Midweek Devotion, September 11, 2024

Reading

Psalm 25: 2-6

In you I trust, O my God. Do not let me be put to shame, nor let my enemies triumph over me. No one whose hope is in you will ever be put to shame, but they will be put to shame who are treacherous without excuse.

Devotion

Eric Fischl, Ten Breaths: Tumbling Woman II, 2007-2008, bronze, 23 x 26 x 49 in. (58.4 x 66.0 x 124.5 cm), Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the James F. Dicke Family, 2013.86, © 2008, Eric Fischl

Today's artwork, "Ten Breaths: Tumbling Woman II," may be found in the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C.  Created by modern New York artist Eric Fischl, it depicts one of the darkest moments, at least in my memory, of the attack on September 11, 2001.  Before the towers fell, many people were faced with the stark choice of either burning to death or jumping from the tall buildings and plummeting to their deaths.  The bronze image reflects the burning flames.  The woman's arm is outstretched, as if reaching for aid.  Her posture seems so vulnerable with her back to the ground as if anticipating the crushing impact.  It's a provocative statue, it draws me in, uncomfortably, in.  I find it invites me into a spiritual place of lament.

Lament begins with the honest expression of sorrow, anger, or frustration.  Crying out our complaints whole-hearted honesty is found so often in the Scriptures.  The beginning of Psalm 22, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me" are among Jesus' last words on the cross.  Hear Psalm 13, "How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I wrestle with my thoughts and day after day have sorrow in my heart?" Psalm 88 is perhaps the darkest of examples in that it ends without hope.  Yet, much of lament ends on a note of defiant faith, having traveled troubles to arrive at a deeper sense of trust.

I remember the sense of chaos and calamity as events unfolded on 9-11.  God seemed so hidden.   John Polkinghorne in the book, One World, made this observation about the intensity of suffering such as this and the idea of a loving God, "At the deepest level I believe the only possible answer is to be found in the darkness and dereliction of the cross, where Christianity asserts that in the lonely figure hanging there we see God himself opening his arms to embrace the bitterness of the strange world he has made" (p. 80).  This is where lament leads--deeper into the Mystery of God.

Perhaps you, dear reader, or someone you know is in a place of lament.  Maybe trapped between two awful outcomes, at a horrible crossroads.  The prayer of lament opens the possibility that in all the senses of loss, abandonment, humiliation, betrayal, and seeming pointlessness, God's absence leads to God's discovery.  At the point marked by the Cross, we find ourselves (The Hiddenness of God in Combat, Jones and Beckman, p. 51).

Prayer

God of peace, justice, and righteousness, we pray today for the victims of the attacks of September 11, 2001, for the heroic people who rushed to save them, and for all who were injured in spirit that day, in our nation and the world. Enable us to learn the right lessons from these and all acts of savagery and darkness in the broken world which you love without reservation or exception. Strengthen our resolve to uphold the principles that signify our nation at its best. Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. (The Rt. Rev. John Taylor)