Jan. 4: Seasoned Love: Marriage as Martyrdom

Rosefire, Melissa Weinman, 2015. Triptych altarpiece. Courtesy of the artist.

“Many Waters” from the album Song of Songs. Performed byConventus, the English Chamber Orchestra,and Elin Manahan Thomas. Composed by Patrick Hawes.

“O Love.” Performed by Elaine Hagenberg. Lyrics: George Mattheson, Music: Elaine Hagenberg.

Poetry:

“Entering St. Patrick’s Cathedral”
by Malachi Black

I have carried in my coat, black wet
with rain. I stand. I clear my throat.

My coat drips. The carved door closes
on its slow brass hinge. City noises—

car horns, bicycle bells, the respiration
truck engines, the whimpering

steel in midtown taxi brakes—bend
in through the doorjamb with the wind

then drop away. The door shuts plumb: it seals
the world out like a coffin lid. A chill,

dampened and dense with the spent breath
of old Hail Marys, lifts from the smoothed

stone of the nave. I am here to pay
my own respects, but I will wait:

my eyes must grow accustomed
to church light, watery and dim.

I step in. Dark forms hunch forward
in the pews. Whispering, their heads

are bowed, their mouths pressed
to the hollows of clasped hands.

High overhead, a gathering of shades
glows in stained glass: the resurrected

mingle with the dead and martyred
in panes of blue, green, yellow, red.

Beneath them lies the golden holy
altar, holding its silence like a bell,

and there, brightly skeletal beside it,
the organ pipes: cold, chrome, quiet

but alive with a vibration tolling
out from the incarnate

source of holy sound. I turn, shivering
back into my coat. The vaulted ceiling

bends above me like an ear. It waits:
I hold my tongue. My body is my prayer.

CALL ME MARA

Many waters cannot quench love, nor can the floods drown it.
- Song of Songs 8:7

Naomi was bitter. She left Bethlehem with her family to wait out a famine in Moab. While there, her husband and both her sons died. She was left alone to provide for her two Moabite daughters-in-law. In her grief, Naomi struggled to trust God’s unconditional love. She told Orpah and Ruth, “the Lord has turned against me” (Ruth 1:13). She saw a glimmer of His love when He again provided food for His people. But she lost sight of it on their way back to the land of Judah, when she stopped and encouraged her daughters-in-law to return to Moab to their families and, ultimately, to their pagan gods. Convinced of God’s love, Naomi, not Ruth, might have been the one to say, “let my people be your people, and my God your God.” Still overwhelmed by the floodwaters, she arrives in Bethlehem telling the townspeople, “Don’t call me Naomi,” which means pleasant, “Call me Mara, because the Almighty has made my life very bitter” (Ruth 1:20).

Malachi Black’s poem reflects the same struggle between trusting God’s love and being overwhelmed by floodwaters. The metaphors for disillusionment pile up as soon as the poem begins. The speaker’s coat is “black wet/with rain,” the city noises include whimpering. The door closes on what feels like hopelessness as “it seals/the world out like a coffin lid.” Inside, the church is dim, but there are glimmers of God’s love, the “blue, green, yellow, red” of stained-glass windows, and the “golden holy/altar.” Our speaker hints at resurrection. And for all his discouragement, he knows God hears because “the vaulted ceiling/bends above me like an ear.” He still can’t lean wholly into God’s love, but his body, his entire being, is his prayer. Like Naomi, he trusts God’s love, and he doesn’t.

Their struggles are our struggles but are completely unlike the heart of Christ represented by today’s artwork,Rosefire. It reflects Christ, sometimes called the Rose of Sharon, whose heart bears “flames of fire” (Song of Songs 8:6), unquenchable love, for His Father and for us.

George Matheson, who wrote the hymn “O Love,” experienced bitterness and heartbreak when his fiancée left him because he was going blind. Twenty years later, he was able to write this hymn for his sister’s wedding because God’s unconditional love pursued him throughout his life:

O love that will not let me go,
I rest my weary soul in thee;

And:

O joy that seeks me through the pain,
I cannot close my heart to thee;

Naomi and Matheson felt the floodwaters rise, and so do we. But as our verse and Patrick Hawes' song state, “many waters cannot quench love.” The flame of God’s love passed from the lineage of Boaz, Naomi’s kinsman redeemer, to Christ, our Redeemer.

Because of God’s unquenchable love, our trust in it, often like the poem’s organ pipes, skeletal, “cold, chrome, quiet,” becomes nothing but alive with a vibration tolling out from the incarnate source of holy sound.

Despite Satan’s plans to kill the Child, to crucify the Man, despite disillusionments that rise and hope that falls, despite bitterness and heartbreak, no waters can extinguish God’s unquenchable love. Instead, He transforms the floodwaters of Satan’s design, into what our hymn calls His “ocean depths” of love.

Prayer:
Oh Lord, we rejoice to know that all things are in Your hands, and that You love us with an everlasting love. No circumstances, no trials, no events in time can diminish or increase Your love; it is infinite, unchangeable, and everlasting. We rest in Your love today and forevermore.”
Amen.
- Charles Spurgeon

Jayne English
Essayist

For more information about the artwork, music, and poetry selected for this day, please visit our website via the link in our bio.