Category: Music

Advent, Day 5: When?

Victoria Emily Jones1 Comment

LOOK: Bethlehem by Carola Faller-Barris

Faller-Barris, Carola_Bethlehem
Carola Faller-Barris (German, 1964–), Bethlehem, 2009. Pencil on paper on MDF board, 100 × 180 cm. [HT]

LISTEN: “Peace” | Words by Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1879, and Wilfred Owen, 1917 | Music by Peter Bruun, 2017 | Performed by the Svanholm Singers, dir. Sofia Söderberg, on Exclusive, 2019

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?

Out there, we’ve walked quite friendly up to Death,—
Sat down and eaten with him, cool and bland,—
Pardoned his spilling mess-tins in our hand.
We’ve sniffed the green thick odour of his breath,—
Our eyes wept, but our courage didn’t writhe.
He’s spat at us with bullets and he’s coughed
Shrapnel. We chorussed when he sang aloft,
We whistled while he shaved us with his scythe.

Oh, Death was never enemy of ours!
We laughed at him, we leagued with him, old chum.
No soldier’s paid to kick against His powers.
We laughed,—knowing that better men would come,
And greater wars: when each proud fighter brags
He wars on Death, for lives; not men, for flags.

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.

The text of this choral work by the Danish composer Peter Brunn combines two British poems: “Peace” by Gerard Manley Hopkins and “The Next War” by Wilfred Owen. Let’s look at each one separately, and then together.

“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.

The Jesuit poet-priest Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889) wrote this curtal sonnet on October 2, 1879, after finding out he was reassigned from his role as curate at St. Aloysius’s church in Oxford to curate at St. Joseph’s in the industrial town of Bedford Leigh, near Manchester. He was apprehensive about this move to a place he described as “very gloomy” and unclean. The following decade, the last of his life, he would be plagued by melancholic dejection, which his later poems reflect. In addition to the internal disquiet he was experiencing in the fall of 1879, there was also an external lack of peace, as Great Britain was at war on three fronts—in southern Africa (against the Zulu kingdom), Afghanistan, and Ireland.

The speaker of the poem addresses Peace, an elusive dove, begging him to come settle down to nest, to incubate his eggs. “Brooding” here, writes J. Nathan Matias, is not a morose act but a generative, warmly creative one, birthing life.

Though the dove appears in scripture as a symbol of God the Spirit, in the last three lines of this poem he could be God the Son, the Prince of Peace. The people waited for generations upon generations for his arrival. And when he came, he was not all talk. He came with serious work to do; he came to hatch a newborn world.

This poem expresses yearning for peace in our hearts and in our lands—a permanent, holistic peace that only Christ can bring.

“The Next War” by Wilfred Owen

“War’s a joke for me and you,
While we know such dreams are true.”
—Siegfried Sassoon

Out there, we’ve walked quite friendly up to Death,—
Sat down and eaten with him, cool and bland,—
Pardoned his spilling mess-tins in our hand.
We’ve sniffed the green thick odour of his breath,—
Our eyes wept, but our courage didn’t writhe.
He’s spat at us with bullets and he’s coughed
Shrapnel. We chorussed when he sang aloft,
We whistled while he shaved us with his scythe.

Oh, Death was never enemy of ours!
We laughed at him, we leagued with him, old chum.
No soldier’s paid to kick against His powers.
We laughed,—knowing that better men would come,
And greater wars: when each proud fighter brags
He wars on Death, for lives; not men, for flags.

One of the premier poets of World War I, Wilfred Owen (1893–1918) was a British soldier whose poems lament the horrors of trench and gas warfare. His cynicism and transparency about war stood in stark contrast to the confidently patriotic verse written by earlier war poets.

Owen wrote “The Next War” while being treated for “shell shock” (PTSD) at Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh; he sent it in a letter to his mother dated September 25, 1917, writing the following week that he wanted her to show it to his youngest brother, Colin—for him “to read, mark, learn.” Owen was discharged from the hospital two months later and returned to the front lines of France, where he was killed in action on November 4, 1918, a week before the armistice, at age twenty-five.

He opens his ironic-toned sonnet with an epigraph from “A Letter Home” by Siegfried Sassoon, a fellow war poet he met at Craiglockhart, who became a friend and a mentor to him. (Bruun omits the epigraph in his choral work so that there’s a seamless transition between poems.) “Dreams will triumph, though the dark / Scowls above me,” Sassoon writes earlier in his poem, a poem that acknowledges the bleakness of war but, imagining the rebirth of a friend slain in battle, clings to the hope that it will soon be over and we can laugh it off.

Owen undercuts the optimism and solace in these lines with what follows in his own poem. The speaker of “The Next War”—which it’s pretty clear is the poet himself—personifies Death as a comrade whose intimate presence is normal among soldiers. He spits bullets, coughs shrapnel, and breathes stinking odors, and yet they ally themselves with him, sing Death’s song, go with him into battle.

Soldiers only delude themselves if they think they fight against Death, Owen asserts; they fight with him. Their nations’ governments will say they’re heroes, taking up arms to save lives and secure peace, but Owen rejects the idea that there’s anything noble, glorious, or effective about war. Soldiers kill men “for flags”—merely serving national interests—and their doing so never puts an end to war but only leads to another.

By bringing together these two texts, sandwiching Owen between Hopkins, Bruun gives a more hopeful framing to Owen’s disillusioned reflections on war, ending with the final image of a brooding dove. I like how the two poems play off one another. For example, Hopkins’s rhetorical question of “What pure peace allows / . . . the death of [peace]?” stands in starker relief when read in conjunction with Owen’s criticism of the ostensible rationale for war.

Bruun still honors Owen’s experience of being made far too familiar with death, his endurance of mortar blasts and mustard gas and all-around carnage, to no apparent end. Owen’s text starts at 2:11 of the video, where a menacing, march-like cadence enters. We feel the anxiety and the darkness of battle. The specificity of the poem resists us metaphorizing war—that is, applying the poem to a situation of inner turmoil (battling inner demons) only. This is physical combat between nations, which, of course, has severe psychological repercussions on the participants.

But at 5:33 the hushed tones of Hopkins return. Bruun had been attracted to Hopkins’s poem “Peace” for some time. In 2010 he wrote a setting of it for solo voice and flute, clarinet, horn, percussion, glockenspiel, violin, violoncello, and contrabass, and in 2016 he published a new setting, with Owens now inserted, as the second in a five-song cycle called Wind Walks for mixed choir and accompaniment, all five texts taken from Hopkins. He then adapted the song for the male-voice chamber choir the Svanholm Singers from Sweden, which is what I feature here.

The pointed and repeated “When” at the opening of Bruun’s piece, a word that Hopkins repeats three times in his poem, is powerful, an echo of the familiar biblical refrain, “How long, O Lord?” If we read Peace as Christ, then the poem is a prayer, asking Christ to come home to us, to our world—to spread his wings over it and nurture it back to life.

In Hebrew thought, shalom, “peace,” is not a passive thing, merely the absence of war. It’s the active presence of God and an all-encompassing state of completeness, soundness, health, safety, and prosperity.

Shalom is what we long for, especially during Advent. It’s what scripture promises will come someday—but now, its lack is keenly felt. It may occasionally flit and hover nearby, but then it flies off again.

As the church, may we embrace “Patience exquisite, / That plumes to Peace thereafter,” as we await Christ’s return, in the meantime preparing his way through acts of righteousness and reconciliation.

Advent, Day 4: Swords into Plowshares

Victoria Emily Jones1 Comment

One day

[. . .]

God
will come forward

to settle the conflicts between us
finally          the one
true witness

even the finality of holocaust
will melt away
like lowland snow

the military hardware
translated into monkey bars
where children play

the hardened postures
crumbled
like ancient statues

children will wave through the gunholes
of tanks
rumbling off to the junkyard

people will find hands
in theirs
instead of guns

learn to walk
into their gardens
instead of battle

Oh House of Israel
let’s walk in the sunlight ways
of his presence

—Isaiah 2:2–5, translated by David Rosenberg in A Poet’s Bible: Rediscovering the Voices of the Original Text (New York: Hyperion, 1991)

LOOK: Isaiah’s Vision of Eternal Peace by Mordecai Ardon

Ardon, Mordecai_Isaiah's Vision of Eternal Peace
Mordecai Ardon (Israeli, 1896–1992) (designer) and Charles Marq (French, 1923–2006) (fabricator), Isaiah’s Vision of Eternal Peace, 1982–84. Stained glass, 6.5 × 17 m. Old National Library of Israel building, Givat Ram campus, Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Photo: Hanan Cohen.

Born in 1896 to a Jewish family in the village of Tuchów in what is today Poland, Mordecai Ardon studied art in Germany under Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, he moved to Jerusalem, becoming a teacher in 1935 at Palestine’s chief art academy, the Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts, which he directed from 1940 to 1952. Known for their vibrant tones and stirring rhythms, Ardon’s paintings often explore the connections between the visible and the invisible and reflect his interest in mysticism and antiquity.

From 1982 to 1984 Ardon carried out a commission by the National Jewish University and Library (now the National Library of Israel) in Jerusalem to develop a monumental triptych of stained glass. His painted designs were translated into the medium of stained glass by the French master glazier Charles Marq, a frequent collaborator of Marc Chagall’s. The result is titled Isaiah’s Vision of Eternal Peace.

Ardon, Mordecai_Isaiah's Vision of Eternal Peace (left)

The left panel illustrates Isaiah 2:2–3:

In days to come the mountain of the LORD’s house shall be established as the highest of the mountains and shall be raised above the hills; all the nations shall stream to it. Many peoples shall come and say, “Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD, to the house of the God of Jacob, that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths.”

Winding like roads, the white bands contain the boldfaced line in various languages—I can detect English, Russian, Polish, Arabic, Latin, and French—representing the peoples of the world streaming to Jerusalem.

Ardon, Mordecai_Isaiah's Vision of Eternal Peace (center)

The center panel depicts a merging of the earthly and heavenly Jerusalems. At the bottom stand the city walls, made up of the seventeen sheets of parchment that comprise the Great Isaiah Scroll from Qumran, dating to around 100 BCE. Floating above are Kabbalistic symbols, including the Tree of the Sefirot, signifying the Divine Presence. There are also several Hebrew texts from Jewish history that I can’t identify.

Ardon, Mordecai_Isaiah's Vision of Eternal Peace (right)

The right panel visualizes the fulfillment of Isaiah 2:4: “. . . they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation; neither shall they learn war any more.” All the machinery of war—tanks and fighter jets, guns and bullets—lies in a garbage heap at the base, and shovels emerge overhead as the weapons are transformed into farming tools.

This glasswork covers an entire wall of the old National Library of Israel building on the Givat Ram campus of Hebrew University. The library moved into a new building in October 2023, situated between the Knesset and the Israel Museum in the heart of Jerusalem. But Ardon’s window remains in its original building at HUJI, which has become a multipurpose space.

LISTEN: “Lo Yisa Goy (Study War No More)” (ֹא יִשָּׂא גוֹי) | Traditional Jewish folk song, arr. Linda Hirschhorn and Fran Avni | Performed by Vocolot, on Behold! (1998)

לֹא יִשָּׂא גוֹי אֶל גוֹי חֶרֶב
לֹא יִלְמְדוּ עוֹד מִלְחָמָה

(Transliteration:
Lo yisa goy el goy cherev
Lo yilmadu od milchama)

(Translation:
Nation will not take up sword against nation
Nor will they train for war anymore)

And into plowshares [they’ll] beat their swords
Nations shall learn war no more

The lyrics of this traditional Jewish antiwar song come from the original Hebrew of Isaiah 2:4, a text held sacred by both Jews and Christians. The song looks with prayerful hope toward the day when global peace will be a reality.

If this is the glorious end state to which we all are headed, the future that God has envisioned and charted for us, then why do we participate in violence now? When governments try to control people through violence, and those people respond with violence, that response only provokes violent retaliation, and so the cycle continues on and on—militancy and death. The line between aggressor and defender becomes blurred. We’ll never get closer to the Isaiah 2 ideal by asserting ourselves with weapons.

May the people of God be a people who refuse violence even when the state commands it, even when we’ve been hit tremendously hard and the urge for payback is intense. May we not become what we fear, inflicting terror because we have been terrorized. And may God bring peace and healing to people and nations who have been victims of war; so too perpetrators of war. To those just trying to survive and be free in this fallen world as best they know how.

The first chapter of Isaiah, which precedes the famous “swords into plowshares” chapter, contains this word from the Lord to his people:

When you stretch out your hands,
I will hide my face from you;
even though you make many prayers,
I will not listen;
your hands are full of blood.
Wash yourselves clean, make yourselves clean;
remove the evil of your doings
from before my eyes;
cease to do evil,
learn to do good;
seek justice,
rescue the oppressed,
defend the orphan,
plead for the widow.

—Isaiah 1:15–17

So let us renounce our vindictiveness and “wash ourselves clean.” And then let us sing this song (1) as a prayer that the Messiah, whom Christians recognize to be Jesus of Nazareth, would come to actualize this beautiful vision of peace, but (2) also as a pledge, committing ourselves to the path of life—to, in the words of the apostle Paul, “overcom[ing] evil with good” (Rom. 12:21).

I like Vocolot’s “Lo Yisa Goy” arrangement best; it has a celebratory mood, as if the coming peace is in sight. But what follows is a handful of others that carry more of a lamentful tone, which is also appropriate as we consider the persistence of war and how short we fall of God’s plan for human flourishing that’s never at the expense of others.

For harp and voice by Estela Ceregatti of Brazil, 2020:

A cappella by the American Midwest female vocal trio Rock Paper Scissors, 2010:

For strings, by La Roche Quartett from Germany, 2018:

A virtual choir under the direction of Andrea Salvemini, 2020:

The last performance employs an increasing number of instruments as the song progresses: guitar, recorder, keyboard, cello, percussion, and accordion. It also includes steps to an Israeli circle dance performed by participants in isolation because this was during the days of COVID quarantines; elsewhere online you can find communal performances where the circle is closed.

Some versions add these two lines as a verse, adapted from Micah 4:4:

And every man ’neath his vine and fig tree
Shall live in peace and unafraid

Roundup: “Peace on Earth” by U2, guns into shovels, and more

Victoria Emily JonesLeave a comment

SONGS:

>> “Peace on Earth” by U2: “Heaven on earth—we need it now. I’m sick of all this hanging around. Sick of the sorrow, sick of the pain . . .” U2’s “Peace on Earth” was inspired by the Omagh bombing in Northern Ireland on August 15, 1998. It first appeared on their 2000 album All That You Can’t Leave Behind, but I prefer the stripped-down acoustic version they recorded last year on Songs of Surrender.

The song wrestles with the tension between the angels’ proclamation of peace in Luke 2 and the course of history ever since, riddled, as before, with violence. “Hope and history won’t rhyme,” the lyrics lament—they’re just not matching up. “Peace on earth” feels naive; the words sometimes stick in our throats. The refrain addresses Christ: “Jesus, can you take the time / To throw a drowning man a line?” In its emotional honesty and its asks, it resembles a biblical psalm. (Bono has in fact spoken about how the Psalms have influenced his songwriting.)

When U2 performed “Peace on Earth” live at Sphere Las Vegas this February, Bono substituted the names of five Irish casualties of the Troubles listed in one of the verses with the names of four Palestinian and Israeli children who have been killed in the current Israel-Hamas War: Gal, Ayat, Hind, and Mila.

>> “There Will Be a Day (Isaiah 2)” by Caroline Cobb, arr. Joel Littlepage: I cued up my favorite song from last year’s Dawning Light service at Grace Mosaic church in Washington, DC (it’s at 32:50–37:29 of the video): “There Will Be a Day” by Caroline Cobb, based on Isaiah 2. The song is from Cobb’s album A Seed, a Sunrise: Advent to Christmas Songs (2020)—it’s my favorite of all her songs, and because of its emotional and summative power, I’ve set it as the concluding track of my Advent Playlist. Joel Littlepage, Grace Mosaic’s pastor of worship and formation and the director of the Daily Prayer Project, arranged it with gospel inflections for his church’s annual Advent carols service. He’s at the keyboard; his wife, Melissa Littlepage, is the vocal soloist (she’s also the choir director); and the saxophonist is Skip Pruitt.

Cobb, the songwriter, has published a new book this year that may be of interest: Advent for Exiles: 25 Devotions to Awaken Gospel Hope in Every Longing Heart. She discusses it on a recent episode of The Habit Podcast that I commend to you.

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ARTWORK: Home (land) Birth (place) by Beth Krensky: Beth Krensky is an artist, activist, and educator of Jewish heritage who describes herself as “a gatherer of things—objects, words, spirit—and a connector of fragments to make us whole.” Her website documents many compelling artistic projects she has undertaken over the past decade. One of them, Home (land) Birth (place), is a performance from 2016 with her academic colleague Amal Kawar, a professor of political science and the author of Daughters of Palestine: Leading Women of the Palestinian National Movement.

Krensky, Beth_Home Land, Birth Place
Beth Krensky (American, 1965–), Home (land) Birth (place), a performance with Amal Kawar, 2016, Great Salt Lake, Utah. Photo: Josh Blumental.

For this piece, Krensky sewed together a truce flag from baby clothes and other white linens and attached it to two olivewood poles onto which she burned quotes from Israeli and Palestinian mothers who have lost a child to Israeli-Palestinian violence. She and Kawar held the flag aloft in the desert outside their hometown of Salt Lake City as a call for peace. Read the artist’s statement at the link above, and view additional photos of the flag here.

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DEVOTIONAL POST: “Swords Will Be Turned into Plowshares,” Center for Christianity, Culture, and the Arts at Biola University: Every year Biola University’s CCCA publishes free daily Advent and Christmas devotions online that feature an artwork, a song, a poem, and a written reflection—the work of many contributors. You can access their 2024 Advent Project here.

Last year I was particularly taken with the peace-themed compilation offered on January 2, which includes a poem by Denise Levertov, a socially conscious, participatory art project led by Pedro Reyes (more on that in next roundup item), a Sweet Honey in the Rock rendition of an African American spiritual, and a wonderful reflection by Dr. Natasha Aleksiuk Duquette, a literature professor. Check it out.

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ARTICLE: “Mexican Artist Pedro Reyes Molds 1,527 Guns into Shovels Used to Plant Trees,” Colossal: Pedro Reyes is a Mexican artist, architect, and cultural agent who seeks to turn social problems into opportunities for tangible change through works that integrate elements of theater, psychology, and activism. (I learned about him through Biola’s Advent Project, above.) In 2008, in cooperation with city authorities, he led a campaign in Culiacán, Mexico, to collect firearms, giving donors vouchers for electronic appliances in exchange. The hundreds of guns he received were publicly crushed by a steamroller, melted, and remolded into shovels, which were then distributed to public schools and other institutions who committed to planting trees with them. This project was an effort to curb local gun violence and to cultivate the collective imagination toward life.

Reyes, Pedro_Palas por Pistolas
Pedro Reyes (Mexican, 1972–), Palas por Pistolas (Guns for Shovels), 2008
Reyes, Pedro_Palas por Pistolas
Artist Pedro Reyes steamrolled 1,527 surrendered guns for his Palas por Pistolas project, transforming them into shovels for planting trees.

I’m interested in exploring more of Reyes’s work, as I love what he’s doing. In 2016, as a visiting lecturer in MIT’s Art, Culture, and Technology Program, he cotaught the course “The Reverse Engineering of Warfare: Challenging Techno-optimism and Reimagining the Defense Sector (an Opera for the End of Times).” A full-color illustrated survey of his projects, Pedro Reyes: Ad Usum / To Be Used, was published by Harvard University Press in 2017.

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INSTAGRAM SERIES: “Alternative Advent 2024” by Kezia M’Clelland: Through December 24, follow the Instagram account @alternative_advent for a progressively revealed photo essay of Advent promises told through journalistic images from 2024, sourced from various news organizations. I call attention to this project every year. The woman behind it, Kezia M’Clelland, has a master’s degree in violence, conflict, and development from SOAS University of London and helps equip churches and communities to support children and families in crisis situations.

Advent, Day 3: True Liberty

Victoria Emily Jones1 Comment

LOOK: Nativity by Josué Sánchez Cerrón

Sánchez Cerrón, Josué_Nativity
Josué Sánchez Cerrón (Peruvian, 1945–), Nativity, 1982. Acrylic on canvas, 88 × 144 cm. © missio Aachen.

LISTEN: “Toda la Tierra” (All Earth Is Waiting) by Alberto Taulé, 1972 | Spanish text and music by Alberto Taulé © 1972, 1993 Centre de Pastoral Litúrgica, Barcelona, admin. OCP Publications; English translation by Gertrude C. Suppe © 1989 United Methodist Publishing House

Below are two performances of this Advent song. The first is by a man and woman from the Parroquía Divino Niño Jesús in Morelia, Mexico, and the second is by the choir Tallo De Amor, from Mexico City:

Toda la tierra espera al Salvador
y el surco abierto, la obra del Señor;
es el mundo que lucha por la libertad,
reclama justicia y busca la verdad.

Dice el profeta al pueblo de Israel:
“De madre virgen ya viene Emmanuel,”
será “Dios con nosotros,” semilla será,
con él la esperanza al mundo volverá.

Montes y valles habrá que preparar;
nuevos caminos temenos que trazar.
él está ya muy cerca, venidlo a encontrar,
y todas las puertas abrid de par en par.

En una cueva Jesús apareció,
pero en el mundo está presente hoy.
Vive en nuestros hermanos, con ellos está;
y vuelve de nuevo a darnos libertad.

ENGLISH TRANSLATION:

All earth is waiting to see the Promised One,
and the open furrows, the sowing of the Lord.
All the world, bound and struggling, seeks true liberty;
it cries out for justice and searches for the truth.

Thus says the prophet to those of Israel:
“A virgin mother will bear Emmanuel,”
for his name is “God with us,” our brother shall be,
with him hope will blossom once more within our hearts.

Mountains and valleys will have to be made plain;
open new highways, new highways for the Lord.
He is now coming closer, so come all and see,
and open the doorways as wide as wide can be.

In the lowly stable the Promised One appeared,
yet, feel his presence throughout the earth today,
for he lives in all Christians and is with us now;
again, with his coming he brings us liberty.

Trans. Gertrude C. Suppe

Alberto Taulé (1932–2007) from Barcelona, Spain, was a Roman Catholic priest and a composer of liturgical music who “believed that every parish should have a dynamic, evolving repertoire”—that “quality music and the regular introduction of new songs are vital to a parish’s spiritual health,” as his Catholic Online obituary reads. Working in the wake of the Second Vatican Council (1962–65), which sanctioned the use of vernacular languages and musical styles in the Mass, Taulé wrote new worship songs that could be grafted into the preexisting liturgical structure, used during the entrance procession, the offertory, the Eucharist, or the closing.

In Spanish-speaking church communities around the world, “Toda la Tierra” is sometimes used as the entrance song for one of the four Advent Sundays. Since the United Methodist Church commissioned an English translation from Gertrude C. Suppe and added the song (with bilingual lyrics) to its hymnal in 1989, it has become more widely known in English-speaking communities as well.

The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America published a different English translation by Madeleine Forell Marshall in the 2006 edition of its hymnal, Evangelical Lutheran Worship; hers preserves the aabb rhyme scheme of the original Spanish and begins with the line “All earth is hopeful, the Savior comes at last!”

The Spanish verb esperar means both “to wait” and “to hope” and is thus especially fitting to describe the action of the church during Advent.

Advent, Day 2: Where the Light Is Gone

Victoria Emily Jones1 Comment

LOOK: Incarnation by Tim Joyner

Joyner, Tim_Incarnation
Tim Joyner (American, 1987–), Incarnation, 2021. Foraged pigment on board-mounted paper, 4 × 4 in.

Tim Joyner is an artist who works primarily with natural pigments and inks derived from locally foraged materials, such as stone, lichen, and seaweed. He is also the worship director at Trinity Church Congregational in Bolton, Massachusetts, where he lives with his wife and four kids.

Incarnation is a painting he made during Advent 2021. He describes its makeup and meaning in a Rabbit Room blog post:

The painting . . . is pretty dark for an Advent piece. It’s primarily Lamp Black (a pigment that I associate with longing and prayer because I make it from the discarded stubs of vigil candles), with some even darker Jet Black. There’s some white from Jingle Shells and a bit of Verdigris, but those are there mostly to make the black pigment look even blacker. Even the orb of gold leaf in the very center of the painting is obscured enough that it mostly just draws attention to the rising movement of dark pigment.

This painting is a reminder to myself that, yes, at the end of all this waiting there is an arrival. But it’s not me arriving at the other end of darkness or doubt, brokenness or betrayal. It is the Christ Child who arrives. He meets us here. And rather than chasing away all that it means to be human—including the pain and the longing unfulfilled—and banishing it forever, He wraps Himself in it. We find Christ not on the other side of our longing, but within it.

LISTEN: “Where the Light Is Gone” by the Wood Drake Sessions, 2023

Refrain:
Where the light is gone
There to us be born

Come, O come, light the shadows
Unto us like an arrow
Make a way, O Emmanuel
Through the night, through the night

In the scars that we carry
From the wars of our families
Make a way, do not tarry
In the night, in the night [Refrain]

In the weight of addiction
In the shame of its mission
Make a way from the prison
In the night, in the night [Refrain]

In the years of our sorrow
When the griefs leave us hollow
Make a way, we lie fallow
In the night, in the night

Final Refrain:
Where the light is gone
There to us be born
Where the light is gone
There may Christ be born

The Wood Drake Sessions is Paul Ranheim of Colorado and Kirk Sauers of Georgia. This song, they write,

asks for Christ to be born into the aches of our world and the longing of our hearts.

Although the Son of God came into our world to joyfully dwell with us, the Christmas season, for many, is often painful, lonely, and despairing as the realities of broken families, stinging disappointments, personal addictions, and profound grief confront us in a poignant way.

Our desire in writing this song is to connect the birth of Christ to these very real, dark areas of our everyday lives. It is a prayer for the hope of the Messiah to be “born” into the places where no light seems to exist.

Advent, Day 1: Wait

Victoria Emily Jones3 Comments

LOOK: Woman Waiting for the Moon to Rise by Uemura Shōen

Uemura Shoen_Woman Waiting for the Moon to Rise
Uemura Shōen (Japanese, 1875–1949), Woman Waiting for the Moon to Rise, 1944. Nihonga watercolor on silk, 73 × 86 cm. Adachi Museum of Art, Yasugi, Japan.

Uemura Shōen, the pseudonym of Uemura Tsune (1875–1949), was a Japanese artist active in the first half of the twentieth century, known primarily for her bijin-ga paintings of beautiful women in the nihonga style. A mold-breaking artist of exceptional skill, “she won international awards and accolades, defied social norms as a single mother of two, and dived into the world of professional painting at a time when women weren’t welcome.” In 1948 she became the first woman to be awarded Japan’s prestigious Order of Culture.

Uemura painted Woman Waiting for the Moon to Rise during World War II, showing a young woman leaning against a bridge railing on a foggy evening, her chin resting on her folded hands and her face looking ahead wistfully. Though the title tells us she’s waiting for the moon to rise, perhaps she’s also waiting for the war to end, for peace to be restored.

LISTEN: “Wait for the Lord” by Jacques Berthier of the Taizé Community, on Alleluia (1988)

Wait for the Lord, whose day is near.
Wait for the Lord: be strong, take heart!

The text of this simple chant comes mainly from Psalm 27:14: “Wait for the LORD; be strong, and let your heart take courage; wait for the LORD!” The chant was written as a responsorial refrain to the reading of another psalm, Psalm 37. As the hymnal Lift Up Your Hearts (2013) instructs congregations: sing the Taizé refrain; read Psalm 37:1–5, sing; read Psalm 37:6–9, sing; read Psalm 37:10–11, 39–40, sing. Like this:

Wait for the Lord, whose day is near.
Wait for the Lord: be strong, take heart!

Do not fret because of the wicked;
    do not be envious of wrongdoers,
for they will soon fade like the grass,
    and wither like the green herb.

Trust in the LORD, and do good;
    so you will live in the land, and enjoy security.
Take delight in the LORD,
    and he will give you the desires of your heart.

Commit your way to the LORD;
    trust in him, and he will act.

Wait for the Lord, whose day is near.
Wait for the Lord: be strong, take heart!

He will make your vindication shine like the light,
    and the justice of your cause like the noonday.

Be still before the LORD, and wait patiently for him;
    do not fret over those who prosper in their way,
    over those who carry out evil devices.

Refrain from anger, and forsake wrath.
    Do not fret—it leads only to evil.
For the wicked shall be cut off,
    but those who wait for the LORD shall inherit the land.

Wait for the Lord, whose day is near.
Wait for the Lord: be strong, take heart!

Yet a little while, and the wicked will be no more;
    though you look diligently for their place, they will not be there.
But the meek shall inherit the land,
    and delight themselves in abundant prosperity.

The salvation of the righteous is from the LORD;
    he is their refuge in the time of trouble.
The LORD helps them and rescues them;
    he rescues them from the wicked, and saves them,
    because they take refuge in him.

Wait for the Lord, whose day is near.
Wait for the Lord: be strong, take heart!

Psalm 37 encourages trust and patience in God, who will one day vindicate the righteous and put wickedness to bed.

Advent Prelude: Out of Darkness

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LOOK: Serenade: A Christmas Fantasy by Joseph Stella

Stella, Joseph_Serenade: A Christmas Fantasy
Joseph Stella (Italian American, 1877–1946), Serenade: A Christmas Fantasy (La Fontaine), 1937. Oil on canvas, 43 1/8 × 37 1/8 in. (109.5 × 94.3 cm). Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC.

Joseph Stella (1877–1946) [previously] was an Italian American painter who became an important figure in modern art. His Serenade: A Christmas Fantasy is not overtly religious, but it does incorporate a few elements traditionally associated with Christmastime—a starry night sky, a holly branch, an ox and ass, a dove—and has a mystical quality. In the center, a flower emerges from what appears to be a conch shell, its pistil and stamen glowing. The flower’s stem shoots up past an abstract, mobile-like object that could be shards of colorful glass or pieces of cut paper. It’s a visionary composition that is open to multiple readings.

Art historian Judith Zilczer comments on the painting in the exhibition catalog Joseph Stella: The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden Collection (Smithsonian Institution, 1983):

Serenade: A Christmas Fantasy typifies Stella’s mature symbolist style. Framed by an arch, a fantastic tree form bisects the composition and serves as the central image of the painting. The colors of the iridescent prism surrounding the central axis recall the abstract geometric style of Stella’s Futurist canvases.

The meaning of Stella’s complex imagery remains elusive. The ox and ass in the upper right spandrel traditionally appear together in paintings of the Nativity. The image of the dove in the center of the lower border is the symbol of the Holy Ghost. These Christian symbols are consistent with the painting’s subtitle, A Christmas Fantasy. The painting is also known as The Fountain (La Fontaine). The treelike form in the center may represent an abstraction of a jet of water. The image of the fountain often served as an attribute of the Virgin Mary, who was regarded as the “fountain of living waters.” It is possible that in this canvas Stella has fused the image of the tree of life with the fountain as the symbol of the Virgin. The nightingale perched on the tendril [of the purple iris] in the lower left is the source of the serenade. (54)

I see in Serenade the promise of Advent—light emerging out of darkness, wondrous new life growing out of dormancy. There’s a coming fullness here, a blossoming. The chromatic spectrum refracted by the center object evokes a rainbow, the sign of God’s covenant with all living creatures in Genesis 9.

LISTEN: “Wonder” by MaMuse (Sarah Nutting and Karisha Longaker), on Prayers for Freedom (2018)

Oooh, I wonder
Oooh, I wonder
Oooh, I wonder
What is to come out of this darkness

I’ve been moving, moving, moving, moving through the darkness
Moving, moving, moving, moving through the darkness
Moving, moving, moving, moving through the darkness
I wonder when the light is cracking open

Oooh, I wonder
Oooh, I am filled with wonder
Oooh, I wonder
What is to come out of this darkness

I thought this candle had long gone out
I thought this candle had long gone out
I thought that it had long gone out
But today, today, today, today I can see
There’s still a flickering, flickering

Oooh, I wonder
Oooh, I wonder
Oooh, I wonder
What is to come out of this darkness

Burn, burn, burn, burning on the inside
Burn, burn, burn, burning like a bright light
Burn, burn, burn, burning on the inside
This light’s still burning, burning bright

I thought this candle had long gone out
I thought that it was long gone out
I thought that this candle had long gone out
But today, today, today, today I can see
There’s more than a flickering

Oooh, I wonder
Oooh, I am filled with wonder
Oooh, I wonder
What is to come out of this darkness

This song was written by MaMuse [previously], an acoustic folk duo who I’d say are “spiritual but not religious,” several years ago on the winter solstice. Watch a live video recording from January 2019 at the Chico Women’s Club in Chico, California, the two’s hometown.

Advent is sometimes mischaracterized as glum, but actually, joyfulness is a key aspect of the season. There’s a somberness, for sure, but it’s married with excitement for what’s coming.

I hope to capture this dual tone of Advent in my selection of art and music over the next twenty-four days. This is the first post in a daily series that will run to the end of Advent on December 24, and then for the duration of Christmas, from December 25 to January 6. Many of the songs in the series can be listened to on the Art & Theology Advent Playlist, Christmastide Playlist, and Epiphany Playlist on Spotify.

In the liturgical calendar, Advent-Christmas-Epiphany is known as the cycle of light. Many churches and families light candles around an Advent wreath, progressively more until Christmas, symbolizing the Light of the World getting nearer, dispelling more of the darkness.

May you be blessed this Advent season as you wonder and explore what is to come out of December’s darkness. May you discern with delight those places where “the light is cracking open,” where God is shining through.

Roundup: Advent video from Fuller Studio, making room for love, “Lord, Remind Me,” and more

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VIDEO MEDITATION: “Yearning and Promise (Advent),” dir. Lauralee Farrer (2017): The first in the seven-part Liturgical Meditations series produced by Fuller Studio (a resource center affiliated with Fuller Theological Seminary), this four-minute video features Advent scripture readings by Fuller alum Paul Mpishi (MDiv, ’17) in his native Swahili, set to beautiful cinematography by Lindsey Sheets, Timothy Kay, and Jordan McMahon.

“Yearning and Promise” explores Advent and the expectant longing for the birth of Christ through cityscapes, wilderness, and water from Chicago and Malibu, with scriptures drawn from Isaiah 40 and Matthew 1. The audio for this video is in Swahili with subtitles in English, Spanish, Mandarin, and Korean—a poetic way to represent the primary tongues of our community. . . .

The liturgical calendar spans the life of Christ in a single year—from anticipation (Advent), to hope (Christmas), to transcendence (Epiphany), to lament (Lent), to redemption (Easter), to the birth of the church (Pentecost), and through long, numbered days (Ordinary Time) back to Advent. The liturgical meditation series to which this video belongs relies on nature to tell the story of God, accompanied by scriptures traditional to each season.

The other Liturgical Meditations are “Fear and Glory” (Christmastide), “Desire and Light” (Epiphany), “Hunger and Healing” (Lent), “Death and Resurrection” (Eastertide), “Fire and Wind” (Pentecost), and “Mystery and Love” (Ordinary Time). Full playlist here.

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SUBSTACK POST: “The Most Powerful Muscle in the World” by Stephanie Duncan Smith: Stephanie Duncan Smith, author of Even After Everything: The Spiritual Practice of Knowing the Risks and Loving Anyway, reflects here on the strong and capacious “womb-love” (Phyllis Trible’s term) of God, and on the physical transformation Mary underwent to make room for him in her own body. Advent, Smith writes, is about “stretch[ing] to make room for love.”

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ARTICLE: “The Birth of Eternity into Time: Contemplating the Incarnation with Piero della Francesca’s Madonna del Parto and Jorie Graham’s ‘San Sepolcro’” by Kathryn Stelmach Artuso, Mockingbird: This short article engages with a famous Italian Renaissance painting of the pregnant Mary (which the British writer Michèle Roberts calls “one of the most beautiful and powerful, sexy and numinous paintings of the Christian era”) and a modern ekphrastic poem about it.

Francesca, Piero della_Madonna del Parto
Piero della Francesca (Italian, ca. 1415–1492), Madonna del Parto, after 1457. Detached fresco, 100 × 80 in. (260 × 203 cm). Musei Civici Madonna del Parto, Monterchi, Italy.

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ZOOM GATHERING: Advent Art Salon, December 12, 5 p.m. ET: Image journal is hosting its fourth annual Advent Art Salon in two weeks, a free, hour-long virtual gathering featuring festive seasonal recipes, poetry readings, a musical performance, Advent reflections, and more. This year’s guests include poet Katie Hartsock, singer-songwriter Jon Guerra, composer Mike Capps, and writers Alex Ramirez (here’s his short story “Gabriel”), Meghan Murphy-Gill (author of The Sacred Life of Bread), and Jan Richardson.

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SONGS:

>> “Lord, Remind Me” by Jon and Valerie Guerra: From their album It’s Almost Christmas! Jon Guerra writes in the YouTube video description about how most days, hope feels naive; about the narratives in which we misplace our trust; about how Jesus, in his coming, tells a different narrative and brings our hope to fruition.

At Christmastime, Guerra writes,

Christians . . . celebrat[e] the arrival of a “shoot from Jesse’s stump.” It’s a transgressive celebration of fragility and vulnerability. We wanted a fully matured tree—God gave us a shoot coming from a stump. We wanted a strong leader—God gave us a vulnerable baby. We wanted a strength that dominates—God gave us a weakness that submits. We wanted victory—God gave us defeat, destitution, death.

How is this defying of our expectations hopeful? Well, theology at its atomic level says this: God is love. God doesn’t love as a decisive action, as though tomorrow the decision could be reversed. God is, always, love.

That love is not only towards humanity—it becomes humanity. It is not only compassionate towards the broken—it becomes the broken. It is unconditional love that becomes death—and in so doing, defeats it. It defies our expectations only to exceed to them.

So here’s to remembering hope in God’s unconditional love towards the desolate stumpiness of ourselves and the world this season—and to believing that this is not the end of the story. Lord, remind me.

>> “His Name Is Jesus” by Keiko Ying: Released this month on YouTube, this children’s Advent song by Keiko Ying celebrates Jesus as Emmanuel, “God with us.” Here is the lead sheet. The drawings and animation in the music video are by the songwriter’s thirteen-year-old daughter, Clara. [HT: Global Christian Worship]

Roundup: Tish Harrison Warren on Advent; make your own Advent wreath; prayer card pack; and more

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Advent begins a week from Sunday, on December 1—a roughly four-week season leading up to Christmas, during which we prepare our hearts to receive the coming Christ. Here are a few resources.

Daily posts at Art & Theology: First I want to let you know that, as I’ve done for the past three years, I will be posting daily here on the Art & Theology blog for the duration of Advent and Christmastide, each day selecting a visual artwork and a piece of music that I feel dialogue fruitfully with each other about a seasonal theme. Many Christians like to read through a devotional book during Advent, and while I do appreciate good devotional writing, I sometimes grow bored of reading prose reflections on the Christmas story. For me, I’ve found that engaging the arts frequently opens up wonder and new angles of inquiry and deepens my longing and gratitude for Christ. Songs, art, and other creative expressions help me slow down and put me in a contemplative frame of mind, and that’s why I use them as companions throughout the liturgical year.

Advent 2024 promo

Though the United States (my country) is heavily represented in the selections, I’ve tried to be intentional about featuring works from a variety of geographic locales. So you’ll see contributions from Mexico, Peru, The Gambia, Kenya, Germany, Turkey, Croatia, Japan, India, the Philippines, and more—a reflection of the global nature of Christianity.

Sometimes I will provide some written context or explication for the song or artwork or relevant biographical details for its maker, but other times I will let the works stand entirely on their own.

I’m really excited to unroll this year’s series! Advent starts December 1, but tune in a day early on November 30 for a “prelude” post to kick things off. The final post in the series will be on Epiphany on January 6. You can view the archives from previous years here:

Advent 2023 | Christmas 2023
Advent 2022 | Christmas 2022
Advent 2021 | Christmas 2021
Advent 2020 (abbreviated)

In addition to the daily posts in the music-art format, I have a few poems lined up and will continue doing periodic link roundups to direct you to other great Advent and Christmas content around the web.

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THE DAILY PRAYER PROJECT: Advent 2024: The Daily Prayer Project, a liturgical publishing nonprofit I work for as curator and copyeditor, is entering its seventh year, and our latest Advent edition is out! The cover art is Look forward to the coming of God by Stanley Fung, a pastor and photographer from Taipei; it’s one of three artworks that receive dedicated attention inside.

Advent DPP

In addition to art, the magazine includes a poem, four song sheets, two mini-essays (one on the spiritual practice of encouragement, the other on nurturing the hidden life of Christ within us), and fourteen distinct liturgies, one for each morning and evening of the week (plus a different scripture reading for every day of the season). Here is one of the featured prayers in this edition, from the Christian Council of Nigeria:

Grant us, O God, a vision of our land that is as beautiful as it could be:
a land of justice where none shall prey on others;
a land of plenty where poverty shall cease to fester;
a land of kinship where success shall be founded on service;
a land of peace where order shall rest not on force
but on the love of everyone for their community.
Give us grace to put this vision into practice
through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Our Christmas edition will also be ready for purchase soon. It covers December 25, 2024, through March 4, 2025.

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VIDEO INTERVIEW: “Advent: The Season of Hope” with Tish Harrison Warren, Trinity Forum, December 1, 2023: In Celebration of Discipline, Richard J. Foster writes, “In contemporary society our Adversary (the devil) majors in three things: noise, hurry, and crowds. If he can keep us engaged in ‘muchness’ and ‘manyness,’ he will rest satisfied.” The pull toward those things is particularly strong in December. But Advent calls us, counterculturally, to quietness, slowness, and moments of solitude.

Here Tish Harrison Warren, an Anglican priest and the author of Advent: The Season of Hope from IVP’s Fullness of Time series, discusses the character and history of Advent, the three traditional practices associated with it, and how to wait well. She also encourages us to ask ourselves: Where do we need Christ to come in the next year? Where do we need healing? Where do we need to find hope in the next season of our life?

The Q&A starts at 38:00 and includes questions such as: How might the theme of judgment shape our observance of Advent? How do we practice Advent during a time of jollity and indulgence and parties without being perceived as a Scrooge?

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SONG: “Come to Us, Emmanuel” by Ordinary Time: Made up of Peter La Grand, Jill McFadden, and Ben Keyes, Ordinary Time is a trio whose music blends elements of folk, Americana, and traditional hymnody. This original song is from their 2007 album In the Town of David, and the music video is shot around Vancouver, where the three band members met when they were students at Regent College.

** This is one of seven songs by Ordinary Time featured on Art & Theology’s Advent Playlist. Join 2,859 others in following the playlist on Spotify, which offers over twenty-one hours of music for the season.

Check out, too, Ordinary Time’s newest album, released Friday, titled You Are My Hiding Place. Favorite track: “All Shall Be Amen Alleluia.”

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ARTICLE: “My Favorite Advent Wreath Supplies” by Ashley Tumlin Wallace: The Liturgical Home is one of my favorite blogs to follow. It’s run by Ashley Tumlin Wallace, a pastor’s wife and mom of four from Florida who collects recipes and traditions from around the world and compiles them into liturgical living guidebooks to help families celebrate the seasons of the church in their homes. In this blog post she shares how to make your own Advent wreath, collecting greenery from outside and purchasing a few basic items.

Here’s her Instagram video showing you how to put it all together:

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CARD PACK: The Light Has Come: 25 Illustrated Prayers with Activities for Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany by W. David O. Taylor and Phaedra Jean Taylor: Each of the twenty-five, 4 × 6 prayer cards in this pack includes a watercolor illustration by Phaedra Taylor, and on the other side a Bible verse, a collect prayer by David Taylor, and a suggested activity (e.g., stargazing, baking or buying a treat for a friend) or prayer prompt. Included are familiar themes, such as Hope, Joy, Shepherds, and Light, but also less familiar ones, like Feasting, Sorrow, Fear, and the Fantastical. There are also cards for Saint Nicholas Day, New Year’s Eve, New Year’s Day, and Epiphany. They are all held together in a cardstock sleeve.

The Light Has Come card pack
Peace (The Light Has Come)

The cards would work well in personal or family devotions, in a small group, or with church staff. “Our hope is that this box of cards will invite you to stop, look and listen afresh to the nativity narratives and to discover a story that truly heals and restores this very broken and beloved world of ours,” David writes in a blog post introducing the product.

You can order reproductions of the watercolors from this collection and others at Phaedra’s online shop.

Roundup: “What to Do After Voting,” Apsáalooke praise song, chapel service led by Terry Wildman (Ojibwe, Yaqui), and more

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PRESS RELEASE: “The Creative Arts Collective for Christian Life and Faith Announces Launch of Its First Competitive Request for Proposals (RFP)”: The Creative Arts Collective for Christian Life and Faith [previously], an endowed initiative run by Belmont University in Nashville, has just opened its online Letter of Inquiry form for the 2025 Spring Grant Program. Form submission deadline: December 6, 2024.

The RFP is open to interested individual artists, artist collaboratives, church leaders, scholars/theologians, arts-affiliated organizations, faith-based nonprofit organizations, or institutions who reside or operate in the United States. Eligible applicants may submit proposals with requests ranging from $50,000 to $250,000 that may be used over one year. Chosen applications will then be requested to submit a full grant proposal for the competitive 2025 Spring Grant Program.

The 2025 grant-seeking theme is “Performing Shalom.” Applicants are invited to reflect the theme in their project or program, but it is not a requirement when applying for a grant. Please click here for more information.

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SUBSTACK POST: “On Artists, Kings, and Mending the Multiverse” by Houston Coley: A wise and rousing reflection after the US presidential election. Houston Coley is an Atlanta-based documentary filmmaker, video essayist (YouTube @houston-coley), podcaster, and writer on TV and film, who “cultivat[es] spiritual imagination around art and pop culture,” as one person put it.

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POEM: “What to Do After Voting” by James A. Pearson: The poet James Pearson shared this poem from his collection The Wilderness That Bears Your Name (Goat Tail Press, 2024) on Instagram on Election Day last Tuesday. He writes, “What’s driving [all our voting] are two things: Our common needs for love, safety, and belonging. And our often conflicting attempts to meet them. Rumi wrote: ‘Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.’ History is offering us a fork in the road. Let’s turn towards what we can do—vote. Then let’s find each other in that field and do the long, slow work of building a world where everyone has access to the love, safety, and belonging they need.” [HT: Amy Peterson]

He writes further on his website, “This poem doesn’t pretend to be a full prescription for what our country needs. It’s just my way of acknowledging that all electoral choices are imperfect. Because even more important is what happens between elections—the long, slow work of building a culture of love and justice for our politicians to live up to. And the better we do that work, the better our options will be next time elections come around.”

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SONG: “Apsáalooke Praise Song,” sung by Sarah Redwolf (née Bullchief): Sarah Redwolf is a member of Crow Nation in Montana and a follower of the Jesus Way whose Apsáalooke name is Baawaalatbaaxpesh (Holy Word). Here she sings a praise song by her grandmother Xáxxeáakinnee (Rides the Painted Horse). The Apsáalooke lyrics are below; I couldn’t find an English translation, and the artist has not yet returned a message I sent ten days ago, but I believe the song was written with Christian intent, as Christianity has been in Sarah’s family for generations. Her father, Duane Bull Chief, is a traveling Pentecostal preacher and the leader, with his wife, Anita, of Bull Chief Ministries, and Sarah has often led worship for church services and other Christian gatherings. What a beautiful voice!

Akbaatatdíakaata Dáakbachee
Huúlaa-k awúaleel akósh
Sáawe dée kush
Ahóohkaáshi, ahóohkaáshi, áaaaweelee-éeh

Akbaatatdíakaata
Baléelechiisaa awúaleel akósh
Ahóohkaáshi, ahóohkaáshi, áaaaweelee-éeh [source]

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LECTURE: “The Sign of Jonah” by Matthew Milliner, Marion E. Wade Center, Wheaton College, Illinois, October 3, 2019: This is the first lecture in a three-part series by art historian Matthew Milliner called The Turtle Renaissance that he developed into the book The Everlasting People: G. K. Chesterton and the First Nations (InterVarsity Press, 2021). (Here’s a well-written book review that I concur with; you can read an excerpt from the book here.) In the video, the talk starts at 8:49, followed by a response by Capt. David Iglesias, JD, of Kuna nation at 1:03:31, and then a Q&A starting at 1:25:27.

In conversation with Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man, Milliner explores contact points between Christianity and Indigenous North American art, symbol, ritual, and history. The discussion touches on pre-contact petroglyphs carved into Teaching Rocks near Peterborough, Ontario (one of them, a sun figure, quite possibly representing Gitchie Manitou, the Great Spirit—Christ incarnate?), the Sun Dance (which many Native Christians interpret as a prophecy of the Crucifixion), the Ghost Dance (about resurrection and renewal), the Mishipeshu (an underwater panther often representing death, which some Native Americans used to characterize white settlers), the Thunderbird, Black Elk’s vision of a mysterious figure with holes in the palms of his hands, and the cross as an axial tree conjoining the above and below worlds. Just as ancient Hebrew culture contained pointers to Christ, so too, Milliner argues, do the Indigenous cultures of North America. Artists, preachers, and visionaries from among the Ojibwe, Kiowa, Lakota, and other peoples are “our North American Virgils,” he says—Virgil being a Latin poet whose Fourth Eclogue, written around 40 BCE, prophesied the birth of a divine savior who would usher in a golden age.

Sun Dance Scene
Sun Dance Scene, Teton Lakota, Central Plains or Northern Plains, Wyoming, ca. 1885. Muslin cloth with watercolor paint, 36 × 91 1/2 in. (91.5 × 232.5 cm). Art Institute of Chicago. See 32:55 of Milliner’s lecture.
Vision of Jesus (Kiowa Ghost Dance)
Vision of a Kiowa man named Fiqi (Eater), received during the revived Ghost Dance, of Christ blessing the ceremony, collected by ethnologist James Mooney, ca. 1890. Pencil and crayon drawing from MS 2538, National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. See 38:49 of Milliner’s lecture and pages 11–12, 130, 142–44 of his book The Everlasting People.
Debassige, Blake_Tree of Life
See 59:24 of Milliner’s lecture and page 8 of his book The Everlasting People

There’s much more I could say, as there’s certainly more nuance and complexity to this, but instead let me simply refer you to Milliner’s lecture and finely footnoted book. There’s also a great audio interview with Milliner about The Everlasting People from November 2021, conducted by Jason Micheli for the Crackers and Grape Juice podcast.

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VIDEO: Chapel service led by Terry Wildman, November 6, 2023, Azusa Pacific University, California: Earlier this year I got to have dinner with Terry Wildman [previously] and his wife, Darlene, who form the Nammy Award–winning musical duo RainSong. It was exciting to hear all about their work with Native InterVarsity and other projects. They live in Maricopa, Arizona, on the traditional lands of the Pima and Tohono O’odham peoples. Wildman, who has both Ojibwe and Yaqui ancestry, was the lead translator, general editor, and project manager of the First Nations Version: An Indigenous Bible Translation of the New Testament. (The nativity narrative from the FNV translation of the Gospel of Luke, you may be interested to know, was adapted into an illustrated book titled Birth of the Chosen One: A First Nations Retelling of the Christmas Story, which just released this fall.)

Last November Wildman led a worship service for Azusa Pacific University students. Here are the key elements:

  • The opening three minutes are an animated video of the gospel story, narrated by Terry Wildman to a flute accompaniment by Darlene Wildman
  • 8:12: Blessing of the Gabrielino-Tongva people
  • 9:38: The Lord’s Prayer (FNV)
  • 10:57: Sermon: “Worship in Spirit and in Truth” (John 4:1–42)
  • 21:17: Reading of Psalm 8 (FNV)
  • 23:48: Song: “Lift Up Your Heads” by Terry and Darlene Wildman, based on Psalm 24
  • 28:40: Song: “Hoop of Life” by Terry Wildman – Native American powwows often feature hoop dancers, who dance a prayer that Creator will bring harmony and goodwill to all the gathered people. Wildman says, “I look at Jesus and I call him the Great Hooper Dancer. Because he’s the one who ever lives to pray for us, to make intercession for us, and when he dances his prayer, he is bringing harmony and balance to the whole world, to the whole universe. And if we follow him, if we give our hearts to him, he will produce that harmony and balance in us and with each other.”
  • 35:56: Song: “Nia:wen” (Mohawk for “Thank You”) by Jonathan Maracle of Broken Walls
  • 45:29: Closing prayer