Epiphany Crowns and Haloes

"Adoration of the Magi," tapestry by Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris

It's fascinating how various parts of daily life can manifest themselves in ways that intersect and surprise.

With Epiphany on the horizon, my mind had been returning to my blurry memory of the image above, which I used a couple of years ago in a presentation as part of my DMin degree, comparing this image to the image woven in words by the prophet Amos in chapter 6, where wealth and complacency accompany pride and are condemned.

I put a lot of work into that and was sad because I thought I had lost it forever, since I did it on the laptop that was stolen this summer;I had looked for it a couple of times in other places without success. But this evening one more search led me to find it in my emails.

I was reminded that the final sentence of what I wrote alluded to the choice between wearing crowns or being given haloes, because one thing that struck me in the tapestry is that all three kings have removed their crowns, and the one approaching Jesus has laid his on the ground, no doubt with an eye to Revelation 4:10 scene where the 24 elders cast their crowns before Jesus.

Whether kings or not (go here for a helpful article on the identity of these men), the wise men must have been wealthy to have traveled so far, and to spend their lives studying the stars. But they used their wealth to find and worship the Light of the world rather than as a means of gaining pleasure and status like the wealthy Amos addressed.

So, feeling happy that I'd discovered a copy of my work, and also being able to look again at the beautiful tapestry after finding the name and artist, I opened the book that we've been reading from throughout Advent and Christmas, to see what the reading for today is.

Here is what I found:

The child we seek

doesn't need our gold.

On love, on love alone

he will build his kingdom.

His piercéd hand will hold no scepter,

his haloed head will wear no crown;

his might will not be built

on your toil.

Swifter than lightning

he will soon walk among us.

He will bring us new life

and receive our death,

and the keys to his city

belong to the poor.

~Gian Carlo Menotti,

from "Amahl and the Night Visitors"

And there it is--"his haloed head will wear no crown." I may have read this poem before, but I had never noticed that line until tonight. It has felt like an evening among old friends, somehow, even though I'm sick with the flu and home alone. A sweet reunion of sorts.

If we all desired the holiness of the halo over the power and prestige of the crown, what a different world it would be. Literal crowns are rare, but the desire for wealth and power certainly isn't. We can at least put down our own crowns and hope and pray for this crown-crazed world. And like the wise men, look for the light and follow it to its Source.

Postscript: I believe the way I originally discovered this tapestry was via the blog of my friend Janet a couple of years ago. Her poem based on it, which I've linked to, is worth reading, also.

Primavera

Primavera always makes me think "first green." In Italian, "verde" is green, and a little etymological hunting seems to confirm that at least some word hunters believe the Latin words for "spring" (ver) and "green" (viride) may go back to some shared root. it would certainly make sense.

This post isn't about the first green, but the blossoms that precede the green leaves. But primavera dictionarily means "spring," and that's what this is about. The coming to life after a period of dormancy. The colors after the more "meno-chrome" winter, if I may create a new word not for  the monochrome state of having only one color, but the winter-in-the-South state of having less color.

The grass was still actually monochrome at the time I took these pictures a couple of weeks ago, except for those few little green weeds.

We always had a flowering quince in the yard when I was growing up, so I wanted to have one in our yard here. When I called the nursery, the owner didn't have the brighter, solid peachey red I was hoping for, but he suggested this one instead.

I took a chance, based on his description over the phone.

And am so glad I did! It's really beautiful, and even though it's still a young thing,

this year it had more blossoms than the two years before.

I'm beginning to feel as if my own mind, body, and heart are coming to life again after a long winter.

I started this degree in 2012, the same year my mom began having serious health problems and hospitalizations that went on throughout the next four years. So it's been a very, very unusual five years since then. I often felt I couldn't give enough to school because of the family situation. And I often felt I couldn't give enough to my family because of school.

And yet, somehow the energy kept coming, and we made it through to my mom's beautiful and victorious ending. And I recently defended my thesis project, and am very close to bringing that to an ending. Not nearly the same kind of beauty and victory, but an ending I'll be thankful for.

Since the defense (on February 27), I have struggled with an exhaustion of mind, body, and spirit. I did stay up pretty late a few nights the week before the defense, but i don't think it's just that immediate sleep deprivation. I think it's five years of tiredness finally feeling free to make itself felt. Throughout the past month, I have just not felt capable of doing anything beyond what I absolutely had to do--and occasionally have cancelled commitments because I was just too tired even for those routine activities.

It has been, I must say, a wonderful thing to experience spring this year. I always love spring, but this year especially it is like a promise. A promise that new life will return, because it always does. It doesn't depend on the flowers or the birds or the trees to make it happen. The Creator and Sustainer makes it happen, year after year after year.

And so even though I must of course do what I can to get my sleep, eat well, rest, drink water, make time for the refreshment of friends and family--it doesn't depend on me to somehow make my energy return. I can trust that it will.

And little by little, just in the past week or so, it has been happening.

A couple of mornings I've waked up and felt alive, refreshed, eager to get up and get going. Sometimes it lasts two hours, sometimes four or five. Sometimes I've taken a short nap and felt energetic again in the afternoon.

I've been remembering recipes I haven't made in 4-5 years. I've begun playing the piano more than I have in a long time. Little by little it's as if my brain is finding more space available, and even my body is remembering routines it had to temporarily forget about for a while.

And here I am, writing on my blog!

The flowering quince is all in green now, at the time I'm writing this. Only four or five blossoms remain on the plant; the rest is all filled out in green leaves. Primavera.

But it was those blossoms that gave me so much hope and joy. They are fragile but beautiful, and this year they helped me believe that as fragile and tired as I've felt, the day would come when the sap would flow more fully, the green leaves would come out, and the plant would be ready for another season of growth.

I trust that I will be ready again before too long, too.

For behold, the winter is past; the rain is over and gone. 

The flowers appear on the earth; the time of singing has come....

Song of Songs 2:11-12

Candlemas

It's dark and cold and wet outside. A good day for candles inside. And today is Candlemas, which, I've seen on calendars for some years but only recently learned refers to the day that Mary and Joseph took Jesus to the Temple, and Anna and Simeon testified to this Light coming into the world. As early as the latter part of the fourth century the church in Jerusalem was celebrating this day, according to a pilgrim who traveled there from Bordeaux, a woman named Egeria who kept a journal of her experience (that you can read here, if interested.)

In churches that celebrate the day, candles are an important part of the service, with every person in the procession carrying one, representing the Light of Christ entering the Temple.

Of course since electricity came along (and I'm not complaining), we have largely lost the sense of dependency on fire as a source of both heat and light. Candles are largely a decorative item for us. But how beautiful it must have been in the middle of winter in 380-something A.D., to go to church and see lots and lots of candles, even to carry one yourself, in a procession for the very purpose of remembering that the Light of God had come into the world as a human, and was spreading from person to person, lighting up the darkness.

Especially in the years after the fall of Rome, when the darkness must have seemed even darker than before, I wonder what it was like for people on this day and other special days--and of course every Sunday was a special day--as they tenaciously held onto their candles, whether literal or figurative, holding onto what they had been told, that Light had come into the darkness, that the darkness was not the final reality.

Most musical settings of Simeon's song use the older language, which I happen to believe is beautiful, having sung it many times.

Lord, now lettest Thou Thy servant
depart in peace
according to Thy Word,
for mine eyes have seen Thy salvation
which Thou hast prepared
before the face of all people.
To be a Light to light on the Gentiles
And to be the glory of Thy people Israel.
Glory be to the Father
And to the Son
And to the Holy Ghost,
As it was the beginning,
Is now and ever shall be,
World without end. Amen.

+++++

Nunc Dimittis
by John Shephard (1515-1559)

(The photo is of candles in the cathedral of Milan, from my trip in 2008.)

Eat this Book

 

In the fall, I took a class on the book of Revelation. I don't think that I wrote about that here. I don't think I wrote much at all here in the fall, did I? And that's a big part of why I did not. I was reading my head off and my heart out. By that, I mean that it really did involve a lot of academic, mind-stretching reading, but the reading and learning reached into my heart and did some amazing things. I was also writing quite a lot, a long paper and a couple of exams.

I don't know why this thing will not let me align my text on the left, as I am telling it to do. But it won't.

Which takes my mind to the various forms that writing has taken over time, and to the title of the post, which comes from, or actually is, the title of a book by Eugene Peterson that I read a few years ago as part of another study adventure.

And Eugene Peterson took the words from the book of Revelation (with allusions to the writings and experiences of Isaiah the prophet), when John is told by the angel to "eat this book" that he has been given.by another angel. The word used for "book" is also translated "scroll," but Peterson uses the "book" translation in his work, obviously.

Peterson writes, "Eating a book takes it all in, assimilating it into the tissues of our lives. Readers become what they read. . . . The angel does not instruct St. John to pass on information about God: he commands him to assimilate the word of God so that when he does speak it will express itself artlessly in his syntax just as the food we eat, when we are healthy, is unconsciously assimilated into our nerves and muscles and put to work in speech and action. . . Words--spoken and listened to, written and read--are intended to do something in us, give health and wholeness, vitality and holiness, wisdom and hope. Yes, eat this book."

During the taking of that class, not long after the death of my beloved "Accompanist," I had an experience that I won't recount here, except to say that at a time when I really needed health and wholeness, wisdom and hope, they came to me in the form of seven precise words, words I had assimilated into my being-- words from the book of  Isaiah, as it happens. And they changed my experience of her death, and my grief, and they even influenced the paper I was writing for the class on Revelation.

Those seven words changed me. Changed me for good.

Earlier in January, the week I was home with the flu, I read Ann Voskamp's One Thousand Gifts, which led me to find her blog, which led me to find her scripture memorization project.

Which has led me to accept her encouragement to recommence something that was once a regular part of my life--committing the Word to memory. Growing up as I did, going to church and attending a church-related school, memorizing scripture was something we did all the time. Usually a memory verse or two for church. Often a large chunk and even a whole chapter for school. In sixth grade, Meg Ireland at church on Wednesday nights had us memorizing more than I had before. And then in high school, singing in the chorus, I committed psalms and other passages to memory via music that stay with me to this day.

(As an aside, but closely related to my topic, I was pleased at Thanksgiving time, while driving to my parents' house and listening to an interview about John Donne, to poke around inside my mind and find that I could still recite all of Donne's sonnet "At the Round Earth's Imagined Corners," thanks to having learned it in chorus all those years ago!)

Recently I was listening to an interview with Melvyn Bragg, who grew up in a similar environment to mine, though his was rural England rather than rural Arkansas. He said that scripture "was like the lining of my mind." It was everywhere, and it was a huge part of what formed him. In the interview, he went on mainly to talk about how scripture, specifically the Authorized Version ("King James Version," as most Americans say)  formed and influenced the entire British nation and beyond. Note: the link above is not to the same interview I listened to, but it covers some of the same material.

Somewhere along the way, somewhere in my college years, I stopped committing scripture to memory. But after college, when I was living in Croatia, living through the war going on around us, and harder yet the wars that went on deep inside me, I was so thankful for scriptures that came to mind when I needed them. They helped get me through those years, those battles, that war.

And yet I never did resume the discipline.

Until now.

I am at a time in my life of realizing that I want to have more say about what forms "the lining of my mind." I want to memorize music again, and I want to memorize scripture again. Maybe I'll eventually memorize important poetry again. I want my mind to be a place of health and wholeness, vitality and holiness, wisdom and hope. And it doesn't get that way by chance. In times of grief, or indecision, or sadness, or even joy, I want to have resources available for expressing what I need to express, for learning what I need to learn, hearing what I need hear, seeing what I need to see.

I want to "eat this book."

(The photos above are from the Bible I've had since my dad gave it to me when I was five years old. I'm glad no one ever told me not to underline in my Bible. I love going through it and seeing what I underlined at various times in my life. Psalm 103 happens also to be one of those passages I learned in chorus, too, and I still hear those words to that melody and in that rhythm.....)