Faith. Works. Slavery
https://www.youtube.com/watch?
Wednesday, November 1, 2023
Fall 2023 : Week Two : Paul, Galatians, Philemon
Fall 2023 Salem Institute Week 1 How to Read Scripture
First Week of Fall Salem Institute class
Lots of ideas from the book, Opening the Bible, by Roger Ferle
And, Brent Schmidt's book, Relational Grace. He sent me a free PDF of his book and said I could share it with my students. Email me directly if you want a copy. rebeccahstay@gmail.com
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVAO7dRFujM&list=PLD9o3pQYhVMF2TXItDBjF2-WOro3i93Af&index=13&t=44s
Friday, August 11, 2023
British Pageant Broadcast for First Time this Weekend.
The Pageant will be livestreamed starting at 7:30 Summer UK time, which was a few hours ago.
But it will be available for streaming for 48 hours, so most of Saturday and all day Sunday.
I have heard it is well-done.
Sunday, April 9, 2023
Easter Monday
Caravagio
Every time I hear that phrase I think of another day with Thomas.
Upon hearing that Lazarus was dying, Jesus waited 4 days, then turned his face toward Jerusalem.
John 11:8 His disciples say unto him, Master, the Jews of late sought to stone thee; and goest thou thither again?John 11:16 Then said Thomas, which is called Didymus, unto his fellowdisciples, Let us also go, that we may die with him.
Let's make mention of this Thomas.
St. Thomas the Apostle
- by Malcolm Guite
“We do not know… how can we know the way?”
Courageous master of the awkward question,
You spoke the words the others dared not say
And cut through their evasion and abstraction.
Oh doubting Thomas, father of my faith,
You put your finger on the nub of things
We cannot love some disembodied wraith,
But flesh and blood must be our king of kings.
Your teaching is to touch, embrace, anoint,
Feel after Him and find Him in the flesh.
Because He loved your awkward counter-point
The Word has heard and granted you your wish.
Oh place my hands with yours, help me divine
The wounded God whose wounds are healing mine.
Saturday, April 8, 2023
Easter Sunday : "He is Risen"
Walter Rane
“Seven Stanzas at Easter” (John Updike)
Make no mistake: if he rose at all
It was as His body;
If the cell’s dissolution did not reverse, the molecule reknit,
The amino acids rekindle,
The Church will fall.
It was not as the flowers,
Each soft spring recurrent;
It was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled eyes of the
Eleven apostles;
It was as His flesh; ours.
The same hinged thumbs and toes
The same valved heart
That—pierced—died, withered, paused, and then regathered
Out of enduring Might
New strength to enclose.
Let us not mock God with metaphor,
Analogy, sidestepping, transcendence,
Making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the faded
Credulity of earlier ages:
Let us walk through the door.
The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache,
Not a stone in a story,
But the vast rock of materiality that in the slow grinding of
Time will eclipse for each of us
The wide light of day.
And if we have an angel at the tomb,
Make it a real angel,
Weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair, opaque in
The dawn light, robed in real linen
Spun on a definite loom.
Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
For our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
Lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed
By the miracle,
And crushed by remonstrance.
—John Updike, “Seven Stanzas as Easter” (1960)
This final station of the cross is a recent -and most appropriate - addition.
XV Easter Dawn
-Malcolm Guite
He blesses every love which weeps and grieves
And now he blesses hers who stood and wept
And would not be consoled, or leave her love’s
Last touching place, but watched as low light crept
Up from the east. A sound behind her stirs
A scatter of bright birdsong through the air.
She turns, but cannot focus through her tears,
Or recognize the Gardener standing there.
She hardly hears his gentle question ‘Why,
Why are you weeping?’, or sees the play of light
That brightens as she chokes out her reply
‘They took my love away, my day is night’
And then she hears her name, she hears Love say
The Word that turns her night, and ours, to Day.
Three Translations of Rainer Maria Rilke's poem. I enjoyed reading the similar yet unique was the translators expressed Rilke's words.
Mary at Peace with the Risen Lord
What they felt then: isn't it
sweeter than every secret,
than all that's only earth;
when he, still pale from the grave,
came assuaged to her:
in all ways resurrected.
O to her first. And they were then
being saved, ineffably.
Yes, being saved, that's it. They had no need
to touch each other firmly.
He laid for a second -
if that - his soon to be
eternal hand on her woman's shoulder.
And they began, at peace,
like trees in spring,
the boundless and the bounded,
the season of this
their utmost association.
Translated from the German by
David Curzon and Will Alexander Washburn
| Pietà , Painted by Oleg Supereco (born 1974), |
The Quieting of Mary with the Resurrected One
What they felt then: is it not
above all other mysteries the sweetest
and yet still earthly:
when he, pale from the grave,
his burdens laid down, went to her:
risen in all places.
Oh, first to her. How they
inexpressibly began to heal.
Yes heal: that simple. They felt no need
to touch each other strongly.
He placed his hand, which next
would be eternal, for scarcely
a second on her womanly shoulder.
And they began
quietly as trees in spring
in infinite simultaneity
their season
of ultimate communing.
-Translated by Randy Coleman-Riese
Ivanka Demchuk
THE CONSOLATION OF MARY WITH THE RESURRECTED CHRIST
What they then experienced, is it not
sweet above all secrets
and still quite earthly:
there he, a little pale still from the grave,
disburdened stepped towards her,
resurrected in every way.
O, to her first. How they were there,
beyond description, in healing.
Yes, they were healing; that was it. They had no need
to boldly touch.
For scarcely a moment
he laid his almost
eternal hand upon her womanly shoulder.
And they began,
silently as the trees in spring,
infinitely together
this season
of their deepest communion.
(unknown translator: https://www.moravianseminary.
Easter Saturday in the Tomb
Brian Kershisnik
Two more Stations
-Malcolm Guite
XIII Jesus’ body is taken down from the cross
His spirit and his life he breathes in all
Now on this cross his body breathes no more
Here at the centre everything is still
Spent, and emptied, opened to the core.
A quiet taking down, a prising loose
A cross-beam lowered like a weighing scale
Unmaking of each thing that had its use
A long withdrawing of each bloodied nail,
This is ground zero, emptiness and space
With nothing left to say or think or do
But look unflinching on the sacred face
That cannot move or change or look at you.
Yet in that prising loose and letting be
He has unfastened you and set you free.
XIV Jesus is laid in the tomb
Here at the centre everything is still
Before the stir and movement of our grief
Which bears it’s pain with rhythm, ritual,
Beautiful useless gestures of relief.
So they anoint the skin that cannot feel
Soothing his ruined flesh with tender care,
Kissing the wounds they know they cannot heal,
With incense scenting only empty air.
He blesses every love that weeps and grieves
And makes our grief the pangs of a new birth.
The love that’s poured in silence at old graves
Renewing flowers, tending the bare earth,
Is never lost. In him all love is found
And sown with him, a seed in the rich ground.
Chora Church, Istanbul
Ikon: The Harrowing of Hell
Down through the tomb's inward arch
He has shouldered out into Limbo to gather them, dazed, from dreamless slumber: the merciful dead, the prophets, the innocents just His own age and those unnumbered others waiting here unaware, in an endless void He is ending now, stooping to tug at their hands, to pull them from their sarcophagi, dazzled, almost unwilling. Didmas, neighbor in death, Golgotha dust still streaked on the dried sweat of his body no one had washed and anointed, is here, for sequence is not known in Limbo; the promise, given from cross to cross at noon, arches beyond sunset and dawn. All these He will swiftly lead to the Paradise road: they are safe. That done, there must take place that struggle no human presumes to picture: living, dying, descending to rescue the just from shadow, were lesser travails than this: to break through earth and stone of the faithless world back to the cold sepulchre, tearstained stifling shroud; to break from them back into breath and heartbeat, and walk the world again, closed into days and weeks again, wounds of His anguish open, and Spirit streaming through every cell of flesh so that if mortal sight could bear to perceive it, it would be seen His mortal flesh was lit from within, now, and aching for home. He must return, first, in Divine patience, and know hunger again, and give to humble friends the joy of giving Him food—fish and a honeycomb.
Ivanka Demchuk
Friday, April 7, 2023
Good Friday
Unkept Good Fridays
by Thomas Hardy
There are many more Good Fridays
Than this, if we but knew
The names, and could relate them,
Of men whom rulers slew
For their goodwill, and date them
As runs the twelvemonth through.
These nameless Christs' Good Fridays,
Whose virtues wrought their end,
Bore days of bonds and burning,
With no man to their friend,
Of mockeries, and spurning;
Yet they are all unpenned.
When they had their Good Fridays
Of bloody sweat and strain
Oblivion hides. We quote not
Their dying words of pain,
Their sepulchres we note not,
Unwitting where they have lain.
No annual Good Fridays
Gained they from cross and cord,
From being sawn asunder,
Disfigured and abhorred,
Smitten and trampled under:
Such dates no hands have scored.
Let be. Let lack Good Fridays
These Christs of unwrit names;
The world was not even worthy
To taunt their hopes and aims,
As little of earth, earthy,
As his mankind proclaims.
Good Friday, 1927
Balage Balogh
Good Friday
by Christina Rossetti
Am I a stone and not a sheep
That I can stand, O Christ, beneath Thy Cross,
To number drop by drop Thy Blood's slow loss,
And yet not weep?
Not so those women loved
Who with exceeding grief lamented Thee;
Not so fallen Peter weeping bitterly;
Not so the thief was moved;
Not so the Sun and Moon
Which hid their faces in a starless sky,
A horror of great darkness at broad noon,—
I, only I.
Yet give not o'er,
But seek Thy sheep, true Shepherd of the flock;
Greater than Moses, turn and look once more
And smite a rock.
More Stations of the Cross
RHS note: many of these stations are legendary, but it helps to know Christian traditions.
By Malcolm Guite
These are taken from ‘Sounding the Seasons; seventy Sonnets for the Christian Year, Canterbury Press 2012′
 |
| Station from the church of St Ignatius in NYC |
VI Veronica wipes the face of Jesus
Bystanders and bypassers turn away
And wipe his image from their memory
She keeps her station. She is here to stay
And stem the flow. She is the reliquary
Of his last look on her. The bloody sweat
And salt tears of his love are soaking through
The folds of her devotion and the wet
folds of her handkerchief, like the dew
Of morning, like a softening rain of grace.
Because she wiped the grime from off his skin,
And glimpsed the godhead in his human face
Whose hidden image we all bear within,
Through all our veils and shrouds of daily pain
The face of god is shining once again.
VII Jesus falls the second time
Through all our veils and shrouds of daily pain,
Through our bruised bruises and re-opened scars,
He falls and stumbles with us, hurt again
When we are hurt again. With us he bears
The cruel repetitions of our cruelty;
The beatings of already beaten men,
The second rounds of torture, the futility
Of all unheeded pleading, every scream in vain.
And by this fall he finds the fallen souls
Who passed a first, but failed a second trial,
The souls who thought their faith would hold them whole
And found it only held them for a while.
Be with us when the road is twice as long
As we can bear. By weakness make us strong.
 |
| By Lynne Kiefer Kobylecky, Our Lady of Guadalupe Trappist Abbey |
VIII Jesus meets the women of Jerusalem
He falls and stumbles with us, hurt again
But still he holds the road and looks in love
On all of us who look on him. Our pain
As close to him as his. These women move
Compassion in him as he does in them.
He asks us both to weep and not to weep.
Women of Gaza and Jerusalem,
Women of every nation where the deep
Wounds of memory divide the land
And lives of all your children, where the mines
Of all our wars are sown: Afghanistan ,
Iraq, the Cote d’Ivoire… he reads the signs
And weeps with you and with you he will stay
Until the day he wipes your tears away.
IX Jesus falls the third time
He weeps with you and with you he will stay
When all your staying power has run out
You can’t go on, you go on anyway.
He stumbles just beside you when the doubt
That always haunts you, cuts you down at last
And takes away the hope that drove you on.
This is the third fall and it hurts the worst
This long descent through darkness to depression
From which there seems no rising and no will
To rise, or breathe or bear your own heart beat.
Twice you survived; this third will surely kill,
And you could almost wish for that defeat
Except that in the cold hell where you freeze
You find your God beside you on his knees.
 |
| Roberto Ferri - Via Crucis |
X Jesus is stripped of His garments
You can’t go on, you go on anyway
He goes with you, his cradle to your grave.
Now is the time to loosen, cast away
The useless weight of everything but love
For he began his letting go before,
Before the worlds for which he dies were made,
Emptied himself, became one of the poor,
To make you rich in him and unafraid.
See as they strip the robe from off his back
They strip away your own defenses too
Now you could lose it all and never lack
Now you can see what naked Love can do
Let go these bonds beneath whose weight you bow
His stripping strips you both for action now
Salvador Dali
XI Crucifixion: Jesus is nailed to the cross
See, as they strip the robe from off his back
And spread his arms and nail them to the cross,
The dark nails pierce him and the sky turns black,
And love is firmly fastened onto loss.
But here a pure change happens. On this tree
Loss becomes gain, death opens into birth.
Here wounding heals and fastening makes free
Earth breathes in heaven, heaven roots in earth.
And here we see the length, the breadth, the height
Where love and hatred meet and love stays true
Where sin meets grace and darkness turns to light
We see what love can bear and be and do,
And here our saviour calls us to his side
His love is free, his arms are open wide.
XII Jesus dies on the cross
The dark nails pierce him and the sky turns black
We watch him as he labours to draw breath
He takes our breath away to give it back,
Return it to its birth through his slow death.
We hear him struggle breathing through the pain
Who once breathed out his spirit on the deep,
Who formed us when he mixed the dust with rain
And drew us into consciousness from sleep.
His spirit and his life he breathes in all
Mantles his world in his one atmosphere
And now he comes to breathe beneath the pall
Of our pollutions, draw our injured air
To cleanse it and renew. His final breath
Breathes us, and bears us through the gates of death.
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