Night Kindness
“Let your merciful kindness, O Lord, be upon us, as we have put our trust in you.”
Whether intentional or not, all of Elise Ritter’s depictions of angles and saints have a distinctively Lenten vibe to them: undoubtedly, it is the predominance of rich purple as the celestial color, and the broken, abstract, impressionistic quality she imbues to spiritual being. This is her “Stained Glass Saints.” Gazing upon these luminous figures in the midst of our Lenten way, we remember our own “swept-up”-ness in the same subtle-but-overwhelming mystery that dreamily called out to Abraham and summoned Nicodemus by night: that mystery, like a golden thread, binding up the pieces of our broken lives with all the Communion of the Broken in the One Indivisible, Holy, Wonderous, Catholic and Apostolic Church that is the Broken Body of Christ himself.
The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.
— Jesus Christ, the Son of God (John 3:8)
Second Sunday of Lent
Texts for this Week
Prayer
Almighty God, you know that we have no power in ourselves to help ourselves: Keep us both outwardly in our bodies and inwardly in our souls, that we may be defended from all adversities that may happen to the body, and from all evil thoughts that may assault and hurt the soul; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.
Uniting Praise
Christian worship has — from ancient times — been a multi-lingual phenomenon. Our praises are peppered with loan words from Hebrew and Greek and Latin, many of which have become so familiar to us that we can forget that they have been transplanted into our consciousness by the accumulated generations of praising our God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, through him in the power of his Holy Spirit. Notably, this is still a feature of the eastern churches: we frequently hear the many repetitions of “Kyrie Eleison” (Lord, have mercy) switch between the heart languages of the peoples and traditions in the worshipping community.
Here is a contemporary and tecnocratic rendering of that same tradition, as John 3:16 is sung sequentially in six different languages, with a uniting melody and recurrent chorus of Halleluiahs.
