April 6: How Long Will You Forget Me?
♫ Music:
Day 36- Wednesday, April 6
Title: HOW LONG WILL YOU FORGET ME?
Scripture: Psalm 13
How long, O Lord? Will You forget me forever?
How long will You hide Your face from me?
How long shall I take counsel in my soul,
Having sorrow in my heart daily?
How long will my enemy be exalted over me?
Consider and hear me, O Lord my God;
Enlighten my eyes,
Lest I sleep the sleep of death;
Lest my enemy say,
“I have prevailed against him”;
Lest those who trouble me rejoice when I am moved.
But I have trusted in Your mercy;
My heart shall rejoice in Your salvation.
I will sing to the Lord,
Because He has dealt bountifully with me.
Poetry:
Peace
by Gerard Manley Hopkins
When will you ever, Peace, wild wooddove,
shy wings shut,
Your round me roaming end, and under be my
boughs?
When, when, Peace, will you, Peace? I'll not play
hypocrite
To own my heart: I yield you do come sometimes;
but
That piecemeal peace is poor peace. What pure
peace allows
Alarms of wars, the daunting wars, the death of it?
O surely, reaving Peace, my Lord should leave in lieu
Some good! And so he does leave Patience exquisite,
That plumes to Peace thereafter. And when Peace
here does house
He comes with work to do, he does not come to coo,
He comes to brood and sit.
TRUST IN THE DARK
“How long will you forget me?”
Psalm 13 gives voice to an important, aching thread of the Christian experience that is woven through the centuries. Sometimes, when we need God the most, he appears perplexingly, painfully silent.
We find in Scripture many beautiful promises: God’s comfort, peace, presence, vindication, and redemption. So when it seems like God is absent, either personally or in the face of evil and injustice, it is experienced as the most painful of contradictions. Twentieth century Welsh poet and priest R.S. Thomas, who wrote often on God’s absence, expresses bitterly in “Via Negativa”:
Why no! I never thought other than
That God is that great absence
In our lives, the empty silence
Within, the place where we go
Seeking, not in hope to
Arrive or find.
Many of us have, at some time or another, felt this intimate wound, and it’s comforting to see that this experience is shared by other spiritual fathers and mothers: St. John of the Cross, Mother Teresa.
When we see that Jesus also experienced the searing silence of the Father, that is more comforting still. How fitting that this “man of suffering, and familiar with pain” (Isaiah 53:3), experienced this grief as well. We see this depicted evocatively in Vasily Perov’s Christ in Gethsemane, where Jesus is rendered nearly lifeless, stripped of the animating communion of the Father. And then on the cross, Christ gives voice to the raw pain of abandonment: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
In the end, the perception of God’s absence––whether felt in crucial moments or for a lifetime remains a mystery. However, the cry of the Psalmist, Christ in Gethsemane and on the cross, and many other voices throughout Scripture and across the Christian tradition are essential companions during this dark night. They complexify the picture of a world assumed to run by rigid cause-and-effect principles. They protest that no, sometimes the cry of the righteous echoes empty, sometimes evil triumphs.
Yet persevering through the paradox of this present time draws us into a deeper understanding. Hopkins writes, “O surely, reaving Peace, my Lord should leave in lieu/Some good! And so he does leave Patience exquisite.” Patience and trust––even when chosen as steps in the dark––carve upon our hearts the story to which we belong, the one we wait to be fulfilled.
And God does not leave us with just a paradox. He himself embodies it along with us. In Gethsemane, Christ is both the absence and the presence of God; he holds the wound of God’s silence within his Triune godhood. On that night, he experiences and prepares to bear in full the suffering of the world. And so, in the dark, the suffering, the silence, He is.
Prayer
Dear God,
Thank you that you still are, even in your silence and amid the world’s deepest hurt. As we long for your presence and comfort, carve upon our hearts the story of redemption within which we belong, and fill us with patient hope.
Amen
Abby Amstutz
Director of Communications
Development Associates International
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:
Christ in Gethsemane
Vasily Perov
1878
Oil on canvas
151.5 x 238 cm
State Tretyakov Gallery
Moscow, Russia
The Garden of Gethsemane is where Jesus prayed the night before he was taken into custody. In his painting Christ in Gethsemane, artist Vasily Perov has purposefully depicted Christ without showing his facial features as a way to symbolically express the purity and holiness of the image of Christ. A greenish pale moonlight illuminates the garden and prostrate figure of Christ. His hands, stretched out in prayer, seem deathly pale and his whole figure is shrouded in tangles of shadows perhaps meant as an omen of impending disaster and future suffering. In this picture Perov sought to show not only the divine, but also the human nature of Christ, who is feeling the weight of his imminent death.
https://en.opisanie-kartin.com/description-of-the-painting-by-vasily-perov-christ-in-the-garden-of-gethsemane/
About the Artist:
Vasily Perov (1834–1882) was a Russian painter and a key figure of the Russian realist movement and one of the founding members of Peredvizhnika, a group of Russian realist artists who formed a cooperative in protest of the strict academic restrictions at the Imperial Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg. His early works, permeated by a romantic spirit, combined detailed brushwork with anecdotal narratives and aimed at criticizing social behavior, reflecting the contemporary democratic doctrines of such writers as liberal social critic Nikolay Chernyshevsky. From1862 to 1864, Perov traveled abroad, working mainly in Paris, where he painted a series of vivid genre scenes of city life. Perov’s success as a genre painter reached its peak in the latter half of the 1860s. His compositions become more laconic and expressive; overcoming an undisciplined use of color, he achieved an impressive unity with an austere grayish-brown palette. Perov also wrote, producing talented sketches of popular life.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasily_Perov
http://www.all-art.org/impressionism/perov1.html
About the Music:
“Psalm 13 - How Long O Lord” from the album Brian Doerksen Collection
Lyrics:
How long O Lord will You forget me
How long O Lord will You look the other way
How long O Lord.
How long O Lord will You forget me
How long O Lord will You look the other way
How long O Lord must I wrestle with my thoughts
And every day have such sorrow in my heart.
Look on me and answer, O God my Father
Bring light to my darkness before they see me fall.
How long O Lord will You forget me
How long O Lord will You look the other way
How long O Lord must I wrestle with my thoughts
And every day have such sorrow in my heart.
Look on me and answer, O God my Father
Bring light to my darkness before they see me fall
But I trust in Your unfailing love
Yes my heart will rejoice
Still I sing of Your unfailing love
You have been good, You will be good to me
Look on me and answer, O God my Father
Bring light to my darkness before they see me fall
Look on me and answer, O God my Father
Bring light to my darkness before they see me fall
But I trust in Your unfailing love
Yes my heart will rejoice
But I trust in Your unfailing love
Yes my heart will rejoice
Still I sing of Your unfailing love
You have been good
But I trust in Your unfailing love
Yes my heart will rejoice
Still I sing of Your unfailing love
You have been good,
You will be good to me
About the Performer/Composer:
Brian Doerksen is a Canadian Christian singer/songwriter, conference speaker, and worship leader from Abbotsford, British Columbia. Doerksen, a member at a local Mennonite Brethren Church in British Columbia, graduated from the Mennonite Educational Institute in 1983. In his early twenties, he joined the staff of the Langley Vineyard Christian Fellowship and spent several years there as the worship pastor in the late 1980s and early 1990s. For many years Doerksen was part of the Vineyard Churches as well as Vineyard Music Group. In that context he has been extremely influential in the area of contemporary Christian worship music. He was a featured worship leader on many Vineyard worship CDs and has also taught extensively on worship leading and songwriting. Notable songs written by Doerksen include "Refiner's Fire" (1990), "Light the Fire Again" (1994), "Come Now is the Time to Worship" (1998), "Faithful One" (2002), "Hope of the Nations" (2003), and "Today (As For Me and My House)" (2008). More recently, Doerksen has been producing worship music through Integrity's Hosanna Music, including his albums You Shine (2002), Today (2004), Live in Europe (2005), Holy God (2006), and It's Time (2008). Doerksen received a Gospel Music Association Dove Award in 2003, only the second Canadian to be so honored. He is also a member of the music group the Shiyr Poets.
https://www.briandoerksen.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Doerksen
About the Poet:
Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889) is regarded as one of 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’ works entitled Poems that first appeared in 1918.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/gerard-manley-hopkins
About the Devotion Author:
Abby Amstutz
Director of Communications
Development Associates International (DAI)
Abby Amstutz is the Director of Communications for Development Associates International. She joined DAI in 2019 after graduating with a Master of Arts in intercultural studies from Fuller Seminary. Previously, she served as an administrative assistant at Kasr el Dobarah Evangelical Church in Cairo, Egypt, and worked in the holistic resettlement of Middle Eastern refugees and asylees in the Kansas City metropolitan area. Amstutz holds a B.A. in biblical and theological studies from Wheaton College. She brings her extensive cross-cultural experience and a passion for the global church to DAI, where she is responsible for helping connect people with a passion for leadership to the work of DAI, whose mission is enhancing the integrity and effectiveness of Christian leaders worldwide so that the church can fulfill its role in extending the kingdom of God.