Komorebi: Ethiopian Church Music, Revival Would Crush You, The 21, St. Peter of Damaskos

Mar 17, 2025

“Komorebi” is a Japanese word that means “sunlight filtered through trees.” This series contains errata, ephemera, et cetera.

A Place to Come and Die

“There is simply no way to grow in God without times of purgation.”

Mark Kutolowski and his wife, Lisa, are founders and co-directors of Metanoia of Vermont, a homestead and community devoted to spiritual formation. A few years ago, Mark wrote a piece winsomely titled, A Place to Come and Die, which I like to read early in the lenten season. If you are observing Lent then I recommend it to you.

“Lent is not about self-improvement. Lent is about self-surrender, and confident trust in the Divine Physician who purifies and heals us when we give ourselves into the arms of Christ.”

Revival Would Crush You

Also for Lent: I have listened to this provocatively titled podcast episode, Revival Would Crush You, three times now and each time something different stands out. This is the first episode in a series from the Awaken Network Podcast. It asks the question, if true revival in the Church came to your region, would you be able to endure it? I’ve asked my church to listen to this conversation so that our lenten prayer might be, “God, strengthen the walls of my soul; thicken the walls of my soul so that I can contain more of your glory.”

Church of Kidane Mehret

Over the years I have found myself increasingly drawn to African music. Obviously Africa comprises 54-55 countries and there is a vast range of cultures and musical styles represented there but I can say nonetheless that African music, ranging from the Saharan desert all the way down to South Africa, tends to calm me down and bring me happiness. So I am happy to share with you a new album, posthumously released, of the music of Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru, of blessed memory. Emahoy, (an honorific that means “mother”) was an Ethiopian composer and pianist and a nun in the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church. She died in 2023 at the age of 99.

When she was about 60 (and I was just born), she emigrated to Jerusalem where she lived at Kidane Mehret, an Ethiopian monastery, for the rest of her life. Emahoy recorded these tracks in various churches throughout Jerusalem. My favorite album of hers, her blues album, is called Souvenirs, but in Church of Kidane Mehret, Emahoy has created some beautifully haunting tracks that I now cherish. Definitely bought this one on cassette tape.

There is so much to say about Emahoy’s life, her work on behalf of children, her ahead-of-her-time fusion of traditional Ethiopian/blues/classical and more, but I will only refer you to the BBC audio documentary about her called The Honky Tonk Nun.

All is Sound

I meant to include this one on my 2025 end of year favorites list. The first track, “Creation,” makes for wonderful background music to a reading of Genesis 1. “A Sleeping Planet,” my favorite track, engenders the delight of the fecundity (love you, K) and flux of life. “Nada Brahma” is a Vedic term meaning something like “Sound is God” or “Sound is joy,” and makes me think about Christ as the eternal Logos made flesh.

The 21

In Romans 8, Paul quotes Psalm 44 in an encouragement that is all too immediately relevant for so many Christians throughout the earth:

Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword?As it is written,
“For your sake we are being killed all the day long;
we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.”
No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.

That “in all these things” line often gets the treatment of something nice that might be cross stiched on a piece of cloth stretched across a circular frame in your grandmother’s bathroom. But the Sons of Korah–the psalmists who composed Psalm 44–give God more of an emotionally resonant challenge/plea, even calling God out for being asleep. Awake!:

All this has come upon us,
though we have not forgotten you,
and we have not been false to your covenant.
Our heart has not turned back,
nor have our steps departed from your way;
yet you have broken us in the place of jackals
and covered us with the shadow of death.
If we had forgotten the name of our God
or spread out our hands to a foreign god,
would not God discover this?
For he knows the secrets of the heart.
Yet for your sake we are killed all the day long;
we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.
Awake! Why are you sleeping, O Lord?
Rouse yourself! Do not reject us forever!
Why do you hide your face?
Why do you forget our affliction and oppression?
For our soul is bowed down to the dust;
our belly clings to the ground.
Rise up; come to our help!
Redeem us for the sake of your steadfast love!

Indeed Christians are being killed all the day long. Communist and Islamist regimes seem to be the main sources of this violence our people suffer; though the real enemy behind it all is the spiritual enemy of God and humanity and we war not against flesh and blood. 70 christians in the Congo were massacred just a couple of weeks ago but these things don’t typically make the mainstream news.

Last month, on the ten-year anniversary of a holy day, a short animated film called The 21, was released. The 21, animated in the style of Coptic iconography, tells the story of the 21 Coptic martyrs who were killed by ISIS in Libya in 2015. It seems that the global Coptic community came together such that “more than 70 artists from more than 24 countries” worked together to create this brief masterpiece. I would suggest that this film is not for the very young nor for the faint of heart and yet it is also edifying, encouraging, hopeful, and very beautiful. I hope you watch it.

Rise up; come to our help! Redeem us for the sake of your steadfast love!

St Peter’s Four Tiers of Prayer

This passage of St. Peter of Damaskos, from the collection of writings of eastern spiritual masters known as The Philokalia (a text which we will come back to time and again), has got me thinking. Better said, this passage has got me staring out into the distance and praying wordless prayers that, if put into words, might sound something like, “Is this what we’re doing, Father? Will I experience this rapture…the blessings of the age to be? Will you take me with you?”

I have arranged this excerpt into a numbered list though that is not how it was recorded. These words may nonplus you, which is okay; time enough. These words may frustrate you, that’s okay too. Perhaps the best case scenario: these words will stick with you for awhile, you will roll them around in your mouth, you will ask questions like, “Why would the ‘contemplation of created beings’ come after the ‘imageless and formless prayer’?” I think these words are true; they convey riches of incarnation, christology, true Christian gnosis and ascent, panentheism, theosis, the dialectic and telos of creation; but again, there’s time enough for all that.

For it is said of God that he "gives prayer to him who prays";
1. and, indeed, to one who truly prays the prayer of the body, God gives the prayer of the intellect;
2. and to one who diligently cultivates the prayer of the intellect, God gives the imageless and formless prayer that comes from the pure fear of him.
3. Again, to one who practices this prayer effectively, God grants the contemplation of created beings.
4. Once this is attained–once the intellect has freed itself from all things and, not content with hearing about God secondhand, devotes itself to him in action and thought–God permits the intellect to be seized in rapture, conferring on it the gift of true theology and the blessings of the age to be.

Spiritus vobiscum.