Annette Fortt (American, 1944–), Jonah, 2014. Collagraph print, 16 × 19 in. Edition of 10. [for sale]
Seaweed wrapped and wrangled, nested in fronds and tangled in stipes, Jonah curled his salt- soaked spine, fetal in the bloated bonds, the belly that stretched and stank—assaulting, contracting, compressing until each rib en-caged him like fingers, like the hard hand that grabs the racing child with bruising grip to pull him back from edges or up and out of pits, those plunging depths from which we call. Cradled thus, he waited a wry span of days and nights during which his only lullaby was digestion’s gurgle and his only pillow, a spongy kelp blade. Ensconced, his vigil swelled as ocean swayed.
This poem, inspired by the collagraph Jonah by Annette Fortt, was originally published in Inkwell, a publication of Christianity Today, on January 20, 2026. Used by permission of the poet.
Rev. Dr. Bethany Besteman is the pastor of worship and discipleship at Silver Spring Christian Reformed Church in Maryland and an editor for ReformedWorship.org. She has a PhD in English language and literature from Catholic University of America. Her poetry has appeared in Ekstasis, Presence, Reformed Journal, and Cable Street.
Deborah Mesa-Pelly (Cuban American, 1968–), Rosy, 1999. Chromogenic print mounted on aluminum, 30 × 40 in. National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC. [view artist’s website]
At that time the disciples came to Jesus and asked, “Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?” He called a child, whom he put among them, and said, “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever becomes humble like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.”
—Matthew 18:1–4 (cf. Mark 9:33–37; 10:13–16; Luke 9:46–48)
The Architect of Love has built the door into heaven so low that no one but a small child can pass through it, unless, to get down to a child’s little height, they go in on their knees.
I saw the above photograph on display several years ago at the National Museum of Women in the Arts and was captivated. The artist, Deborah Mesa-Pelly, regularly features female subjects in her work, often on the verge of marvelous adventure. In Rosy, a girl breaks through a papered wall, entering another world on hands and knees.
The image of this child-size portal leading from a dark, dusty room into a bright and verdant landscape reminds me of Jesus’s teaching that we must receive the kingdom of heaven like little children. What is it about little ones that makes God more accessible to them? What quality or qualities of children ought we to emulate?
Matthew specifically names their humility, by which he may mean their lack of pretension or worldly ambition, their dependance and trust, and/or their openness and teachability (different from naivete). Children tend to be curious, exploratory, full of wonder, energetic, honest, and unselfconscious. These are all traits I want to embody in my life of faith as I press through walls to discover more and more of the “life more abundant” that Jesus offers.
Juneteenth (June 19) is a holiday that celebrates the end of race-based chattel slavery in the United States. It rejoices in the expansion of freedom, but it also reckons with the shadow of freedoms still denied. It is thus both backward- and forward-looking. (For more on the holiday, see the article that historian Jemar Tisby published this morning: “Juneteenth Is the Counter-Narrative to America 250.”) Below are a few artistic pieces that speak to the themes of Juneteenth.
ARTWORKS: From my two most recent visits to New York City.
>> The Floating World: Lotus (125th) by Sanford Biggers:Lotus (125th) is part of the 2013 Floating World series by the multidisciplinary artist Sanford Biggers, employing paper collage, stencils, screenprint, and spray paint to construct layered compositions that blend Japanese aesthetics with African American history. “Floating world” translates the Japanese term ukiyo-e, referring to Edo-era woodblock prints, and “125th” likely refers to the main street in Harlem. The work features a mandala-like lotus flower whose petals are eighteenth-century diagrams showing enslaved humans tightly packed into the cargo hold of a ship. What looks pleasing from a distance is, on closer inspection, horrifying.
Sanford Biggers (American, 1970–), The Floating World: Lotus (125th), 2013. Screenprint and collage, image: 27 15/16 × 26 3/8 in. (71 × 67 cm), sheet (irregular): 27 15/16 × 26 3/8 in. (71 × 67 cm). Edition 1/30. The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Print Collection, New York Public Library. Photo: Victoria Emily Jones. [object record]
Biggers lived in Japan for three years in the 1990s, where he became greatly influenced by Zen Buddhism. In Buddhism, the lotus is associated with awakening, purity, transcendence. The slave-ship-lotus is a motif the artist has used in other works—see, e.g., here and here—and I’m not exactly sure what to make of it. Is it about how the pain, trauma, and destruction wrought by slavery can be transmuted into enlightenment, progress? Or is the disjunction between beautiful flower and ugly abuse meant to be ironic, perhaps a statement about how we tend to palliate the vile parts of American history?
>> Contending with Contingency I by Kenturah Davis:Kenturah Davis is a multidisciplinary artist working between Los Angeles and Accra. Oscillating between facets of portraiture and design, her work explores the fundamental role language has in shaping how we understand ourselves and the world. Contending with Contingency I is the first work in a series engaging the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, which abolished slavery, with one exception: Those convicted of a crime can be subjected to forced labor. The amendment was a milestone, but the punishment clause creates a contingency under which slavery can remain legal. (Ava DuVernay’s illuminating documentary 13th, on Netflix, examines how this loophole has and continues to be exploited to disproportionately incarcerate Black people.)
Kenturah Davis (American, 1984–), Contending with Contingency I, 2021. Carbon pencil, pencil, and blind debossing on nine sheets of paper, 132 × 81 in. (335.3 × 205.7 cm). Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photo: Victoria Emily Jones. [object record]
The eight pieces in Davis’s Contending with Contingency series depict a Black woman dancing over transcripts of the 1864–65 congressional debates regarding the language and provisions of the Thirteenth Amendment, and whether to pass it. Here’s an excerpt, for example, of the opinion given by Senator Lazarus Powell from Kentucky:
I do not believe it was ever designed by the founders of our Government that the Constitution of the United States should be so amended as to destroy property. I do not believe it is the province of the Federal Government to say what is or what is not property. . . . You seem to care for nothing but the negro. . . . You seem to be inspired by no other wish than to elevate the negro to equality and give him liberty. . . . I believe this government was made by white men and for white men; and if it is ever preserved it must be preserved by white men.
“The structures that shape our experience in the world extend from the ways we use language,” Davis says. “The implications of this language are activated through our bodies.” The legislators’ oppositional words, and the legacy they reflect and perpetuate, impede the free movement of the dancing figure—but she appears to be pushing past the obstacles, resisting dissent, claiming her right to liberty. I read the work, especially in light of the whole series, as ultimately emancipatory.
>> “Joy” by Raye, Mike Sabath, Tom Richards, Amma, and Absolutely: This song appears on the second studio album of the British pop sensation Raye (the stage name of Rachel Agatha Keen), This Music May Contain Hope, released in March. It’s based on Psalm 30:5: “Weeping may linger for the night, but joy comes with the morning.” Here’s Raye singing it on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert with her sisters Amma and Absolutely. (A worship song on late-night TV!) See also the recent cover bythe Good Shepherd Collective.
>> “Someday We’ll All Be Free” by Donny Hathaway and Edward Howard, performed by the Good Shepherd Collective: In 1973, the American soul singer Donny Hathaway wrote the melody to this classic, and his friend Edward Howard wrote the lyrics. Howard said he intended it as an encouragement to Hathaway, who was struggling with paranoid schizophrenia; but it has since become an anthem of Black American civil rights. It’s sung here by Charles Jones for a Good Shepherd New York digital worship service.
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COMPILATION:“Early Photographs of Juneteenth Celebrations,”Public Domain Review: Many of the photographs that survive from turn-of-the-century Juneteenth celebrations in Texas depict elegantly dressed groups in horse-drawn carriages elaborately decorated with flowers down to the wheels.
Martha Yates Jones (left) and Pinkie Yates (right), daughters of Rev. Jack Yates, park their decorated carriage in front of Antioch Baptist Church in Houston’s Fourth Ward on June 19, 1908. Photo courtesy of the Houston Public Library Digital Archives.
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POEM:“Gospel”by Rita Dove: This poem is from Rita Dove’s Pulitzer Prize–winning collection Thomas and Beulah (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1986), based on the lives of her maternal grandparents, who moved from Tennessee and Georgia to Akron, Ohio, during the Great Migration. Opening with the instantly recognizable phrase “Swing low” from the African American spiritual “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” it describes her grandparents’ Black church congregation as “a humming ship of voices / big with all / the wrongs done / done them,” but that “ride[s] joy.” Hymns, gospel songs, and spirituals have had a formative influence on Dove, a member of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Zion Church, as they did too for her predecessors, lifting them out of the miseries inflicted on them by Jim Crow America and into heaven, a place of wholeness, affirmation, and triumph, where racism and lynch mobs can’t touch.
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CHORAL-ORCHESTRAL WORK:Requiem for Colour: A Journey through Lament and Joy by Jeffrey L. Ames: Composed by Dr. Jeffery Ames, Requiem for Colour (2022) is a thirteen-movement work for SATB choir, soprano, tenor, orator, rapper, orchestra, and African percussion that adapts the form of the Requiem Mass, traditionally offered for the repose of the souls of the deceased, to tell a story of Black enslavement and liberation. Gentry Publications, who publishes the score, provides this description:
Requiem for Colour by Jeffery L. Ames is a powerful choral and orchestral work that honors the lives and legacies of enslaved Blacks from 1619 to 1865 and contemporary Black martyrs who sacrificed for equality and freedom. This masterwork skillfully blends idiomatic Black musical genres with Western European composition styles, creating a unique and profound musical journey. The requiem traces the Black experience from West Africa, through the Middle Passage, slavery, and sharecropping in the South, to the Civil Rights Movement and today’s ongoing fight against racism and injustice. The libretto incorporates narratives from enslaved people, sharecroppers, and contemporary activists, offering an aesthetic experience that both commemorates and challenges. This deeply moving work is a testament to the resilience and complexity of Black American history.
In this February 5, 2025, performance at the Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Belmont University in Nashville, Ames conducts the Belmont University Oratorio Chorus and Orchestra, comprising over 450 students. The performance features soprano NaGuanda Nobles, tenor Rodrick Dixon, and orators Jasmine Simmons and Elliott Robinson, plus a lyrical rap by the composer’s daughter, Lydia Ames. The concert and its recording—which aired June 18, 2025, on WNPT, Nashville’s PBS station—were made possible by a grant from the Creative Arts Collective.
My roundups aren’t typically thematic, but in this one I’ve pulled together content around the Psalms—plus a link to my new monthly playlist, from which I call out particular psalms.
SPOTIFY PLAYLIST: June 2026 (Art & Theology): Most months of the year, I release a playlist of thirty songs, mostly by Christian artists—an assortment of psalms, hymns, and other spiritually inclined music. The psalm settings I feature this month are Psalm 10:1 for choir by the South Korean composer Jung Jae-il (known for his work on Parasite and Squid Game); “Psalm 55” by Poor Bishop Hooper (they’ve set all 150 songs from the Psalter!); Psalm 97:11 in Hebrew (“Light dawns for the righteous and joy for the upright in heart”) by the Jewish women’s a cappella ensemble Vocolot; Psalm 103:1, a new cover of Andraé Crouch’s “Bless His Holy Name” by Paul Zach, Jessica Fox, and IAMSON; Psalm 117, in English and Spanish and with Latin rhythms, by The Soil and The Seed Project (see below); a song by the indie singer-songwriter Sam Wilson that uses Psalm 119:103 as a refrain; and “Psalm 139” by the New Jersey–based DJ duo (and married couple) KNGDM REVIVAL.
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NEW ALBUM:Psalmsby The Soil and The Seed Project: Released last month, this double album contains thirty-four new songs and one re-release. The first disc consists of word-for-word settings of psalms using the NIV or NRSV translations—hence why the album is classified as part of their “Bible Memory Collection”—whereas the second disc comprises songs inspired by the Psalms—loose paraphrases and, more commonly, songs that talk to God in a psalmic vein, encompassing the same broad emotional range as the biblical Psalter. There are songs of praise and gratitude, of weariness and lament, as well as petitionary songs seeking rescue or direction, presence or protection, stillness or fruitfulness.
Here’s the bilingual Psalm 117 setting “Praise the LORD, All You Nations”—the shortest psalm and the shortest chapter in the entire Bible—by Seth Thomas Crissman and Jorge Eliecer Triana, sung by Nicolas Melas and Lauren Yoder. I’ve followed it with “Lord, I Get Grumpy” by Clara Weaver, which she sings with Nichole Barrows while, it sounds like, doing dishes! “Lord, I need your patience” is something I pray a lot; now I can sing it.
Led by my friend Seth Thomas Crissman (MDiv, Eastern Mennonite Seminary), The Soil and The Seed Project is more than just a songwriting collective; they create all kinds of “creative resources that help us together turn towards Jesus in the ordinary moments of life.” Their latest Psalms package includes, in addition to the album, coloring pages and a Little Liturgies booklet with responsive readings, reflection questions, and suggested activities, all written with children in mind. You can download all these resources for FREE from their website!
>> “Considering Lament: Psalms of Protest, Pain and Hope,” Presbyterian Church in Ireland: This video presents Considering Lament: Psalms of Protest, Pain and Hope, a suite of eight lament psalms composed in 2026 by David and Karen Campbell based on the experiences of victims and first responders to the Troubles, a violent ethno-nationalist-religious conflict in Northern Ireland that lasted from the late 1960s to 1998 but whose wounds are still felt. The suite grew out of a project conceived by the Peace and Reconciliation Panel of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland’s Council for Public Affairs, which involved Rev. Dr. Karen Campbell and her husband David convening Psalm study groups in eight locations across Northern Ireland over the course of two years. The stories, thoughts, and feelings shared in response to the eight given lament psalms—Psalms 5, 7, 39, 59, 64, 82, 109, and 140—and in relation to the sectarian traumas the participants have endured informed the Campbells’ musical adaptations of these psalms. Click on the link above for the song list.
The lament psalms, Campbell says, “provided vessels to channel all kinds of emotions – from disappointment, anger, betrayal and sorrow – without losing hope,” an avenue “to present our hurts before the One who knows what it means to experience pain . . . and grief.” The Considering Lament suite was recorded by local artists in a studio in South Armagh and is available for free streaming, and you can download an accompanying booklet that includes sheet music. It premiered March 26 at an evening of live worship (see video) that interwove the eight songs with painful stories told firsthand, with a liturgy to connect them and to guide worshippers in prayer and reflection around the theme of suffering and loss.
To learn more about the Considering Lament project, read this wonderful interview with Karen Campbell, conducted by Joan Huyser-Honig for the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship.
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HISTORICAL PSALTERS: Barberini Oriental 2 and Ethiopien d’Abbadie 105: As you know, I’m very interested in Christian material culture, and if a cultural object has an appealing aesthetic, all the better! Here are two psalters (a volume containing the biblical book of Psalms) I photographed at the Africa and Byzantium exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2023. The first, dated to somewhere between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, is a pentaglot (five-language) psalter from Dayr al-Suryan, a multicultural and multilinguistic monastic community in Egypt. From left to right in parallel columns are Ge‘ez, Syriac, Coptic, Arabic, Armenian, and Syriac again. This format would have facilitated comparative study of the Bible as well as common readings in the liturgy.
Pentaglot Psalter, Egypt, 12th–14th century (restored and rebound 1636). Ink on parchment, 14 1/2 × 11 × 2 3/4 in. (36.8 × 28 × 7 cm). Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Barb. Or. 2, fols. 2v–3r. Photo: Victoria Emily Jones. [object record]
Another psalter, from fifteenth-century Ethiopia, was open to a full-page illustration of King David, the author of many of the psalms, playing an Ethiopian box lyre called a begena, traditionally played by elite and royal men. He is shaded by an attendant with a ceremonial umbrella. In most countries at the time, it was common practice for artists to contextualize the Old and New Testament saints of the ancient Near East to their own culture. (Think, for example, of the contemporaneous Italian and Dutch Renaissance paintings.) This anonymous artist has signified “imperial ruler” by giving David the familiar trappings of an Ethiopian emperor. The manuscript would have been used by a priest or monk in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church in both his personal devotions and liturgical services.
David the Musician, from a psalter from Tigray, Ethiopia, 15th century. Ink and tempera on parchment, 11 7/8 × 8 1/4 in. (30 × 21 cm). Ethiopien d’Abbadie 105, fols. 13v–14r. Collection of the Académie des Sciences, Institut de France, on deposit at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. Photo: Victoria Emily Jones. [object record]
OLD HUNDRED is a famous hymn tune from the Genevan Psalter, so named because it came to be associated with William Kethe’s metrical paraphrase of Psalm 100, “All People That on Earth Do Dwell.” In her early poem “OLD HUNDRED,” written in the latter half of the 1960s, the African American poet Lucille Clifton (1936–2010) also engages with the Hundredth Psalm, interleaving its first line with the opening lyric of the spiritual “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen” and blues-like phrases to create a multitextured expression of praise and lament.
Like the Psalter itself, life encompasses both gladness and sorrow. While many of the psalms call us to rejoice and give thanks, others express deep pain and questioning. The vocalist and composer Ruth Naomi Floyd says the greatest blues line ever written is Psalm 22:1, which Jesus “sings” from the cross: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
Clifton had seen trouble; so had Jesus. (“Nobody knows but Jesus . . .”) And Jesus is a friend who stands with us in hardship, weathering it alongside. When God’s promises seem far off and we can’t muster a hallelujah, looking to Jesus can give us the strength, both to be honest about our trouble and to put it in God’s hands and so lay hold of joy. “OLD HUNDRED” wrestles through that.
Does this poem feel disjunctive or integrated? What do you make of Clifton’s use of all-caps? After reading the poem, read Psalm 100 and the lyrics to “Nobody Knows” and compare them. Consider how they both fit into the church’s repertoire of songs.
“OLD HUNDRED” can be found in Clifton’s Collected Poems, a volume I highly recommend.
Käthe Kollwitz (German, 1867–1945), Mary and Elizabeth, 1929. Woodcut, sheet 14 × 13 1/2 in. (35.6 × 34.3 cm). Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Buffalo, New York.
In the morning it takes the mind a while To find the world again, lost after dream Has taken the heart to the underworld To play with the shades of lives not chosen.
She awakens a stranger in her own life, Her breath loud in the room full of listening. Taken without touch, her flesh feels the grief Of belonging to what cannot be seen.
Soon she can no longer bear to be alone. At dusk she takes the road into the hills. An anxious moon doubles her among the stone. A door opens, the older one’s eyes fill.
Two women locked in a story of birth. Each mirrors the secret the other heard.
John O’Donohue (1956–2008) was an Irish poet, philosopher, and best-selling author of Anam Cara (1996), Conamara Blues (2001), and To Bless the Space Between Us (2008), among other books. Ordained to the Catholic priesthood in 1982, he retired from priestly ministry in 2000 to devote himself to full-time writing and social activism. He was deeply influenced by Hegel, Meister Eckhart, and Celtic spirituality, and much of his work has to do with beauty, friendship, and how the material and the spiritual intertwine in human experience.
Illustration by Duncan Robertson for BEHOLD: The Resurrection and the Life trading cards from Fish Coin Press
On that final night, his meal was formal: lamb with bitter leaves of endive, chervil, bread with olive oil and jars of wine.
Now on Tiberias’ shores he grills a carp and catfish breakfast on a charcoal fire. This is not hunger, this is resurrection:
he eats because he can, and wants to taste the scales, the moist flakes of the sea, to rub the salt into his wounds.
From Corpus(Jonathan Cape / Penguin Random House, 2004)
Sharing food with friends was a significant aspect of Jesus’s ministry, so it’s no surprise that it’s one of the first things he does with his resurrected body. Based on the “breakfast on the shore” episode in John 21, “Food for Risen Bodies II” by Michael Symmons Roberts “exults in the renewal of bodily sensations” experienced by the risen Christ, writes commentator Janet Morley in The Heart’s Time. Gloriously corporeal, Jesus enjoys tastes and textures once again and, in my interpretation of the poem’s final line, is even glad to be able to feel pain, because it’s a marker of being alive. (Theologians disagree on whether Jesus could feel pain in his risen state.) Roberts mentions the saltiness of the fish; I think, too, of the stickiness of the honeycomb, which some manuscripts of the parallel passage in Luke 24 mention Jesus ate that day. The poem contrasts the somber formality of the Last Supper with the joyous informality of this barbecue on the beach, this Easter feasting.
Michael Symmons Roberts (born 1963) is an award-winning British poet, librettist, broadcaster, and dramatist. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he is the author of nine poetry collections and a professor of poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University.
It is the day of Resurrection and an auspicious beginning. Let us be made brilliant by the feast and embrace each other. . . .
Yesterday the lamb was slaughtered, and the doorposts were anointed, and the Egyptians lamented the firstborn, and the destroyer passed over us, and the seal was awesome and venerable, and we were walled in by the precious blood. Today we have totally escaped Egypt and Pharaoh the harsh despot and the burdensome overseers, and we have been freed from the clay and the brick-making. And nobody hinders us from celebrating a feast of exodus for the Lord our God. . . .
Yesterday I was crucified with Christ, today I am glorified with him; yesterday I died with him, today I am made alive with him; yesterday I was buried with him, today I rise with him.
—Gregory of Nazianzus, “On Pascha and on His Slowness,” an Easter sermon from ca. 362, trans. Nonna Verna Harrison in Festal Orations by Saint Gregory of Nazianzus (St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2008)
LOOK: Miniature from the Tomić Psalter
The prophet Miriam leading the women with timbrels and dances, from the Tomić Psalter, Bulgaria, ca. 1360. Tempera on paper, 30 × 25 cm. State Historical Museum, Moscow.
This miniature comes from a fourteenth-century illuminated psalter from Bulgaria, a masterpiece of the Tarnovo art school. It’s linked to Psalm 105, which exults in the memory of God bringing Israel up out of Egypt, providing for them in the desert, and establishing them in the promised land. “So he brought his people out with joy, his chosen ones with singing,” the psalmist writes (Ps. 105:43).
More directly, the image is an illustration of Exodus 15:20–21, an episode of female-led worship that occurs just after the crossing of the Red Sea:
And Miriam the prophetess, the sister of Aaron, took a timbrel in her hand; and all the women went out after her with timbrels and with dances.
And Miriam answered them, Sing ye to the LORD, for he hath triumphed gloriously; the horse and his rider hath he thrown into the sea.
The only percussion instrument mentioned in the Hebrew Bible, the timbrel (Heb. toph), or hand drum, consists of a hoop of wood or metal over which the skin of an animal is stretched. Some have jingles around the rim, like the modern tambourine, and some do not. The instrument is associated with women and celebration.
In the visual imagination of the anonymous Tomić Psalter artist, Miriam beats a drum with a stick while two of her companions clash cymbals and other women interlock arms and dance. The artist probably took inspiration from the folk music and dancing of women in his own culture.
LISTEN: “Da Mariae tympanum” (Give Mary a Tambourine) | Words by Peter Abelard, 1130s | Music by Georg Forster, 16th century | Performed by the Augsburg Early Music Ensemble on Medieval Pilgrimage to Santiago, 2003
Da Mariae tympanum resurrexit Dominus, Hebraes ad canticum cantans provocet, Holocausta carminum Iacob immolet.
Subvertens Aegyptios, resurrexit Dominus, Rubri Maris alveos replens hostibus, quos involvit obrutos undis pelagus.
Dicat tympanistria, Resurrexit Dominus, illa quidem altera re, non nomine, resurgentem merita prima cernere.
Cantet carmen dulcius, resurrexit Dominus, reliquis fidelibus mixta feminis, cum ipsa narrantibus hoc discipulis.
Deo patri gloria, resurrexit Dominus, salus et victoria Christo Domini; par honor per saecula sit Spiritui.
Give Mary a tambourine, for the Lord has risen; as she sings, let her incite Hebrew women to song; let too Jacob sacrifice holocausts of songs.
Egyptians he did overwhelm, for the Lord has risen, filled the Red Sea’s submerged caves with his enemies, whom the sea caught and buried in the waves below.
Let the timbrel player sing, For the Lord has risen, a second Mary, different in her person, not in name, she deserved to be the first to see him risen up.
Let her sing a sweeter song, for the Lord has risen, as she mingles with the rest of the faithful women, who with her proclaim the news to the Lord’s disciples.
Glory be to God the Father, for the Lord has risen, health restored and victory to the Lord’s anointed; equal honor through the years to the Holy Spirit.
This hymn is from the second book of the Hymnarius Paraclitensis (Hymnary of the Paraclete), a collection of over 130 Latin hymns written by the French philosopher and theologian Peter Abelard (1079–1142) [previously] for the convent of the Paraclete near Troyes, headed by Héloïse. It imagines Mary Magdalene as the New Miriam (Mary is the anglicized form of the Hebrew Miriam), leading women in song and dance in celebration of God’s victory over the forces of sin and death through the resurrection of God’s Son, Jesus Christ.
In Christianity, the exodus is interpreted not just as a literal saving act in Israel’s history but also as a prefigurement of the Resurrection. In many churches, Exodus 14, recounting the Israelites’ crossing of the Red Sea, is part of the Easter liturgy. The Orthodox word for Easter, Pascha—a Greek word from the Hebrew Pesach—itself means “Passover,” further reinforcing the connection between the Israelites’ liberation from Egyptian slavery and the liberation of God’s New Testament people from spiritual bondage, both made possible by the blood of a lamb and requiring passage through the waters—sea versus baptismal.
Mary Magdalene was one of Jesus’s closest disciples, and it’s she, according to the Gospel of John, to whom he first appeared following his resurrection. He then commissioned her to go tell the other disciples—to beat the drum, as it were, announcing the good news that he is alive. The Gospels of Matthew and Luke have her joined in this task by other faithful women: “the other Mary” and “Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the other women,” respectively.
I like the image Abelard gives us of Mary Magdalene rousing her female companions with a tambourine, leading them in the song and dance of resurrection. In the new exodus, Christ guides humanity into freedom, from death to life, as Mary praisefully proclaims, across the path he has paved by his own rising. “Resurrexit Dominus!” The men at first disbelieve her testimony . . . but once they see what she’s seen, they, too, rejoice.
The musical setting of Abelard’s text featured above is by the German Renaissance composer and physician Georg Forster (ca. 1510–1568).
William Blake (British, 1757–1827), The Angels Hovering over the Body of Christ in the Sepulchre, ca. 1805. Watercolor on paper, 42 × 30.2 cm. Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
A robin’s egg in a nest,
a row of yellow tulips, petals closed,
the last few shadowed moments on the eastern horizon,
and Holy Saturday, as Christ was lying in the sealed tomb, and angels were waiting.
Comprising just seven spare lines, this poem is a wonderfully succinct evocation of the anticipation of Easter. An egg about to hatch, a flower about to bloom, the sun about to rise—Leslie Anne Bustard gives us these images from nature to sit with on Holy Saturday, a day of waiting in the still, silent moment before life, light, and beauty break forth from Christ’s tomb and he ambles out, calling our names.
Leslie Anne Bustard (1968–2023) was a teacher, a writer, and a producer of high school and children’s theater in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where she lived with her husband, Ned, and raised three daughters. A lover of the arts, she was the vice president of Square Halo, a Christian nonprofit that publishes books, hosts an annual conference, curates a contemporary art gallery, and records a podcast. She is the coeditor, with Carey Bustard and Théa Rosenburg, of Wild Things and Castles in the Sky: A Guide to Choosing the Best Books for Children (2022) and the author of The Goodness of the Lord in the Land of the Living: Selected Poems (2023) and the posthumously published Tiny Thoughts That I’ve Been Thinking: Selected Writings of Leslie Anne Bustard (2024) and Strong Allies: Creating, Cultivating, Restoring (2026). She died of cancer at age fifty-five.
Helmut Stephan Diedrich (German, 1937–), Kreuzfall, 1964. Lithograph, edition 62/100.
You fall, sparrow-bone, God-eyed leaf, black hair of ox, kernel of wheat, gold blown from the stalk. You lift wood, trudge, and lurch, your back pulped. You would spit up the cup-dregs for relief—
but no, you want not; you believe your master’s dream. You toss your dreams like chaff to the breeze. You lift wood. You fall,
thin coin,
widow’s all,
copper seed into the mouth of the box. She brushed you a hundred times, so good to hold, but better to drop. Wood weights you, snapped bone, wind-flung leaf. You fall.
This poem was originally published in Christianity and Literature 59, no. 2 (Winter 2010) and is anthologized in Imago Dei: Poems from Christianity and Literature, ed. Jill Peláez Baumgaertner (Abilene Christian University Press, 2012). Used by permission of the poet.
Originating in the Middle Ages, the Stations of the Cross is a Christian devotional practice in which participants commemorate the journey Jesus took down the Via Dolorosa (Way of Sorrows) to his death—either on location in the Holy Land, physically following a demarcated route, or, more accessibly, in their imaginations, through the aid of images or meditative texts. Traditionally, there are fourteen stations, the third, seventh, and ninth of which are “Jesus falls.” At these stopping places, Christians reflect on the crushing weight of sin and wood, on Jesus’s intensifying exhaustion, and yet, too, on his perseverance to get up each time and, pushing through the debility, to continue his trek to its fatal, foreordained end.
In his poem “Sparrow Lament,” William Woolfitt alludes to Jesus’s three falls on his way to Golgotha: “You fall,” “You fall,” “You fall.” He uses a string of metaphors from the natural world for the falling Christ: He’s a sparrow bone (spat out by a predator?), a floating leaf, a shed bovine hair, a grain of wheat blown loose from its stalk. These are wistful images of solitariness, passage, decease—and yet the descriptor “God-eyed” indicates that the path Christ is on is governed by divine providence.
The sparrow reference, given further weight by its use in the poem’s title, evokes Jesus’s teaching in Matthew 10:28–31: “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather, fear the one who can destroy both soul and body in hell. Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father. And even the hairs of your head are all counted. So do not be afraid; you are of more value than many sparrows.”
The Father has willed the Son to drink the bitter cup of suffering and death, which, despite Jesus’s distressed plea less than twenty-four hours prior that the cup be removed, he downs in trust, casting off any dreams he had for living into old age. As he carries out his calling, he stumbles, he falls to the ground—but not apart from the will of his Father.
In the middle of the poem, the lineation—the arrangement of words using lines and line breaks—mimics a downward motion. Like the drop of the storied widow’s coin into the offering box (Mark 12:41–44; Luke 21:1–4). Most biblical interpreters assume that Mary, Jesus’s mother, was a widow by the time Jesus started his ministry, since Joseph is never mentioned in any of the Gospel accounts after the episode of Jesus disappearing in the temple at age twelve. Woolfitt refers to Jesus as “widow’s all”—Mary’s everything, her firstborn son, whom she sacrificially gives to the world, knowing God will bless her gift. She doesn’t hoard this dear treasure of hers. She surrenders him to God’s greater plan.
It wasn’t an easy choice to make. Mothers instinctively want to hold on to their children, and tight. Many intrusively fear dropping them as infants and would do anything to spare them pain. Well, Mary drops her son, on purpose. She relinquishes him, “copper seed,” whose death bears fruit, yields dividends.
William Woolfitt is a writer across the genres of poetry, fiction, and essay. His poetry collections are The Night the Rain Had Nowhere to Go (Belle Point, 2024), Spring Up Everlasting (Mercer, 2020), Charles of the Desert (Paraclete, 2016), and Beauty Strip (Texas Review, 2014). He is an associate professor of creative writing at Lee University in Cleveland, Tennessee, where he lives with his wife and two children. He founded and edits Speaking of Marvels, a blog that features interviews with authors of chapbooks, novellas, and books of assorted lengths.
There are hundreds of creative works I could feature on the topic of Christ’s wounds. Here are just a few of note.
ARTICLE: “‘Your body is full of wounds’: references, social contexts and uses of the wounds of Christ in Late Medieval Europe” by Johanna Pollick, Emily Poore, Sophie Sexon, and Sara Stradal: In this three-part collaborative essay, I was most intrigued, in part because of its newness to me, by the first section, “The flowering wound: Christ’s heart in Princeton University, MS Taylor 17,” in which Dr. Johanna Pollick explores a small English illuminated devotional book, dating from around 1500, that portrays Christ’s wounds as wells. For help in interpreting these images, she turns to medieval literary traditions as well as to the Carthusian Miscellany.
Wounded Heart of Christ as the Well of Lyfe, England, ca. 1500. Princeton University Library, MS Taylor 17, fol. 10v.
Dr. Grace Hamman writes about MS Taylor 17’s extraordinary “well of lyfe” page in Jesus through Medieval Eyes (and for InterVarsity’s The Well), which is what brought me to this essay. The hand-colored image shows flowers—labeled “pyte” (pity), “loue” (love), and “charyte” (charity)—springing forth from the wounded heart of Jesus. The verse prayer at the top reads, “Well of lyfe that ever shall laste / My herte in thee make it stedfast.”
The same theme shows up in another late fifteenth-century English lyric in MS Arundel 286 at the British Library, which appears in modern compilations under the title “The Wounds, as Wells of Life” or “The Wells of Jesus’ Wounds”:
Ihesus woundes so wide Ben welles of lif to the goode, Namely the stronde of his syde That ran ful breme on the rode. Yif thee list to drinke To fle fro the fendes of helle, Bowe thu doun to the brinke And mekely taste of the welle.
Jesus’s wounds so wide Are wells of life to the good, Namely the stream from his side That ran fiercely on the rood. If thou list to drink, To flee from the fiends of hell, Bow thou down to the brink And meekly taste of the well.
Trans. Victoria Emily Jones
And in a late fifteenth-century gold ring, also from England, engraved with a Man of Sorrows image and hieroglyphs of Christ’s five wounds, labeled “The well of pitty, the well of merci, the well of confort, the well of gracy, the well of everlastingh lyffe”:
SONG: “Deep Were His Wounds” by William Johnson, 1953: This midcentury hymn is composed of three simple stanzas: The first half of each meditates on Jesus’s cruel death on the cross, whereas each second half (“But . . .”) celebrates the healing, freedom, and eternal life that death wrought.
>> Music by Leland B. Sateren, 1958: I like this tune, called MARLEE, but it’s difficult to sing congregationally. Here’s a soloist, Sarah Gulseth, singing it for her church’s 2011 Good Friday service, accompanied on organ by Luther Gulseth:
>> Music by Vito Aiuto, 2008: I was first introduced to “Deep Were His Wounds” through the Welcome Wagon’s debut album, Welcome to the Welcome Wagon, “a ramshackle singalong enterprise of a Presbyterian pastor (the Rev. Vito Aiuto) and his wife (Monique) wrestling out the influences of folk music, religion, popular culture, and church tradition.” Mood-wise, Aiuto’s tune wouldn’t work as well for Good Friday—even given the paradox of that day, it’s too bright, in my opinion, for that somber observance. But it’s great for throughout the year, especially for churches that favor a contemporary/folksy style of music.
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CANTATA CYCLE:“Membra Jesu Nostri” (The Limbs of Our Suffering Jesus) by Dieterich Buxtehude: Dieterich Buxtehude (ca. 1637–1707) was a Danish German organist and composer of the mid-Baroque period. For Good Friday 1680, he composed a cycle of seven concerto-aria cantatas. The texts of the aria sections are taken from the medieval Latin hymn “Salve mundi salutare” (Hail, the World’s Salvation) by the Cistercian abbot Arnulf of Leuven (ca. 1200–1250), whereas the concerto section texts are Old Testament quotations. The following video is a 2004 performance from Payerne, Switzerland; see the YouTube video description for further credits. The video includes English subtitles, but you can also read the lyrics (with translation) here.
The cycle begins by paying homage to Christ’s wounded feet (“Ad Pedes” = “To the Feet”), and then progresses upward to his knees, hands, side, breast, heart, and finally, face/head. Traditionally, Christ’s wounds are enumerated as five: a hole in each foot, a hole in each hand, and a hole through his side/heart (from the centurion’s spear). But Arnulf meditates on seven distinct body parts of Christ’s that were injured on Good Friday.
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ARTWORKS:
>> The Five Wounds of Christ by Fernand Léger | Commentary by Albert Hengelaar: This visual meditation is about the architecture and interior decoration of the Sacré-Coeur in Audincourt, France, a product of the Art Sacré movement, a Catholic art renaissance spearheaded by the French Dominican Order from 1919 to the 1950s. The centerpiece of the church, sited above the high altar, is a stained glass window depicting the five wounds of Christ shining like suns—one of seventeen windows the artist Fernand Léger designed to encircle the space in a strip.
Fernand Léger (French, 1881–1955), The Five Wounds of Christ, 1950–52. Stained glass window, Église du Sacré-Cœur (Church of the Sacred Heart), Audincourt, France.
>> The Great Wound, aka Go On, Wounded Healer by Jack Baumgartner | Commentary by Sam Kee: In this Substack post, Sam Kee unpacks a drawing by his friend Jack Baumgartner [previously], which shows that “there is life in His [Christ’s] wounds, and He pours His life into our wounds.” The drawing started with the roman numeral V, which stands for the five wounds of Christ. The circumference is one large wound that encompasses five smaller wounds, eye-like, each one weeping blood. Other symbols that Kee analyzes in the drawing are wheat, grapes, fig leaves, seashell, fire, heart, and womb. “Go on” is a refrain that Baumgartner uses often in his work, a mantra for persevering in the faith, for continuing on the path.
Jack Baumgartner (American, 1976–), The Great Wound, 2024. Drawing from the series The Diary of a Tree Standing on Its Head.
Kee concludes with an original ekphrastic poem.
You can purchase an archival reproduction of The Great Wound from Baumgartner’s online shop. I encourage you to explore his website as well. I admire how his work is somehow both mystical and earthy, rooted.
Art & Theology 