prerequisite rules, or practices, they must assent to before meeting Jesus. For Paul, for the woman in the crowd, the only requirement for meeting Christ is recognizing the severity of one’s predicament. “Saul! Saul!” Jesus says in Acts 9:4, “Why do you persecute me?” After he meets Jesus, Paul’s life is never the same.
Nor is the woman who’s been healed.
After she’s healed, we read that Jesus stops and calls her out of the crowd. She falls before him, cowering. He doesn’t berate her for not shouting, “Unclean! Unclean!” He doesn’t tell her it is inappropriate for a woman to touch the clothing of a man who is not her husband. Instead, he blesses her: “Daughter, your faith has made you well.” She is invited into his family. She has become his flesh and blood.
Prayer:
Dear God,
Make us a people who live with the faith of the woman, with the perspective of Paul—dying to ourselves, alive in Jesus—so that we may be agents of healing and grace for those who need it. We know that our bodies are limited, but we thank you for that gifts that they are—that in them we image your creative power, and in them we bear witness to your sacrifice, redemption, and resurrection.
Amen.
Chris Davidson
Associate Professor of English
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:
Ascending Arc, 2001
Erica L. Grimm
Encaustic on Baltic birch panel
In Erica Grimm’s paintings, the human figure swims in a sea of being: each gesture, each pose is richly evocative of the ancient but neglected idea of the unity of body and soul. Both her exquisite rendering of the figure and her encaustic technique (employing melted wax) bring a sense of warmth and affirmation to these works. But if Grimm sees creation as good, she also understands it as subject to sin and mortality. Her figures know suffering, limitation, and longing. So it is no surprise that her muse is Simone Weil, the French mystic who wrote so compellingly about the spirituality of “affliction.” These are images that take up residence in your heart…and stay there.
About the Artist:
Erica L. Grimm (b. 1959) was born in Saskatchewan, Canda. She studied at the University of Regina, where she completed her BFA (1982), and at Simon Fraser University, where her PhD work included multimedia installations (2006). Grimm’s work incorporates encaustic and steel, as well as a variety of unique materials, from PET scans to 23 karat gold and birch panels. Her installation pieces have included digital elements including film projections and interactive soundscapes. Themes of embodiment, materiality, and liminality are recurrent themes in Grimm’s work. Of her exhibition The Body Knows, Grimm writes, "All we know is mediated through the body, making it, inescapably, the central site of meaning. I am not interested in the surface superficialities of the body but in going deeper, going inside in an exploration of states of being. My work uses encaustic layered over graphite drawings, usually of figures, and juxtaposes these figurative panels with planes of steel, gold and lead....Materials such as steel, wax, lead and gold carry meanings ranging from precious to toxic, and when paired with the figure, heighten a corporeal reading of the figure." Grimm has exhibited across Canada and the United States in more than 25 solo exhibitions and numerous group exhibitions. She is currently an Associate Professor and Chair in the Art + Design Dept. of the School of the Arts Media and Culture (SAMC) at Trinity Western University.
About the Music:
“I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free” from the album Silk & Soul
Lyrics
I wish I knew how it would feel to be free
I wish I could break all the chains holding me
I wish I could say all the things that I should say
Say 'em loud, say 'em clear
For the whole round world to hear
I wish I could share all the love that's in my heart
Remove all the bars that keep us apart
I wish you could know what it means to be me
Then you'd see and agree
That every man should be free
I wish I could give all I'm longing to give
I wish I could live like I'm longing to live
I wish that I could do all the things that I can do
Though I'm way overdue I'd be starting anew
Well I wish I could be like a bird in the sky
How sweet it would be if I found I could fly
Oh I'd soar to the sun and look down at the sea
And I'd sing cos I'd know that
And I'd sing cos I'd know that
I'd know how it feels to be free
I'd know how it feels to be free
I'd know how it feels to be free
About the Composers and Lyricists:
“I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free” is a jazz song written by Billy Taylor and Dick Dallas. Taylor's original version (as "I Wish I Knew") was recorded on November 12, 1963, and released on his Right Here, Right Now! album the following year. Taylor said: "I wrote this song, perhaps my best-known composition, for my daughter Kim. This is one of the best renditions I’ve done because it is very spiritual." The song served as an anthem for the Civil Rights Movement in America in the 1960s. A widely played version was recorded by Nina Simone in 1967 on her Silk & Soul album.
About the Performer:
Eunice Kathleen Waymon (1933–2003), known professionally as Nina Simone, was an American singer, songwriter, pianist, arranger, and activist in the civil rights movement. Her music spanned a broad range of musical styles including classical, jazz, blues, folk, R&B, gospel, and pop. Waymon initially aspired to be a concert pianist. With the help of a few supporters in her hometown, she enrolled in the Juilliard School of Music in New York.To make a living however, she changed her name to "Nina Simone” to disguise herself from family members so she could sing at a nightclub in Atlantic City. It was here singing “cocktail music” that she effectively launched her successful career as a jazz vocalist. Simone recorded more than 40 albums between 1958 and 1974. Simone's musical style fused gospel and pop with classical music, in particular with Johann Sebastian Bach.
About the Poet:
Amy Clampitt (1920 –1994) was an American poet and author. At Grinnell College she began a study of English literature that eventually led her to poetry. After graduation, she lived in New York and worked as a secretary at the Oxford University Press, a reference librarian at the Audubon Society, and as a freelance editor. Not until the mid-1960s, when she was in her forties, did she return to writing poetry. Her first poem was published by The New Yorker in 1978. In 1983, at the age of sixty-three, she published her first full-length collection, The Kingfisher. In the decade that followed, Clampitt published five books of poetry, including What the Light Was Like (1985), Archaic Figure (1987), and Westward (1990). Her last book, A Silence Opens, appeared in 1994. She taught at the College of William and Mary, Smith College, and Amherst College, but it was her time spent in Manhattan, in a remote part of Maine, and on various trips to Europe, the former Soviet Union, Iowa, Wales, and England that most directly influenced her work. Clampitt was the recipient of a 1982 Guggenheim Fellowship, a MacArthur Fellowship (1992), and she was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Poets.
About the Devotional Writer:
Chris Davidson
Chair, Department of English
Associate Professor of English
Biola University
Chris Davidson is Associate Professor of English and co-director of first-year writing at Biola. He teaches courses in critical thinking and writing, writing for competency, and creative writing. He has a bachelor's degree in English from California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, and a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from University of California, Irvine. His work has appeared in several journals and anthologies, including Monster Verse: Poems Human and Inhuman. A chapbook, Poems, appeared in 2012