February 2016 – Page 2 – Art & Theology

Other than celebrating the two high holy days of Christmas and Easter, I did not follow the liturgical calendar growing up; it was never highlighted in my church. It wasn’t really until after college, when I became involved in a denominationally diverse Christian community, that I realized what I was missing out on, and since then the liturgical calendar is something I’ve learned to appreciate and observe—at least its main seasons: Advent, Christmas, Lent, and Easter, which concludes with the feast of Pentecost. The observance of these seasons is not mandated in scripture, but the church has devised them as a way to help us relive the story of God together throughout the year and to encourage us to meditate over an extended period on key mysteries of the faith.

Russian icon depicting the twelve great feasts of the Orthodox Church, plus the “feast of feasts,” the Resurrection, in the center, ca. 1903.

Wendy M. Wright has aided me greatly in my understanding of the set-apart days and seasons of the church year—their history, significance, and how they can be used as tools for spiritual growth. In her introduction to The Rising: Living the Mysteries of Lent, Easter, and Pentecost (part of an excellent trilogy of books written from an ecumenical perspective), she describes how and why the church has structured time. This passage is quoted here with her permission: Continue reading “The sanctification of time in the church year” →

The poet laureate of the United Kingdom from 1930 until his death in 1967, John Masefield occasionally turned to Christian themes in his writing. In 1911 he wrote “The Everlasting Mercy,” a long poem that tells the tale of a man’s conversion from a life of sin to life in Christ. Masefield takes us down into the darkness felt by the poem’s antihero and speaker, Saul Kane—a belligerent drunk and a womanizer—and then up into the light he experiences when, in his own words, “the Lord took pity on me” and “brought me into grace.”

The bulk of the poem takes place during one of Saul’s drinking binges: he has just clobbered one of his friends in a boxing match, defending his (knowingly false) claim to a piece of land, and is celebrating at the Lion, a local pub. As is his custom, he starts flirting with a barmaid and then makes a sexual pact with her. He feels a sting of moral conviction about this—

And while we whispered there together
I give her silver for a feather
And felt a drunkenness like wine
And shut out Christ in husks and swine.
I felt the dart strike through my liver.
God punish me for’t and forgive her.

—but not enough to stop him from carrying out the deed. To ease his conscience, he issues a direct address to his fellow males, urging them away from such behavior:

O young men, pray to be kept whole
From bringing down a weaker soul.
Your minute’s joy so meet in doin’
May be the woman’s door to ruin;
The door to wandering up and down,
A painted whore at half a crown.
The bright mind fouled, the beauty gay
All eaten out and fallen away,
By drunken days and weary tramps
From pub to pub by city lamps
Till men despise the game they started
Till health and beauty are departed,
And in a slum the reeking hag
Mumbles a crust with toothy jag,
Or gets the river’s help to end
The life too wrecked for man to mend.

Found Drowned by G. F. Watts — George Frederic Watts (British, 1817–1904), *Found Drowned*, 1850. Oil on canvas. Watts Gallery, Guildford, Surrey, England.

Throughout the poem Saul’s narration is shot through with this sort of guilty awareness of his own depravity. It disgusts him, but he represses that disgust while he’s in the act of perpetrating whatever sin is at hand, whether it be lying, stealing, poaching, punching, speaking irreverently, or taking sexual advantage of young women. Continue reading “Excerpts from “The Everlasting Mercy” by John Masefield” →