Retrieve Lament, Day 1 (art mediations + suggested resources for Lent 2013)

"Once, ritual lament would have been chanted; women would have been paid to beat their breasts and howl for you all night, when all is silent. Where can we find such customs now? So many have long since disappeared or been disowned.

That’s what you had to come for: to retrieve

the lament that we omitted."
(Ranier Maria Rilke, from Requiem For A Friend)

During Lent I'll share almost-daily meditations of Scripture, hymns, and art reflecting this time of tension between dying and birth.

Won't you join me?

February 13, Ash Wednesday

Three years ago I had an emergency surgery on Valentine's Day, gave up my gall bladder for Lent. This year, on Ash Wednesday, my doctor burned away the lining of my uterus, once a blanket of sustenance for my children, no longer sustaining life but harming it.

Later in the day, after Brian'd driven me home from surgery, our priests arrived at the front door, carrying a baggie of ashes, a little wine, a little bread. While my freshly-abused insides blistered healing, they applied a charry cross to my forehead. I've never felt so attuned to the reality of decay. A reverse sacrament -- visible signs of inward death.

I've never tasted sweeter grace -- breaking the medical fast with broken bread, sipping pungent wine. After my surgery three years ago, I did not receive kindness well. What was intended for love to me felt like pain.

Christ's life is growing in me.

This time, the kind care of the hospital nurses, the pastoral prayers of our priests, my husband's sign of the cross over me as I rolled into surgery, hugs and chocolate-covered strawberries from my concerned children, prayer messages sent from friends -- all of it -- reminding me that even while we remember death His easter is alive in us.

Jonah 3:1-4:11

The word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time, saying, ‘Get up, go to Nineveh, that great city, and proclaim to it the message that I tell you.’ So Jonah set out and went to Nineveh, according to the word of the Lord. Now Nineveh was an exceedingly large city, a three days’ walk across. Jonah began to go into the city, going a day’s walk. And he cried out, ‘Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!’ And the people of Nineveh believed God; they proclaimed a fast, and everyone, great and small, put on sackcloth.

When the news reached the king of Nineveh, he rose from his throne, removed his robe, covered himself with sackcloth, and sat in ashes. Then he had a proclamation made in Nineveh: ‘By the decree of the king and his nobles: No human being or animal, no herd or flock, shall taste anything. They shall not feed, nor shall they drink water. Human beings and animals shall be covered with sackcloth, and they shall cry mightily to God. All shall turn from their evil ways and from the violence that is in their hands. Who knows? God may relent and change his mind; he may turn from his fierce anger, so that we do not perish.’

When God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil ways, God changed his mind about the calamity that he had said he would bring upon them; and he did not do it.
But this was very displeasing to Jonah, and he became angry. He prayed to the Lord and said, ‘O Lord! Is not this what I said while I was still in my own country? That is why I fled to Tarshish at the beginning; for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing. And now, O Lord, please take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live.’ And the Lord said, ‘Is it right for you to be angry?’ Then Jonah went out of the city and sat down east of the city, and made a booth for himself there. He sat under it in the shade, waiting to see what would become of the city.

The Lord God appointed a bush,* and made it come up over Jonah, to give shade over his head, to save him from his discomfort; so Jonah was very happy about the bush. But when dawn came up the next day, God appointed a worm that attacked the bush, so that it withered. When the sun rose, God prepared a sultry east wind, and the sun beat down on the head of Jonah so that he was faint and asked that he might die. He said, ‘It is better for me to die than to live.’

But God said to Jonah, ‘Is it right for you to be angry about the bush?’ And he said, ‘Yes, angry enough to die.’ Then the Lord said, ‘You are concerned about the bush, for which you did not labour and which you did not grow; it came into being in a night and perished in a night. And should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who do not know their right hand from their left, and also many animals?’