1. It's been raining almost every day this week -- but this Good Friday morning it was lovely and blue, and I went for a run and then lay on the floor of my room stretching and listening to an aria from the Messiah:
I know that my Redeemer liveth and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth. And though worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God. (Job 19:25-26) For now is Christ risen from the dead, the first fruits of them that sleep. (I Corinthians 15:20)
(There were quite a few worms along the path as I ran, they'd come out after yesterday's rain, and I took care to avoid them although that meant several muddy splashes when I quick side step away from a worm meant a side step into a puddle.)
2. The recording I was listening to was taken on Wednesday when I went with Auntie Sarah to watch Handel's Messiah in the cinema in Bury. They recorded it live from the Bristol Old Vic - and I recorded part of the singing which you can download here. It was some of the most beautiful singing I've heard in all my days. The director (Tom Morris) wanted to revivify the drama of the text and story and so rather than having it as a normal oratorio without costume/set/action, it was more like an opera -- Christ's body was born by candlelight onto the stage in the first scene, the soloists acted as well as sung their grief and the chorus participated in the scourging of Christ. The Christ in the performance was played by Jamie Beddard, who has cerebral palsy. I didn't realise at first and put the slight movements of the 'dead' Christ down to shivering - 'He must be cold, lying there without a shirt on,' I thought. When it became apparent (when he stood up) that he had a disability it added an entirely different dimension to the story. When the words 'he was despised and rejected' were sung their meaning came through so much more clearly, since it's difficult now to imagine Jesus (so highly exalted and loved) as being despised and rejected, but by paralleling it to the barriers to everyday life that people with disability face it became a lot more clear, and a lot more horrible:
"The Messiah gets cast out by his followers and, in many ways, there are parallels with the political climate around disability at the moment. In many ways my unique physicality contradicts people’s expectations of who Jesus was. It allows us to re-imagine who the historical figure might have been, away from the religious gloss that has determined how he has been understood for the last two millennia." (Jamie Beddard)
3. I've been reading and thinking a lot about rejection - ejection - abjection for my dissertation, and the crucifixion as a site for all of those things (rejection by man, ejection of blood, abjection of body)
4. I've been reading about tragedy and theology and was struck by this quote:
'Betwixt and between: the Christian experience of the world is one of ambiguity, in the 'middle of the journey of our lives', 'lost', like Dante, 'in a dark wood' of sin, waiting for grace.' George Steiner compares is to Holy Saturday - 'we wait, between the memory, trauma and despair of Good Friday and the expectant hope of Easter. The experience [...] is one in which we learn the difference between optimism and hope, in which we are only able to hope for the best by confronting the worst. As Hardy enjoined, 'who holds that if way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst.''
5. Both Nat and I saw this quote on the same day 'Sometimes when you're in a dark place you think you've been buried, but you've actually been planted.' Christine Caine. Reminded me of Launcelot Andrewes sermon in which:
'Christ rising was indeed a gardener, and that a strange one, who made … a dead body to shoot forth out of the grave … He it is that by virtue of this morning’s act shall garden our bodies too, turn all our graves into garden plots; yea, will one day turn land and sea and all into a great garden, and so husband them as will in due time bring forth live bodies, even all our bodies alive again.'
6. I've been listening to (aside from the Messiah) the Killer's new album Wonderful, Wonderful, which has a song called 'Some Kind of Love'
You got the will of a wild
A wild bird
You got the faith of a child
Before the world gets in
You got some kind of love
You got the soul of a truck
On a long distance haul
You got the grace of the storm
In the desert
7. I am, as always, touched by the meeting of Jesus and Mary outside the tomb, after his Resurrection. I remember the teary world I ran through to the fields beyond the day after Grandma died, how I walked without feeling the cold and stood leaning on a fence, looking out and singing to myself. If I'd heard her call my name... The meeting between Mary and Jesus makes me cry in the same way the reunion of Hermione and Laertes in The Winter's Tale makes me cry, that impossibility and undeserved restoration of what was beautiful and lost:
Now Mary stood outside the tomb crying. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb and saw two angels in white, seated where Jesus’ body had been, one at the head and the other at the foot.
They asked her, “Woman, why are you crying?”
“They have taken my Lord away,” she said, “and I don’t know where they have put him.” At this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not realize that it was Jesus.
He asked her, “Woman, why are you crying? Who is it you are looking for?”
Thinking he was the gardener, she said, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have put him, and I will get him.”
Jesus said to her, “Mary.”
She turned toward him and cried out in Aramaic, “Rabboni!” (which means “Teacher”).
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