Retrieve Lament, Day 20 with Spark and Echo Arts

"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?

March 7 , Day 20

Dance is one of the hardest art mediums to translate via blog.  I'm so glad to have discovered Spark and Echo Arts, an organization committed to "creating the world’s largest multi-disciplinary “illumination” of the Bible".   You should certainly spend some time viewing their site.  May God bless the artists who collaborated on choreography, dance, soundtrack and videography to illustrate today's passage -- and many, many, many more like them.

2 Corinthians 4:16-5:5

(ESV)

¹⁶ So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. ¹⁷ For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, ¹⁸ as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.

5 For we know that if the tent that is our earthly home is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. ² For in this tent we groan, longing to put on our heavenly dwelling, ³ if indeed by putting it on we may not be found naked. ⁴ For while we are still in this tent, we groan, being burdened—not that we would be unclothed, but that we would be further clothed, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life. ⁵ He who has prepared us for this very thing is God, who has given us the Spirit as a guarantee.

what flickers will yet remain from Spark and Echo Arts on Vimeo

from the choreographer:  

This passage from 2 Corinthians fascinates me, especially the juxtaposition of the reality that we experience in our daily lives, and the reality that lies beneath those circumstances. For me, the verses present a perpetual tension between the temporal and the eternal, deterioration and regeneration, frustration and hope. That our lives comprise all of these facets simultaneously overwhelms me, but this scripture is also a comfort. It echoes our difficulties, while assuring us of the infallible hope that remains.

what flickers will yet remains is a meditation on the fluidity of struggle, rest, stability, change, the everyday and the imagined. The work also explores the collaboration of dance, music and film perspectives. It could not have been made in its present form without the contributions of videographer, musicians and dancers, to whom I am very grateful.

Suggested Resources for Lent:

• Book of Common Prayer, Daily Devotions for Families and Individuals

• 2013 Lenten Daily Devotional from Christ Church of Austin
• Exposed at Simcha Fisher: a beautiful, provocative meditation for Lent 

Now it's your turn!  What art are you enjoying this season? 

 Tell us about it in the  comments below.  

If you've written your own post, share the link.

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"Let him easter in us, be a dayspring to the dimness of us, be a crimson-cresseted east." Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Wreck of the Deutschland