March 11: The Cosmic Christ
♫ Music:
Monday, March 11
The Cosmic Christ
Scripture: Colossians 1:15-22
He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross. And you, who once were alienated and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, he has now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death, in order to present you holy and blameless and above reproach before him.
Poetry:
That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection
by Gerard Manley Hopkins
Cloud-puffball, torn tufts, tossed pillows
flaunt forth, then chevy on an air-
Built thoroughfare: heaven-roysterers, in gay-gangs
they throng; they glitter in marches.
Down roughcast, down dazzling whitewash,
wherever an elm arches,
Shivelights and shadowtackle ín long
ashes lace, lance, and pair.
Delightfully the bright wind boisterous
ropes, wrestles, beats earth bare
Of yestertempest's creases;
in pool and rut peel parches
Squandering ooze to squeezed
dough, crust, dust; stanches, starches
Squadroned masks and manmarks
treadmire toil there
Footfretted in it. Million-fuelèd,
nature's bonfire burns on.
But quench her bonniest, dearest
to her, her clearest-selvèd spark
Man, how fast his firedint,
his mark on mind, is gone!
Both are in an unfathomable, all is in an enormous dark
Drowned. O pity and indignation! Manshape, that shone
Sheer off, disseveral, a star,
death blots black out; nor mark
Is any of him at all so stark
But vastness blurs and time
beats level. Enough! the Resurrection,
A heart's-clarion! Away grief's gasping,
joyless days, dejection.
Across my foundering deck shone
A beacon, an eternal beam.
Flesh fade, and mortal trash
Fall to the residuary worm;
world's wildfire, leave but ash:
In a flash, at a trumpet crash,
I am all at once what Christ is,
since he was what I am, and
This Jack, joke, poor potsherd,
patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,
Is immortal diamond.
THE COSMIC CHRIST
In Jesus, all things hold together. All things are reconciled. Peace is made.
These are powerful statements of hope. They’re joyful and rich. They, and the whole Colossians hymn, can tumble out of your throat with refined exuberance. You can imagine a tambourine going, with cartwheeling worshippers in the church aisles. You can imagine the choir coming in at high points, and people shouting “Amen!” When it gets read right, this hymn is ecstatic.
So, it’s easy to miss its recognition of pain. The peace of Jesus must be made (forged, constructed) precisely because the world is characterized by war. It’s important that he reconciles all things, because without him, all things are antagonized. He holds all things together with incomparable, tensing exertion, because without his tug, all things would rip —they are ripping!— apart.
The world this hymn describes is not a grinning, disinfected storybook world. It’s this world, where natural disasters can wipe out unsuspecting millions, where the powerful are often unjust, and where humans can’t live without hurting themselves and the people around them. Into this corroded, stony world, Christ steps.
He steps in from inaccessible splendor, from where his singing set creation spinning. From where his shining gave everything its light. Creation gets its sparks from his burning love, and “million-fuelèd, nature's bonfire burns on.” The “dazzling” beauties of the planet “flaunt” and “glitter” back at him, endowed with dignity and joy. Swinging his spangled arms, he conducts the cosmos’ symphony, and laughs.
But we aren’t laughing here. Not mostly. Not yet. Here, we humans and rebel angels have set ourselves to the labor of cacophony. Seeking power in Christ’s symphony, we scream our discords. Seeking power over the glory God embedded in each thing, we bulldoze it, building ash heaps. Our planet, intended to operate under authority and care, spins heedlessly on, harming us and suffering harm from our neglect and violence.
And you, aren’t you just like the heedless, hurting world? Inside, don’t the varied voices of your soul long to sing in harmony? Aren’t you ashamed of how they shout at each other? Don’t you try to overpower yourself, only to discover you’ve bulldozed another beautiful thing? Those scars keep reopening, don’t they? You want to shine and speak like marble can, but you’re just rough-cut rock, run through with cracks.
Christ can step in. He’ll weave himself into your cracks, transforming your pain until it’s beautiful. The master who sang nature into existence, listening to the noise of your heart, will come, singing note after brand new note, shaping discords into chords, until you complete and discover your own startling music. Clapping his hands so the sparks fly, he’ll relight the lamps of your faith, hope, and love. In him, you’ll hold together and be reconciled to all things. By his cross, your death, which “blots black out” your glory, will become the prelude to a brilliant resurrection.
If everything in you and everything in the world has any hope of holding together, we need this hero, Jesus. We need the one who imagined quarks and mangos to live inside our blunt sin, pains, and deaths. And only he can claim to span from the heavens to the place of the dead, from unassailable peace to unimaginable suffering, and from God to embodied creation without division or harm. We need a cosmic, holy one who shares our pain, and Jesus does. Will you, tired soul, submit your hope to him?
Prayer:
Hold me together, Jesus.
Be my king and my first resort.
Oh archetype, remake me after you.
Set at peace the war-making parts of me.
Forgive me, and spread balm on my injuries.
Sharer of my death, share your life and light with me.
Bring me home into your home, to your family.
Purify, beautify me until I refract your light.
Step into my pain. Touch my scars.
Even now, show me your singing.
Amen.
Peter David Gross
Executive Director of Wheatstone Ministries
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:
TRIAGE, 2015 (detail)
James Tughan
Chalk and pastel on paper
30” X 40”
Artist James Tughan says of his work, “This is a body of work in pastel drawing that is my way of finding solace in a part of our country that I grew up with, a part of the world that is endlessly rich in surface aesthetics. It is called TRIAGE, because it has been a means for me to deal with the estrangement from my son and his violent addictions that my wife and I were forced to live through as real emotional trauma.” Commenting further he states, “I see the primary context and reality of the Christian journey from a psychological and relational point of view. That is, I believe it is my communal and familial history through which God has most shaped my creative process, my language as an artist and my development in drawing, realism, and cartography. I have come to love God because he has shown me respect, talking with me in my own visual language of images and has brought therapeutic healing to me out of considerable emotional damage in my youth. For me drawing is about respect and attachment to the physical world and has really become inseparable from my connection with other persons in my spiritual and cultural community in the arts.“
About the Artist:
James Tughan, (B.Th., B.A. Hon., Fine Art), visual artist and educator, is the Executive Director of The Semaphore Fellowship, a Christian arts advocacy group based in Oakville, Ontario, Canada. He currently is enrolled in the M.T.S. program at McMaster Divinity College, Hamilton, ON. He has served on the faculty of Redeemer University, Tyndale College and Seminary, and Sheridan University College. He and his wife Donna, are part of an Anglican congregation (ANiC) of St. Hilda’s in Oakville, ON. Tughan works in pastels and uses an adaptation of realism that he calls “Cartographic Realism,” a marriage of aerial visual mapping, natural symbolism, and a Christian theology. This style of imagery, he says, respectfully draws metaphors for the seen and unseen world of spirit from the natural surface topography of the visual subject matter itself. It exploits the detail of surface patterning, texture, color, lighting, and narrative possibilities, and infers that there is more to see than immediately meets the eye. His work has been commissioned by major corporations throughout North America and magazines such as: Rolling Stone, Esquire, Saturday Night and House & Garden.
About the Music:
“After Bach: Ostinato” from the album After Bach
About the Composer and Performer:
Bradford Alexander "Brad" Mehldau (b. 1970) is an American jazz pianist, composer, and arranger. He was a member of saxophonist Joshua Redman's Quartet and has led his own trio since the early 1990s. Since the early 2000s, Mehldau has experimented with other musical formats in addition to trio and solo piano. Largo, released in 2002, contains electronics and input from rock and classical musicians; later examples include touring and recording with guitarist Pat Metheny, writing and playing song cycles for classical singers including Renée Fleming and Anne Sofie von Otter. Mehldau has absorbed aspects of pop, rock, and classical music, including German Romanticism, into his writing and playing. Through his use of some traditional elements of jazz, simultaneous playing of different melodies in separate hands, and incorporation of pop and rock pieces, Mehldau has influenced musicians, in and beyond jazz, in their approaches to writing, playing, and choice of repertoire.
About the Poet:
Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) is regarded as one the Victorian era’s greatest poets. He was raised in a prosperous and artistic family. He attended Balliol College, Oxford, where he studied the Classics. In 1867 he entered a Jesuit monastery near London. At that time, he vowed to “write no more...unless it were by the wish of my superiors.” Hopkins burned all of the poetry he had written and would not write poems again until 1875. He spent nine years in training at various Jesuit houses throughout England. He was ordained in 1877, and for the next seven years carried out his duties of teaching and preaching in London, Oxford, Liverpool, Glasgow, and Stonyhurst. In 1875, Hopkins, deeply moved by a newspaper account of a German ship, the Deutschland, wrecked during a storm at the mouth of the Thames River, began to write again. Although his poems were never published during his lifetime, his friend poet Robert Bridges edited a volume of Hopkins’s works entitled Poems that first appeared in 1918.
About the Devotional Writer:
Peter David Gross
Executive Director of Wheatstone Ministries
Peter David Gross is Executive Director of Wheatstone Ministries, a nonprofit that invites youth into Christian adulthood, giving a powerful new purpose to youth ministry. He is a proud graduate of Biola University and its Torrey Honors Institute. In addition to speaking and writing, Peter is an actor, painter, art consultant, and graphic designer. Against the odds, he’s married to Amanda, a brilliant Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Southern California. Their son, Wesley, is one, and cuter than all other babies combined.