The first in a weekly, six-part Lenten series exploring themes of human frailty and suffering through music, story, and art. This week’s post features an image by Jamin Still, a song by Drew Miller, and a new liturgy by Doug McKelvey from Every Moment Holy, Vol. II.
An Image: Candle by Jamin Still
Jamin Still reflects on the relationship between anguish and hope found in the psalms which inspired this work:
The psalms provide a model for looking at and processing pain and suffering. They lead us to acknowledge hardships and give us permission to feel what we feel. Nowhere do we see, “Put on a good face and pretend that everything is OK.” The psalms do not tell us to ignore pain or to pretend it doesn’t affect us. God allows us to question, he allows us cry out in our anguish.
But coupled with this raw emotional response, the psalms remind us of perspective and hope. They say, “Yes, feel deeply the sting of injustice. Feel deeply the wrongness of disease and death. Scream to the heavens in your anguish and in your inability to understand the brokenness of this world. But know that there is hope. All will be mended, all will be made right again, even if you don’t understand now.”
Is this hope an empty promise, given to simply make us feel better? No. Christ, of course, is the embodiment of that promise. And here’s the thing: God allowed himself to experience pain, like the pain that we so often suffer and do not understand, in order to fulfill the promise of all things new; in order to bring us hope. We may not understand, but he does. Our light might be extinguished, we might be snuffed out, but dawn is about to break. —Jamin Still
A Song: “Into the Darkness” by Drew Miller
Drew Miller shares the backstory of “Into the Darkness”:
The week after Hutchmoot 2019, I did two things: bought a guitar I’d been eyeing up all summer and wrote this song on it. When Kelsey went to bed, I was strumming five chords, and when she woke up, I had five verses.
Each of the first four verses explores a strategy as old as Eden for avoiding suffering: distraction via decadence, works righteousness, pedestalizing creativity, and the quest to eliminate mystery. When we reach the end of these dead-ends, life often drags us, kicking and screaming, into the darkness.
Then the fifth verse presents another way—not a way out, but a way through.
I’ll give you this spoiler alert: the darkness is not the enemy. The darkness, it turns out, is one of the greatest friends available to us, if only we have the honesty and humility to receive it. —Drew Miller
For more Lenten songs, explore our Lent Playlist on Spotify and Apple Music.
A Liturgy: “An Exhortation Making Space to Speak of Dying” by Doug McKelvey
Children of the Living God,
Let us now speak of dying, and let us speak without fear, for we have already died with Christ, and our lives are not our own.
Our dying is part of the story that God is telling to us, and part of the story that God is telling through us.
It is not a dark and hopeless word we must take pains to skirt or mention only in hushed whispers lest our conversations grow awkward and uncomfortable.
Rather, death is a present and unavoidable reality, and one through which we—the people of God—must learn to openly walk with one another.
Yes, it is cause for lament. Death is a horrible and inevitable sorrow. It is grief. It is numb shock and raw pain and long seasons of weeping and ache. And we will experience it as such.
But it is more than all of that.
For it is also a baptism, a prelude to a celebration.
Our true belief that Christ died and was raised again promises this great hope:
That there will be a newness of life, a magnificent resurrection that follows death and swallows it entirely.
Death will not have the final word, so we need not fear to speak of it.
Death is not a period that ends a sentence. It is but a comma, a brief pause before the fuller thought unfolds into eternal life.
Beloved of Christ, do not hide from this truth: Each of us in time must wrestle death. In our youth we might have run in fear from such lament, but only those who soberly consider their mortal end can then work backward from their certain death, and so begin to build a life invested in eternal things.
We should remember death throughout our lives, that we might arrive at last well-prepared to follow our Lord into that valley, and through it, further still, to our resurrection.
Death is not the end of life. It is an intersection—a milestone we pass in our eternal pursuit of Christ.
Yes, death is an inhuman, hungering thing. But it is also the pompous antagonist in a divine comedy. Even as it seeks to destroy all that is good, death is proved a near-sighted buffoon whose overreaching plans will fail, whose ephemeral kingdom will crumble.
For all along, death has been blindly serving the deeper purposes of God within us— giving us the knowledge that all we gather in this short life will soon be scattered, that all we covet will soon be lost to us, that all we accomplish by our ambition will soon be rendered as meaningless as vapor.
Death reveals the utter vanity of all our misplaced worship and all our feebly- invested hopes.
And once we’ve seen, in light of death, how meaningless all our human strivings have been, then we can finally apprehend what the radical hope of a bodily resurrection means for mortals like us—and how the labors of Christ now reshape and reinterpret every facet of our lives, Rebuilding the structures of our hopes till we know that nothing of eternal worth will ever be lost.
Yes, we are crucified with our Lord, but all who are baptized into his death are also resurrected into his life, so that we live now in the overlap of the kingdoms of temporal death and eternal life—
and when it is our time to die, we die in that overlap as well, and there we will find that our dying has already been subverted, rewritten, folded in, and made a part of our resurrection.
Have we not all along been rehearsing Christ’s death and his life in the sacrament of his communion? We have been both remembering and rehearsing our union and reunion with him.
O children of God, do you now see? Your pursuit of Christ has always demanded a daily dying to your own self, and to your own dreams.
That final, brief sleep of death is but the last laying down of all those lesser things, that you might awake remade, set free, rejoicing in the glorious freedom that will be yours.
Yes, hate death!
It is an enemy— but an enemy whose end approaches, and whose assault can inflict no lasting wound.
Yes, weep and grieve!
But more than that, believe! The veil is thinner than we know. And death is thinner still. It cannot hold any whose names are dearly known to God. Rejoice in this! Death is neither a grey void, nor a dungeon cell—but a door. And when Christ bids us pass through at last, we pass from life to Life.
Amen.