snowce:

Phil Jones, Death of Death

(Source: darksilenceinsuburbia, via lbtmplz)

snowce:

Steve McCurry, Kabul Cemetery

"They see reality altogether differently from their surrounding culture. And, sure, a lot of the trappings seem bizarre and unnecessary. But the heart of the matter, the kernel not the husk, the way they act, behave towards one another – and more, towards outsiders, people who dismiss, mock, abuse them – isn’t that the way all Christians are called to live? Isn’t that the way our personal, social, and political imaginations are supposed to be structured? Shouldn’t that dissident, nonconformist vision be our defining reality?"

Faith and Theology: Wackos: A Good Friday sermon

Martyrdom St Petronella. Strasburg 1419, colored drawing. Cod Pal germ 144. U of Heidelberg (by tony harrison)

Caravaggio: Ecce Home

Behold the Man

Ecce Homo (pronounced [ˈeːtʃe ˈomo] or [ˈeːke ˈhomo]) are the Latin words used byPontius Pilate in the Vulgate translation of the John 19:5, when he presents ascourged Jesus Christ, bound and crowned with thorns, to a hostile crowd shortly before his Crucifixion. The original Greek is Ἰδοὺ ὁ ἄνθρωπος (Idou ho Anthrōpos). The King James Version translates the phrase into English as Behold the Man. The scene is widely depicted in Christian art.

Ecce Homo “Behold the Man”

Antonio Cesari

Ecce Homo (pronounced [ˈeːtʃe ˈomo] or [ˈeːke ˈhomo]) are the Latin words used byPontius Pilate in the Vulgate translation of the John 19:5, when he presents a scourged Jesus Christ, bound and crowned with thorns, to a hostile crowd shortly before his Crucifixion. The original Greek is Ἰδοὺ ὁ ἄνθρωπος (Idou ho Anthrōpos). The King James Version translates the phrase into English as Behold the Man. The scene is widely depicted in Christian art.

Chagall

welovepaintings:

William Adolphe Bouguereau (William Bouguereau) (1825-1905)
Pietà
Oil on canvas
1876
148 x 230 cm
(4’ 10.27” x 7’ 6.55”)
Dallas Museum of Fine Arts (Dallas, Texas, United States)

(via scriptural)

One Kneeling, One Looking Down

A Poem called “One Kneeling and One Looking Down”

from Cruciality 

“Part of my meditation on this Good Friday has been focused around a poem by Australian poet Les Murray. The poem, One Kneeling, One Looking Down, was inspired by an aboriginal legend in which a man was killed, and then raised from the dead by his two wives. In order for this ‘resurrection’ to happen, both wives had to agree on it. Murray’s poem depicts a moment of engagement between the two wives: the older wife wanting to have her husband back and the younger one resisting. Apart from the obvious echoes of the Easter narrative (not least the two women, the many impossibilities, freedom through death, etc), Murray’s piece also invites the reader to experience something of the fear and hope, sense of betrayal and renewed possibilities, that the Easter narrative explores. Of course, one does not want to push the echoes too far. Part of my meditation today was on ’seeing’, even re-writing, the poem’s episodes as a Trinitarian event in the life of God. In this, we not only have one kneeling (in faithful obedience) and one looking down (in pained delight), but also one holding him up in that kneeling posture. But again, one does not want to push the echoes too far …

Anyway, here’s the poem” :

ONE KNEELING. ONE LOOKING DOWN

Half-buried timbers chained in corduroy
lead out into the sand
which bare feet wincing Crutch and Crotch
spurn for the summer surf’s embroidery
and insects stay up on the land.

A storm engrossing half the sky
in broccoli and seething drab
and standing on one foot over the country
burrs like a lit torch. Lightning
turns air to elixir at every grab

but the ocean sky is troubled blue
everywhere. Its storm rolls below:
sand clouds raining on sacred country
drowned a hundred lifetimes under sea.
In the ruins of a hill, channels flow,

and people, like a scant palisade
driven in the surf, jump or sway
or drag its white netting to the tide line

where a big man lies with his limbs splayed,
fingers and toes and a forehead-shine

as if he’d fallen off the flag.
Only two women seem aware of him.
One says But this frees us. I’d be a fool -
Say it with me, says the other. For him to revive
we must both say it. Say Be alive. -

But it was our own friends who got
him with a brave shot, a clever shot. -
Those are our equals: we scorn them
for being no more than ourselves.
Say it with me. Say Be alive. -

Elder sister, it is impossible. -
Life was once impossible. And flight. And speech.
It was impossible to visit the moon.
The impossible’s our summoning dimension.
Say it with me. Say Be alive again. -

The young wavers. She won’t leave
nor stop being furious. The sea’s vast
catchment of light sends ashore a roughcast
that melts off every swimmer who can stand.
Glaring through slits, the storm moves inland.

The younger sister, wavering, shouts Stay dead!
She knows how impossibility
is the only door that opens.
She pities his fall, leg under one knee
but her power is his death, and can’t be dignified.

From Les Murray, New Collected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet, 2003), 450-1.

[From ALIVE ON ALL CHANNELS]

euronews-editorschoice:

Picture of the day - Procession of the Torches in Goias Velho
REUTERS/Ueslei Marcelino

ontologicalterrorist:

Zamora, Spain: Penitents take part in the procession of the Cristo de la Buena Muerte brotherhood during holy week 

Photograph: I.Lopez/AP

(via ontologicalterrorist-deactivate)

ontologicalterrorist:

A rebel fighter moves through a hole in a wall close to frontline fighting on Tripoli Street Photograph: Chris Hondros/Getty Images

(via ontologicalterrorist-deactivate)

darkface:

Lake Of Sorrows by *intao

(via zulabelle-deactivated20120510)

(via Art Church / Church Art | unfolding forms)

Marc Chagall  Exodus

Good Friday

Arkansas Good Friday

I

Everyone knows what the cross means, or will
          before long


It is the body

It resembles the first stick-figure depictions
         of it found in caves (some
         with the heads of birds)

Depictions reproduced to this day by young children
         just learning to draw


Its aerodynamic properties ought to be obvious I suppose

to us,
the wingless


How many years we have been carrying it
And before too much longer it will reveal itself
the source of a forsakenness and agony
nobody would have dared foresee
I saw it
over twenty years ago

Every day as the darkness came down on New York
I went up to my father and saw

(More and more I meet him
in the mirror, it is his blood I have
to clean up if I shave—…)

And I was born just as I found him there

a little bald
toothless man
screaming,
not for long though
(I refer to Mother Morphine’s left tit)


II

Now I’ll tell you something you don’t know, you hurt
by the past, just like me, crushed
by the future and blind
to the present,
blind
to the moment—

But there is nothing you don’t know
I got up every morning here
a long way from home
and cried for ten minutes
then showered and dressed
and got back down to work
assisted, on occasion, by one or two magical mystery
            pills


III

I can tell you this
Who dwarfs my pain I cling to
the genuinely broken
and poor
And I cling to the Before
The spirit face
behind the face
yearning for light
the water and the light
And I am flowing back to the Before, the infinite
years which transpired while I was not
here, and did not know
I was not

here…
          I came just like you
from inconceivableness, the eternal
before-we-arrived, flowing
from God’s mouth, and come here to say
“this world” and
                     “God,” as if
they needed
names
         And what lies beyond is no doubt the beginning
I wouldn’t know but I’m going
to find out
The what lies beyond
this loneliness and panic
I call dying, time, remorse, this cold
and purifying
fire, which hurts so much, which burns
away the world and all I was
who walked and breathed and spoke
how real it all seemed
for a few years, but I was always
immortal and will be
once more, when I return
to the infinite time
which elapsed before I was conceived;
when the heavenward face is burned away
and its scared eyes
and its tears
and its euphoria, which no one can imagine
(wrong: someone in love can imagine!)
And I have heard God’s silence like the sun
now I long to return to it
no matter my infantile clinging
to this gorgeous material of such early wisteria and
         lilacs, the wind
in the redbud and light-giving new heart-shaped leaves
music visible if completely unheard, I’ll return
The angel’s going to raise his arms and sing that time is
         no more
nor tears: that numbered
sea of them is gone—
now there is a new sea, a new earth, a new sky—
and I will know what to say at the end: What end?
And I can add I found this world sufficiently miraculous
           for me, before I’m changed.


—Franz Wright

from “God’s Silence”