March 19: A Deep Mystery Regarding Christ’s Death
♫ Music:
Tuesday, March 19
A Deep Mystery Regarding Christ’s Death
Scripture: Romans 5:7-8
Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous person, though for a good person someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
Poetry:
The Star Market
by Marie Howe
The people Jesus loved were shopping at the Star Market yesterday.
An old lead-colored man standing next to me at the checkout
breathed so heavily I had to step back a few steps.
Even after his bags were packed he still stood, breathing hard and
hawking into his hand. The feeble, the lame, I could hardly look at them:
shuffling through the aisles, they smelled of decay, as if the Star Market
had declared a day off for the able-bodied, and I had wandered in
with the rest of them—sour milk, bad meat—
looking for cereal and spring water.
Jesus must have been a saint, I said to myself, looking for my lost car
in the parking lot later, stumbling among the people who would have
been lowered into rooms by ropes, who would have crept
out of caves or crawled from the corners of public baths on their hands
and knees begging for mercy.
If I touch only the hem of his garment, one woman thought,
could I bear the look on his face when he wheels around?
A DEEP MYSTERY REGARDING CHRIST’S DEATH
Dino Saluzzi’s plaintive Argentine bandoneon (concertina) playing reminds me of heat. It brings to mind being escorted for the first time through the suffocating heat of the barrios of Medellin, Colombia, watching the children of paramilitary gang members playing football barefoot, one set of eyes on the dancing ball and another, always another, mindful of the patrolling troop carriers one block away. Death was always one stray gunshot away. Football might seem eternal, but you could see that gray watchful vigilance in the eyes of all the young ones in that city of death. It was collectively even more evident in Bellavista, the prison there where inmates once played football with human heads. I felt I had no right to be there, coming from the insulated suburbs of a Canadian city.
It reminds me also of cold. I remember the first time I set out on an uninvited tour of a poverty-stricken native reservation in the Northwest territories, the first hoarfrosts on the ground in mid-August, the tin shacks and the sadness in the eyes of the half-frozen kids with a short life-expectancy courtesy of glue in a bag. It could have been their fathers who I worked with each day coughing up blood in the rail yards in Hay River. I felt like a complete alien to their world. It reminds me of silence, the silence of the terrifying scene in the town square centered on the woman caught in adultery, while men waited for an excuse to put her to death. Jesus crouches to collect his thoughts, looking for a way to not perpetuate her abuse at the hands of cruel men. Exposed, betrayed, shamed…she is one rock away from unconsciousness and mutilation. The only thing standing between her and a horrid death as a presumed piece of trash, was a man who did not see her like that. Jesus knew and valued her, just as he knew the sicariosin Bellavista and alcoholics of Hay River.
William Kurelek, like today’s poet Marie Howe, was no stranger to this pain. He knew poverty and suffering on the prairies of Canada as an immigrant, and emotional illness after having come to Canada from the devastation of European war. As a new Christian he did not flinch in his depictions of our North American culture’s descent into materialism and blindness to Christ’s suffering (seeIn The Autumn of Life). In his Passion of Christseries (housed ironically near the Niagara Falls tourist haven), he captures the raw brutality of shaming and death (but thankfully notes Christ having the last word).
Howe’s layered poetry inStar Marketalso elegantly reminds us that we in fact do not have to look far to learn to see as Christ did, immersed in the realities of his own culture. It will unerringly find us. It will find us in our own failures, our own illnesses, our broken relationships, and our own emotional collapses. It will find us and we will beg for mercy and intervention. We will long for the mystery of Him turning to notice uswhen we least deserve it.
Prayer:
Father, in spite of our reluctance to inhabit the places you gave gone for us, grant us the humility to know our own poverty of spirit, the eyes to recognize the empathy of grace, and the courage to ask for it from your hand.
Amen.
James Tughan
Visual Artist and Educator
Executive Director of The Semaphore Fellowship
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
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:
Passion Of Christ Series, 1960-1963
Overall image and 4 separate panels from left to right:
1. Saying as They Did So, Show Yourself a Prophet, Christ: Tell Us Who It Was That Smote You
2. And They Led Him Away In Bonds and Gave Him Up to the Governor, Pontius Pilate
3. And About the Ninth Hour Jesus Cried Out, Eli Eli Lamma Sabachthani? That Is, My Lord, My Lord Why Have You Forsaken Me?
4. So That the Guards Trembled for Fear of Him and Were Like Dead Men
William Kurelek
Gouache on paper
51.1 x 48.0 cm
Niagara Falls Art Gallery and Museum
Ontario, Canada
Artist William Kurelek conceived his Passion of Christ series while living in England, one year before he officially converted to Roman Catholicism. The project reflects Kurelek’s exposure to the work of French artist James Tissot (1836–1902), particularly Tissot’s reproductions of 350 gouache paintings illustrating the life of Jesus. From the outset, Kurelek saw his series as a didactic tool for dispersing the message of the Gospels. To reach the widest possible audience, Kurelek ensured his images accommodated the dimensions of the television screen aspect ratio of 4:3 (at the time). His goal was to see the paintings “one day produced on film,” a feat that was accomplished in 1981, and again in 2009, after his death. The series is effectively a collection of 160 detailed cinematic storyboards that illustrate the central narrative of the Gospel. Olha and Mykola Kolankiwsky subsequently purchased the entire Passion of Christ Series and placed it on permanent display at the Niagara Falls Art Gallery and Museum in Ontario, Canada.
About The Artist:
William Kurelek (1927-1977) was a Canadian artist and writer. His work was influenced by his childhood on the prairies, his Ukrainian-Canadian roots, and his Roman Catholic faith. Kurelek painted many modern nativities showing Christ being born in a wide variety of settings to many different ethnicities. Kurelek’s early career was defined by the search for both religious and artistic identity. Throughout the 1950s, he created emotionally charged paintings that drew on art historical references. Many were painted as a form of therapy while Kurelek was seeking psychological treatment in England. In 1957, Kurelek converted to Roman Catholicism, which he credits with helping him deal with his mental illness. Over the ensuing 20 years until his death, Kurelek conceived much of his art as overt proclamations of faith that brought the Christian story to modern audiences.
About the Music:
“Gorrion” from the album Todo Sobre Mi Madre
About the Composer and the Performer:
Dino Saluzzi (b. 1935) is an Argentine player of the bandoneón, a type of concertina. A key figure in contemporary South American music, Saluzzi has played the bandoneón since his childhood. For much of his youth, Saluzzi lived in Buenos Aires, playing with the Radio El Mundo Orchestra. He would play in orchestras for a living, while touring with smaller, sometimes jazz-oriented ensembles where he developed a personal style that made him a leading bandoneónist in Argentine folklore and avant-garde music. In 1991, Saluzzi recorded an album with his brothers and his son on guitar, kicking off his "family project", which has since then toured many countries. Saluzzi has frequently toured with his relatives and in-laws as the Saluzzi Family Band. Saluzzi’s oeuvre is at some level always about his homeland and his memories.
About the Poet:
Marie Howe (b. 1950) is an American poet who was named the 2012 State Poet for New York. Howe did not devote serious attention to writing poetry until she turned 30 when she was accepted at Columbia University, where she received her MFA. She is presently on the writing faculty at Columbia University, Sarah Lawrence College, and New York University. After Howe's brother died of an AIDS-related illness, she co-edited a collection of essays, letters, and stories entitled In the Company of My Solitude: American Writing from the AIDS Pandemic that sought to foster open dialogue about the plight of AIDS in the United States. Her poems have appeared in literary journals and magazines including The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry, Agni, Ploughshares, and The Harvard Review. Her honors include a National Endowment for the Arts and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
About the Devotional Writer:
James Tughan
Visual Artist and Educator
Executive Director of The Semaphore Fellowship
James Tughan, (B.Th., B.A. Hon., Fine Art), visual artist and educator, is 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. His work has been commissioned by major corporations throughout North America and magazines such as: Rolling Stone, Esquire, Saturday Night and House & Garden.