Praises Abound: Hymns and Meditations for Lent and Easter - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0898698677 ISBN 13: 9780898698671

Verlag: Church Publishing, 2012

Inhaltsangabe

These hymns and meditations are authentic and honest reflections of seminary students who have since become priests, musicians, and educators throughout the church. The collection is made up of selected works by students of Dr. Schulz-Widmar during his thirty-year teaching career at the Episcopal Theological Seminary of the Southwest (ETS), Austin, Texas.

It is organized for devotional reading for Lent and the early Easter season, readings are designated for specific days.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Russell Schulz -Widmar, recently retired ETS professor, is former president of the Hymn Society in the United States and Canada. As a member of the Standing Commission on Church Music of the Episcopal Church, he chaired the hymn music committee for The Hymnal 1982. He has lectured and published widely on contemporary hymn-writing in the United States.

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Praises Abound

Hymns and Meditations for Lent & Easter Week from the Seminary of the Southwest

Church Publishing

Copyright © 2012 the contributors
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-89869-867-1

Contents

Chapter One

Ash Wednesday

The Glory of These Forty Days

Meditation based on "The glory of these forty days," Hymnal 1982: 143

The glory of these forty days we celebrate with songs of praise; for Christ through whom all things were made, himself has fasted and has prayed.

We begin our Lenten days with ash on our foreheads and with the solemn reminder of our mortality: "Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return." Then, as Lent unfolds, we come to the singular Christian understanding: our frail bodies are meant for glory. Our bodies are the habitat of glory, of God's own radiant presence, revealed in Jesus. Our Friend and Companion in the way shares this embodied human life, and lives it from the inside out. He knows hunger, thirst, fatigue. He chooses fasting and prayer. He recognizes both the limitations of the body and its divine origin.

How can this be? We are surrounded by images that tell us the body is a commodity. Or that the body is nothing more than a means for gulping down food or booze or chemicals. We fail to see the body as the handiwork of God, as our own particular "text"—a little gospel of the good news of God's vital and eternal creating, as close as our breath, as intimate as the hand of a master artisan.

"The glory of these forty days" is precisely this: the reminder that when we fast and pray, we follow in the steps of Jesus. We act on the wild invitation of the Holy Spirit to enter the wilderness of Lent. We engage in fasting and prayer. We let go of the illusion of needing so much. We walk into the spare, open space of Lent and we begin to live in a clarity of body, mind, and spirit. We do so as a company, as the gathered community. We do so in the company of Jesus the Christ, "through whom all things are made." The Christ is with us, and we with him. Strength and grace will mark this journey. Each day of Lent potentially resounds with the Word speaking in and through our cells, our marrow, our muscles and sinew. Each day of Lent, limned with glory, invites us to cast aside illusions that we are self-sufficient or self-made. Each day of Lent calls us to venerate the image and likeness of God in the bodies of others, recognizing the sacred presence of Jesus in his various disguises.

This hymn reminds us of the gifts to be found in the way of Lent. We become a pilgrim people, walking together through the fasting and praying. We remember together the great stories of Scripture—Moses, Daniel, and Jesus each knowing their need and their weakness. We recall that the wilderness is the scriptural place of presence. The hymn, as it sings in us, brings us to adoration. We sing together of our God-given desire to love God, neighbor, and ourselves through these Lenten disciplines. As we fast, we recall those whose tables have no food, and those whose labor places food before us. We remember those bodies emaciated by famine, those eyes dulled by war, those minds battered by the fearful trek of the refugee. As we pray, we are knit together anew as the Body of Christ, Bread of Life. As our bodies and our spirits are gently refashioned and reclaimed by the Love who will not let us go, we discover anew that each wilderness is full of divine presence, full of possibility, full of that sacred Life that leads us to fast and pray with joy.

—Mary C. Earle

2nd Day of Lent: Thursday

Dame Julian's Vision

Refrain

    God holds the world, a hazelnut,
    and keeps us safe in hand.
    The love of God for each of us
    will every care withstand.

      Sometimes our lives are troubled,
    not tranquil or serene.
    But then dear Christ, our Mother,
    makes all our spirits clean.

      When Julian saw Christ's passion,
    she heard our savior say:
    God's everlasting mercy
    will never fade away!

      When pain and sorrow threaten
    as Julian did foretell,
    remember Christ's sweet promise
    that "all things will be well."

Words: Winifred Mitchell © 2006 Possible Tune: Balm in Gilead

3rd Day of Lent: Friday

Journey to Christ

Meditation based on "I bind unto myself today," Hymnal 1982: 370

I sat on my sister's bed, feeling as bleak as the winter day outside. The gray, chilly winters in northwest Florida can fill one's marrow with dampness, and my bones were fairly dripping.

I sat alone. Gloomy. Bereft of comfort. The comfort of central heat: who could afford that anymore? The comfort of companionship: my sister had taken my son to a movie and the rest of our roommates were long scattered to the neighborhood malls.

My only company was the leftover rain dripping from the gutters and the smells emitted from my sister's old mattress—mildew and perspiration. Poor company for a lonely widow of twenty-four.

I sighed and thought about Larry, my husband, also gone. Gone to death. As usual, I had put on one of his T-shirts that morning—mostly all I wore on the weekends were a pair of softly faded jeans and Larry's T-shirts. I couldn't seem to part with them—it was too much like parting with him, so I kept them and wore them, notwithstanding the accusation of my four-year-old son some months prior. Pointing to my closet, he'd said firmly, "I know you have some dresses in there!" Well, he was right, but who was I going to dress up for?

I picked up one of the magazines my sister favored— Good Housekeeping or Redbook—and flicked a particularly skeletal looking model's bare thigh. "I know you have some fat in there," I grumbled, hating her skinny, airbrushed self. Sigh.

"Deborah," I asked myself, "did anyone ever have a better fix on self-pity than you do right now?" Probably not, I decided. Flipping to another page, I stared at an article's title asking if a marriage could be saved. Huh. Well, mine can't. I tossed the magazine on the floor beside the bed and flopped back onto the pillows, tears streaming down my face.

Clink-clank. Ah, the mailman. Another big sigh and I was off the bed, wrapping a wool shawl around my shoulders. At least I could fetch the mail and distribute it to the roomies—that would take up some of this dreary time on my hands.

Among the junk mail, circulars, and letters for the household I saw a legal- sized envelope with my name and address typed on it. Great. Another Larry admirer telling me how sorry they are. Not as sorry as I am, I thought.

I plopped onto my sis's bed again and slid my thumb under the envelope's seal and extracted a poorly typed, smudged piece of onion skin.

What's this?

I began to read:

Christ be with me, Christ within me, Christ behind me, Christ before me, Christ beside me, Christ to win me, Christ to comfort and restore me. Christ beneath me, Christ above me, Christ in quiet, Christ in danger, Christ in hearts of all that love me, Christ in mouth of friend and stranger....

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Church Publishing
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2012
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0898698677
• ISBN 13: 9780898698671
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 160
• Herausgeber: Schulz-Widmar Russell
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Buchpark GmbH; gpsr@buchpark.de; ; Krügerweg 1; Trebbin; Brandenburg; 14959; Deutschland