The Indefatigable Nearness of God
“The Lord is near to those who are brokenhearted and will save those who are crushed in spirit.”
The 20th C Mexican surrealist Octavio Ocampo has a penchant for optical illusions and visual puns: gravitating to a “metamorphic style” largely of his own invention, he juxtaposes and superimposes realistic and figurative details within his visual art. His painting Calvary depicts (of course) Christ on the Cross, but from two angles: we see both the crucifix with the corpus in the center of the frame, and the face of Christ, eyes closed, subdued by his suffering. On closer inspection, other details appear: a whole row of crosses behind the central figure, and before him, St John (also a self-portrait of the artist) representative of humanity, looking on from a distance. Other faces are present in the cracked earth, and in the gloomy rocks: judgement? Contempt? Horror? Confusion? Is that Adam and Eve clinging and cowering behind him? An angelic figure descends to minister to him: are there demons rushing to the Cross as well? Behind him, ravens ascend: dark birds bearing dark omens; but before, a trio of doves — the descent of the Holy Spirit? Or the Spirit that the Lord gave up in his final words? In any case, the birds ascend into the mist, and above them, in the swirling clouds, the unmistakable figure of eyes: open, seeing, and sorrowful, but somewhat distant, and faded from view. The Triune God and all creation here suffer on Calvary’s mount for our redemption, and for the salvation of all.
For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
— The Apostle Paul (2Cor 5:21)
Laetare Sunday (Fourth of Lent)
Texts for this Week
Prayer
Gracious Father, whose blessed Son Jesus Christ came down from heaven to be the true bread which gives life to the world: Evermore give us this bread, that he may live in us, and we in him; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.
Lorica
Within the Hiberno-Celtic monastic tradition, the Latin term lorica meaning “body armor” or “breastplate” was appropriated (perhaps via Eph 6:14) to denote a prayer of protection, wherein the enfolding presence of God was invoked as help and defense against the all the wiles of the devil and this dark world. The most famous lorica to come down to us is, of course, the lorica of attributed to St. Patrick, popularized in English through the Victorian hymnification done by Cecil Alexander. Characterized by several stanzas worth of “binding to [oneself] today” the core mysteries of the Christian faith, and then two urgent stanzas of naming the presence of Christ in all spaces and circumstances, Patrick’s Lorica is a forceful hymn, justly loved and regularly remixed.
The “Lorica of Ballyloughlin” appropriates the section of Patrick’s Breastplate that invokes Christ to the style of the Celtic jig, associated with the village of Ballyloughlin.
