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Christmas Day: Witness of that Light

December 23, 2009

Witness of that Light © Jan L. Richardson

Reading from the Gospels, Christmas Day, Years ABC: John 1.1-14

On Christmas Eve during my first year as a pastor (at a church just up the road from Disney World), I stepped into my office during a quick break between the six worship services we were having that evening. I spotted a gift that my senior pastor, Bill Barnes, had left for me. Opening it, I discovered an illuminated edition of The Book of Common Prayer. Containing an early version of the BCP, the volume includes nearly two hundred miniatures taken from a variety of illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages. The book enchanted me and remains one of the coolest gifts I have ever received.

I picked the book up tonight and was enchanted all over again, partly for the memories it evoked, partly for the doorways of history and imagination it opened to me as an artist, and partly for the book itself, its intricate and vivid pages shimmering (even in reproduced form) with gold. It’s the presence of gold that qualifies a manuscript as “illuminated,” and many medieval book artists drenched their pages with this precious metal. Artists, and their patrons who commissioned these books, were drawn to gold both because of its lavish quality and also because it signified the presence of the God who not only gives us light but who also came into this world as light.

Light shimmers through the gospel reading that the lectionary gives us for Christmas Day: the stunning prologue to the gospel of John. Tonight I read the version contained in my luminous Book of Common Prayer—the King James Version, of course. In this passage that I love and have read approximately a zillion times, what struck me tonight, in this version, were these words:

There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. The same came for a witness, to bear witness of the light, that all…through him might believe. He was not that light, but was sent to bear witness of that light.

Most times when I read this passage, I’m focused on John the Evangelist’s powerful description of how Christ came as the Word: the Word that was with God, the Word that was God, the Word that was in the beginning with God, the Word that came as life and light. As a woman with a passion for the Word, and words, and the bonds between them, I never cease to be stunned by the power of this poetic passage and what—and how—it tells us of the One who entwined himself with us as life and flesh and light. Yet tonight, amidst the stunning words about the Word, my eye keeps going back to John—the one whom we call the Baptist, the one who prepared the way—and how, as the King James Version puts it, he came “to bear witness of that light.”

We need darkness, and I often find myself uncomfortable with the ways that we in the Christian tradition perpetuate stereotypes that hold that all that is good is light and bright and white, and all that is evil is dark and black. I’ll say it again: we need darkness. The seed in the ground, the child in the womb, the body and soul in rest and in dreaming: we must have times of shelter from the light in order to grow in the ways God calls us to grow. I love that verse in Isaiah where God says, “I will give you the treasures of darkness and riches hidden in secret places, so that you may know that it is I, the Lord, the God of Israel, who call you by your name” (Isaiah 45.3).

And yet, even as it calls us to honor the gifts of the dark, this season bids us recognize our ancient longing for light, and to celebrate the One who came to us as light. Amidst the shadows—some necessary, some horrendous—God beckons us to look deeper, to look more closely, that we may find the presence of the Christ who shimmers there. And, finding that presence, to bear witness.

How do we, in our own lives, do what John the Baptist was called to do in and with his life? How do we bear witness of that light?

As we cross the threshold into Christmas, here at the end of our Advent pilgrimage, this is a question I’ll be carrying with me, tucked in the traveling bag where all my mysteries go. In the days, weeks, months to come, how will I bear witness to, point toward, open myself to, embody the God who came as life and as light? Are there any shadows that I’ve grown too comfortable with, any places of darkness that God might be wanting to stir around in and shed some light on? Are there any pockets of ignorance or indifference within me that God might be desiring to illuminate? Is there some dark corner of my soul that I’ve been content to leave in shadow, in mystery, where God might be inviting me to kindle even a small flame and wait in stillness to see what reveals itself?

How about you? What question will you carry on the path ahead? What light beckons you as we spiral into the coming season?

Wherever your path takes you, may this Christmas be for you and yours a day of celebration, a day of hope, a day of peace. A luminous day. I am grateful to you for sharing this Advent journey, and I welcome you to join me at The Painted Prayerbook, where I’ll soon return to explore some words and images in the year to come.

May Christ our Light go with you in every season. Merry Christmas!

CHRISTMAS BONUS: To hear a wondrous song from my singer/songwriter sweetheart, inspired by the prologue to John’s gospel, click this link: Garrison Doles-“From the Beginning” (from Garrison’s CD House of Prayer).

[For previous reflections on this passage, please see Tangled Up in You and Door 25: The Book of Beginnings.]

[To use the “Witness of that Light” image, please visit this page at janrichardsonimages.com. Your use of janrichardsonimages.com helps make the ministry of The Advent Door possible. Thank you!]

Posted in Advent, art, Book of Isaiah, Christmas, Gospel of John, lectionary, medieval, religion, sacred time | 12 Comments »

Christmas Eve: Revisiting the Secret Room

December 22, 2009

The Secret Room © Jan L. Richardson

In his book The Art of Pilgrimage, Phil Cousineau writes that in every sacred journey, there is a secret room, a place along the path that gives us a different perspective on the deep mystery of our journey. In describing this hidden room, Cousineau draws on a story that poet Donald Hall tells of friends who purchased an old house in the country. Cousineau writes,

It was a ‘warren of small rooms,’ and once they settled in and began to furnish their new home they realized that the lay of the house made little sense. ‘Peeling off some wallpaper, they found a door that they pried open to reveal a tiny room, sealed off and hidden, goodness knows why: They found no corpses nor stolen goods.’ For Hall, the mystery of poetry to evoke powerful feelings finds its analogy here, in its ability to be sealed away from explanation, this is the place where ‘the unsayable gathers.’

And so it is on the pilgrim’s path. Everywhere you go, there is a secret room. To discover it, you must knock on walls, as the detective does in mystery houses, and listen for the echo that portends the secret passage. You must pull books off shelves to see if the library shelf swings open to reveal the hidden room.

I’ll say it again: Everywhere has a secret room. You must find your own, in a small chapel, a tiny cafe, a quiet park, the home of a new friend, the pew where the morning light strikes the rose window just so.

As a pilgrim you must find it or you will never understand the hidden reasons why you really left home.

A couple of years ago, I shared these words from Hall and Cousineau as I reflected here at The Advent Door on the gospel lection for Christmas Eve. Then, as now, I find myself struck by a seemingly small detail that Luke tucks in near the end of this passage:

But Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart. (Luke 2.19)

Over the previous nine months, Mary has entertained an archangel, said yes to becoming the mother of the Son of God, made the journey to visit Elizabeth, and lifted up a song of hope that has endured across centuries. She has waited with Elizabeth, made the journey back home, and traveled with her husband Joseph to Bethlehem to be included in the registration ordered by Emperor Augustus. She has labored to give birth to her son, enfolded him in strips of cloth, laid him in a manger, and welcomed those who came to marvel at what had come to pass.

Luke tells us that in response to their amazement, Mary treasures these words in her heart. Luke’s description conjures an image of a woman who, amid the tumult of angels and signs and visitors and miracles, holds all these happenings in a place of stillness. Among the memories of nine months of adventures she never could have imagined, Mary embodies a sense of wonder that is quiet and deep and wise.

Mary has found what Hall and Cousineau describe: she has found the place where the unsayable gathers. She has found the secret room.

As we approach Christmas Eve and the end of our Advent journey, it seems a fitting time to pause for a moment and look back on the path we’ve traveled these past few weeks. And I want to ask now, as I asked a couple of years ago: Have you found a secret room for yourself in these Advent days? In your pilgrimage through this season, have you found a space, a moment, a place of wonder or wisdom or sheer respite or deep delight, that helped you discover the purpose of this pilgrimage?

This season has been intense for me, as always: it has been full, it has passed quickly, and I always wish I could make more time to savor and to linger with these days. Yet on this Advent afternoon, as the sky turns toward dusk and I fix myself another cup of tea on what is, for us in Florida, a wonderfully chilly day, I find myself revisiting a few secret rooms that opened to me along this path. I think of a visit with my spiritual director on a weary afternoon a couple of weeks ago, and receiving from her a golden bag of chocolate truffles that she brought back with her from France—that we opened and immediately began to eat. I left that visit lighter in spirit—and not solely because of the truffles (though they were excellent medicine). I think of an afternoon spent with three women whom I love and whom I had not seen in a long time, and how they brought an amazing lunch and filled my home with their conversation and their spirits. I think of a celebration with friends on the Winter Solstice, and of how we gathered outside around fires beneath a dark sky and spoke of the gifts and challenges of darkness and light.

On this Advent afternoon, I am treasuring these things in my heart. (And still savoring the magic bag of truffles.)

Perhaps this will become our tradition here at The Advent Door—as Christmas Eve approaches, to invite the question again: Where have we found a secret room on this pilgrimage toward Christmas? Where and how do we join with Mary in pondering what has taken place? Amidst the unfolding story—the story of the birth of Christ, the story of our own intertwined lives—what do we treasure in our hearts?

In these remaining moments of Advent, may a secret room yet open itself to you and help you remember why you undertook this journey in the first place. Blessings and peace to you.

[For another reflection on this passage, see Where the Foreign Meets the Familiar. For last year’s reflection on Isaiah 9.2-7, the lection from the Hebrew Scriptures for Christmas Eve, please see Longing for Light.]

[To use the “Secret Room” image, please visit this page at janrichardsonimages.com. Your use of janrichardsonimages.com helps make the ministry of The Advent Door possible. Thank you!]

Visit ◊The Advent Door◊ home.

Posted in Advent, art, Christmas, Gospel of Luke, lectionary, poetry, religion, sacred time | 6 Comments »

An Illuminated Joy

December 19, 2009

The elves and I have been busy in my Advent workshop, creating another new video for the season. An Illuminated Joy: A Christmas Book of Hours intertwines artwork from my series The Advent Hours with a wondrous song from my sweetheart, Garrison Doles. (It’s from his Christmas CD The Night of Heaven and Earth.) Think of it as a Christmas card from us to you.

Blessings and peace!

Posted in Advent, art, Christmas, religion, sacred time | 8 Comments »

A Little Advent Housekeeping

December 15, 2009

The Hour of Lauds: Visitation © Jan L. Richardson

We’re more than halfway along the Advent path now; how’s your season unfolding? This is a good chance to catch our collective breath for a moment. As we take a pause, I have a few various and sundry things rattling around my brain that I want to pass along to you here at The Advent Door.

THE GOOD WORD: This is a great week in the Advent lectionary, with two of my favorite passages appearing among this Sunday’s readings: Mary’s visit to Elizabeth (Luke 1.39-45), and the song that pours forth from that meeting: the Magnificat (Luke 1.47-55). My reflection on the Visitation is the next post down; for an earlier reflection on the Magnificat, I invite you to visit Mary, Magnifier.

FEAST DAY: While Mary is on our mind: somehow I got it in my head this season that the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, beloved by many as the patroness of the Americas, was on Dec. 15; it was actually on the 12th. She’s worth celebrating for more than a day, so, happy extended feast day to you! Here’s a reflection I wrote previously on the feast: The Day of the Lady.

AN ARTFUL YEAR: During Advent I’m offering a festive discount at my website Jan Richardson Images, where high-resolution files of my artwork are available for use in worship, education, and other settings. Through Christmas, an annual subscription (which gives you unlimited downloads) is 100 smackeroos (normally $165). Visit subscribe to check it out.

PRINTS PRINTS PRINTS: All the images at Jan Richardson Images, including the images from The Advent Door and my other blog, The Painted Prayerbook, are now available as art prints (a great gift for yourself and others!). Just go to any image that you’d like and scroll down to “Prints & Products” to order.

THANKS THANKS THANKS: Thank you so much to everyone who has supported The Advent Door by linking to it from a blog or website or in print, including these cool sites that I recommend: patheos.com (a thoughtful site that offers “Balanced Views of Religion and Spirituality”; they’re reprinting my Advent reflections at their Mainline Protestant Portal) and Image & Spirit, a blog of the ECVA (Episcopal Church & the Visual Arts, though they’re hospitable to all!), which is offering lovely images and words each day of Advent. And thanks of course to Jenee Woodard, who provides an astounding ministry through The Text this Week, and to my friends at RevGalBlogPals; you rock!

And thanks to YOU for traveling this Advent road with me. I am praying for you as we make this journey and am grateful beyond measure for your company. Blessings!

Posted in Advent, art, Gospel of Luke, lectionary, religion, sacred time | 2 Comments »

Advent 4: The Sanctuary They Make in Meeting

December 13, 2009

The Sanctuary Between Us © Jan L. Richardson

Reading from the Gospels, Advent 4, Year C: Luke 1.39-45

Here’s one way that I imagine it: having received her courageous yes, Gabriel turns and takes his angelic leave of Mary. A shimmering rush of wind, and he is gone. The light returns to normal, the objects in the room resume their familiar shapes. And Mary—young Mary, unmarried Mary, pregnant Mary—looks around. Finds herself quite alone. Places her head in her two hands and thinks, “It seemed like a good idea at the time…”

Luke tells us that after Gabriel’s departure, Mary goes “with haste” to visit Elizabeth. She knows, for Gabriel has told her, that her kinswoman is experiencing an unusual pregnancy of her own. Mary arrives at Elizabeth’s home, enters, and a scene unfolds that is among my favorites in all of scripture. Elizabeth no more than hears Mary’s words of greeting, and she knows what has happened. Luke tells us that Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit, and she cries out,

Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. And why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me? For as soon as I heard the sound of your greeting, the child in my womb leaped for joy. And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.

I love how artists have depicted this scene, known as the Visitation, for hundreds of years: Elizabeth reaches out to Mary, places her hands on Mary’s belly, speaks her words of welcome and blessing. Mary reaches out in turn, her hands on Elizabeth’s arms or on her kinswoman’s belly that is swollen with the miracle child she has carried for six months now: the child, Elizabeth says, that leaps for joy in her womb. It is a dramatic scene, intense with the intimacy of the reaching out of these two women toward one another, holding on to one another for dear life.

Jane Schaberg writes of how Elizabeth, in this moment, appears as a prophet, though that title is not given to her. Filled, as Luke tells us, with the Holy Spirit, Elizabeth recognizes the One whom Mary carries, much as Anna the prophet will do in the temple in a few months’ time. Yet Elizabeth is not only a prophet here; she engages also in a priestly act as she speaks her words of blessing and places her hands upon the vessel that contains the Christ.

I have often pondered this scene in terms of the way in which Elizabeth extends her hospitality to Mary, how her welcome is wondrous not merely for its complete absence of judgment of the pregnant, unmarried Mary but especially for her deep delight in what her cousin has done. Yet what strikes me, too, as this season spirals me around this passage once again, is not only how Mary found a refuge in Elizabeth, but also how Elizabeth must have found something of a refuge in her young cousin. There are few things more powerful than finding ourselves in a situation beyond our imagining, and encountering someone who knows, from the inside of it, something of what it is to be in that place. Someone who can meet us there.

Pregnant in strange and wondrous circumstances, Mary and Elizabeth each find perhaps the only other person who could possibly understand what’s happening to them. With one another, they find not just understanding (though that would be gift enough), not just hospitality (though that would be mercy enough); in one another, they find a shelter; in their meeting, they make a sanctuary.

In moments, Mary will raise her voice in an ancient song. Singing, after all, is part of what a sanctuary is for. In the relief and release she finds in Elizabeth’s welcome, Mary is freed to let loose with her words about the Word that is within her, and to pour forth her poetic proclamation of what God has wrought in her and in the world.

Ah, but that’s another reflection for another day. Soon, because it’s this song, the Magnificat, that the lectionary gives us for next Sunday’s canticle.

For now, we linger in the sanctuary, this sacred space that Mary and Elizabeth have made with their meeting, their embrace, their welcome, their knowing. And here, in this holy place, I am come to ask you: where are you finding sanctuary in this season? Are you Mary, needing to make a journey—literal or otherwise—to find the refuge you need? Are you Elizabeth, extending hospitality to another and finding there a shelter you needed for yourself? Are you longing for a sacred space that hasn’t yet appeared? What might it take to begin to find it, to fashion it? Who can help?

May this be for you a day of blessings given, blessings received, and sanctuary along the way.

[To use this image, please visit this page at janrichardsonimages.com. Your use of janrichardsonimages.com helps make the ministry of The Advent Door possible. Thank you!]

[The Jane Schaberg reference is from her commentary on Luke in The Women’s Bible Commentary, edited by Carol A. Newsom and Sharon H. Ringe (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox, 1992).]

Visit ◊The Advent Door◊ home.

Posted in Advent, art, Gospel of Luke, lectionary, religion, sacred time | 10 Comments »

Advent 3: As on a Day of Festival

December 11, 2009

As on a Day of Festival © Jan L. Richardson

Reading from the Hebrew Scriptures: Zephaniah 3.14-20
Canticle: Isaiah 12.2-6
Reading from the Epistles: Philippians 4.4-7

From time to time, someone will look at a piece of my art and ask, “So what does it mean?” As if meaning were the main thing. Or as if it could mean only one thing.

I cannot tell you what this one means. I can tell you that as I worked on it in the night, the lamps on either side of my drafting table the only illumination in my apartment, I was thinking of these words, these Advent words, from the prophets and from Paul. I was thinking of with joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation and of the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding. I was thinking about these words rejoice and exult and sing; these words proclaim and praise.

I was thinking how Paul and the prophets do not tell us to be happy; they do not talk in terms of feelings; they do not talk about mood or about dispositions that are dependent on circumstances. I was thinking about how they call us to a rejoicing that is not an emotion but an action, a choice. I was thinking about all those verbs they use: those words that impel us to move and to choose and to resist stagnating in one place.

Which of course led me to thinking about Get Fuzzy, my favorite comic strip, where Bucky, the world’s most acerbic feline, says, “Anything can be a word if you just verbify it.”

I was thinking how when our joy is at an ebb, we need to start verbifying ourselves.

I can tell you I was thinking about how frequently we make the mistake of assuming that rejoicing depends on feeling happy, and about those for whom happiness is a stretch in this season. I was thinking of Marge Piercy’s poem “For Strong Women,” and the line where she writes, “Strength is not in her, but she/enacts it as wind fills a sail.” I was thinking of how joy is sometimes like this: not something we summon from inside ourselves but something that visits us. Calls to us. Asks us to open, to unfurl ourselves as it approaches. Like Mary in the presence of the angel, her yes poised to fall from her lips.

And I can tell you that on the scrap of paper I had placed beneath the collage as I pieced it together, I penciled these words between the streaks of glue left behind:

Call it
the waters of salvation
or the garlands of gladness.

Call it
the grave-clothes
falling away
or call it the loosing
of the chains.

Call it
what binds us together:
fierce but
fragile but
fierce.

Call it
he will rejoice over you
with gladness;
call it
he will renew you
in his love;
call it
he will exult over you
with loud singing
as on a day
of festival.

Call it
the thin, thin place
where the veil
gives way.

Or call it this:
the path we make
when we go deep
and deeper still
into the dark
and look behind to see
the way has been lit
by our rejoicing.

In these Advent days, may you find a path of celebration. Blessings.

[To use the “As on a Day of Festival” image, please visit this page at janrichardsonimages.com. Your use of janrichardsonimages.com helps make the ministry of The Advent Door possible. Thank you!]

Posted in Advent, art, Book of Isaiah, lectionary, religion, sacred time | 7 Comments »

Advent 3: Terrors and Wonders

December 7, 2009

The Final Fire Is Love © Jan L. Richardson

Reading from the Gospels, Advent 3, Year C: Luke 3.7-18

Some years before I met him, my sweetheart, Garrison Doles, starred in a horror film. Shot here in Central Florida, Jack-O is a real classic of the drive-in, B-movie genre, complete with a low budget, no rehearsals, and scenes shot in one take. The movie featured a jack-o-lantern-headed demon disturbed from his grave (by unwitting teenagers, as ever) who then (after dispatching the teenagers) seeks his revenge upon the descendants of the man who had killed him. The movie also featured John Carradine, the famed actor who in his later years became a mainstay in horror films. Through the miracle of technology, the fact that he’d been dead for nearly a decade didn’t diminish his performance.

I’m not a big fan of the horror genre, but of course I had to see this one. I’m happy to report that my sweetheart saves the day, the demon is vanquished, and the townspeople return to their normal lives, freed from the specter of a scythe-wielding, pumpkin-headed fiend.

I find myself curious about what it is that draws people into scenarios designed to scare them. For some folks, there’s clearly something compelling about entering a space in which the darker realities of life are so intensely magnified yet also reduced to the manageable size of a movie screen. And I imagine that’s one aspect of the appeal: that amid the known terrors of the world, a horror film offers us an opportunity to have some control over how we encounter our fears.

Fascination with fear isn’t a new phenomenon, of course. In the Middle Ages, some of the most vivid and enduring works of art are those depicting hell and its torments. The artists’ renderings of the underworld—as, for instance, in this painting of a hell-mouth in the 15th-century Hours of Catherine of Cleves or in the works of Hieronymous Bosch—tend to be far more visually interesting and gripping than their depictions of heaven.

Horror movies weren’t the first thing that came to mind as I read the gospel lection for this week. Yet I found myself thinking about them as I wrestled with the text, which is one of the more challenging ones that Advent gives to us. On the one hand, I am quite taken by John the Baptist, this man who so devotes his life to preparing the way for Christ, his own cousin. John has many opportunities to claim status and power for himself—as in this very text, when people are wondering who he is and are prepared to believe he is the Messiah. It seems, however, that any pretensions or yearning for power John may have ever had have been worn away by his life of prayer in the wilderness. The baptizer studiously resists taking on any power or identity that does not belong to him.

Meanwhile, on my other hand, I am uneasy with this man who calls his listeners a brood of vipers, and I wonder about this crowd that is so willing to listen to a preacher who speaks to them in this way. Beyond the matter of John’s name-calling, I find myself wondering: what draws them to this wild-eyed prophet who speaks—probably yells—such fearsome visions of fire and brimstone, axes and roots, winnowing forks and threshing floors?

It’s tempting to think that at least some of those among the crowds have sought out John for the spectacle of it: that the same kind of thing that draws 21st-century people to terrifying visions on the silver screen drew crowds into the wilderness for the 1st century’s version of graphic, high-def, full-throttle, give-you-the-willies cataclysmic fare. It is perhaps tempting, too, to think that when the crowd asks, “What should we do?” it sounds less like an authentic question and more like the helpless, hand-wringing query of a character in one of those horror films—and you know there’s no real point in their asking what they should do, because no matter what you holler at the screen, they’re going to open that door, or go into those woods, or accept that ride from a stranger.

The drama, the intensity, the sensation and sensationalism of John the Baptist’s words and their power to stir the crowd: this is compelling and disturbing stuff. Ultimately, however, what John the Baptist gives to his hearers goes far beyond sensationalism. Wherever their question comes from, whatever has impelled them to ask what they should do, John gives them an answer that, if they heed it, if they take it on as their own, will change them utterly.

I’m intrigued by how specific John is with his responses. He does not give his questioners a “one size fits all” solution, as do so many preachers who flavor their sermons with fire. Those who have clothing and food need to share them with those who don’t, John says. When the tax collectors ask what they should do, he tells them, “Collect no more than the amount prescribed for you.” When soldiers ask him, John tells them, “Do not extort money from anyone by threats or false accusation, and be satisfied with your wages.” To each group, to each condition presented him, John provides counsel tailored distinctly to who they are.

Forget fire, forget winnowing forks, forget threshing floors: amid our daily lives, is there anything more unsettling than receiving a clear word about what it is that we’re meant to do in this world? Is there anything that risks taking us deeper into our insecurities, into our fears, into the dark unknown than when someone who sees and recognizes and knows us, then challenges us to be the person whom God has created and called us to be? And is there anything more full of wonder and hope?

I think of Audre Lorde, who, in a conversation with her fellow poet Adrienne Rich, said, “Once you live any piece of your vision it opens you to a constant onslaught. Of necessities, of horrors, but of wonders too, of possibilities.”

This, finally, is what John the Baptist, this preparer of the way, is offering to his hearers: wonders. Possibilities. The invitation to be initiated into a relationship with God’s own incarnate self. The fire, the winnowing fork, the threshing floor: these are important, but they are not John’s primary point. As ever, John in his fierce fashion is pointing to—making the way for—the One who comes. And this One comes not for the purpose of terrifying us but of loving us.

Terror may get our attention. It’s one way of telling a story. In the most adept hands, it can be a compelling form in which to illuminate the complexities involved in the struggle of good against evil. Yet terror alone—fear of hellfire and damnation—is not enough to sustain a lasting relationship with Christ. Horror, by itself, is not the path to lead us into heaven. Only love—the truest fire—can do this.

In this season, we remember and celebrate this fierce and fiery love: the love that created us; the love that garbed itself in our own flesh and came among us; the love that beckons us to respond by discerning and doing what it is that God formed and fashioned us, in all our particularity, to do; the love that we will one day see and know in its completeness.

So what should we do, then? How do you carry this question—this question the crowd asked of John—in this season? How do you discern God’s longing for your life? To whom do you listen as you seek an answer to this question?

May the presence of love attend your Advent days.

[To use this image, please visit this page at janrichardsonimages.com. Your use of janrichardsonimages.com helps make the ministry of The Advent Door possible. Thank you!]

[The Audre Lorde quote is from her book Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press, 1984).]

Posted in Advent, art, Gospel of Luke, lectionary, medieval, religion, sacred time | 11 Comments »

Advent 2: A Song that Means Blessed

December 5, 2009

Canticle, Advent 2, Year C: Luke 1.68-79

“Burning/all night long/Burning/at the gates of dawn
Singing/near and far/Singing/to raise the morning star.”
–Bruce Cockburn

This Sunday, instead of a passage from the psalms, the Advent lectionary gives us a canticle—one of those those songs that trace a melodic, poetic, and oftentimes prophetic line through both testaments of the Bible. Reading the lines of what has become known as the Canticle of Zechariah, I cannot help but hear voices, and melody. I’m not having an auditory hallucination; the sounds are lodged in my memory, imprinted by years of singing these words on the occasions when I have gathered with my sisters and brothers of Saint Brigid of Kildare Monastery.

For a millennium and a half, this passage from Luke has been part of the Liturgy of the Hours, the monastic round of prayer that stretches from before dawn throughout the day and evening and into the dark again. Specifically, this text is chanted at the hour of Lauds, one of the early morning offices of prayer. It is known as the Benedictus: in Latin, this means blessed.

Blessed is the first word of the song that Zechariah sings. It is the first word we hear from his lips after the silence that the archangel Gabriel imposed on him when he dared to be incredulous at the news that his wife—who, as Zechariah himself described it, was “getting on in years”—was pregnant with the child whom we would come to know as John the Baptist, the one who would “make ready a people prepared for the Lord” (Luke 1.17). Like Mary’s song that precedes it, Zechariah’s canticle is a potent song about what God has accomplished. It is a song, too, of what God will yet do in and through the life of this child—this baby eight days old—to whom Zechariah sings.

After Zechariah has blessed and praised God for some verses, he turns his focus on his child beginning in verse 76: “And you, child, will be called the prophet of the Most High; for you will go before the Lord to prepare his ways, to give knowledge of salvation to his people by the forgiveness of their sins.” One can imagine this father gathering his son into his arms as he raises what surely must have been a bittersweet song. If he knew this much about his son, Zechariah must also have had some understanding, like Mary in the temple after Simeon sang of her son with words about light and glory, that the shadow of a sword hovered close by.

And yet Zechariah sings. Full of wild hope, he sings. Knowing the state of the world, he sings. And he closes his canticle with these words:

By the tender mercy of our God,
the dawn from on high will break upon us,
to give light to those who sit in darkness
and in the shadow of death,
to guide our feet into the way of peace.

These are my favorite lines of the canticle. When I pray with the St. Brigid’s community on our annual retreat, in that early morning hour when I am still in the realm between sleep and full waking, we chant these lines twice: once at the beginning of the canticle, and again at the end. In my mind, these lines are so bound together with sunrise and meeting the day that I can almost imagine that we—all of us around the world who sing these words at the outset of the day—sing them not in response to the coming of dawn but rather to help ensure it. Not in a literal fashion, of course; the physical rising of the sun does not depend on us (and a good thing, too, as my night owl self rarely is up at that hour). But there is some kind of light that depends on our waiting for it, watching for it, singing it into this world. And when we can’t, God bids us trust that there are others watching and waiting and singing on our behalf and on behalf of the world.

Sitting down to write this reflection, I receive an email from a friend with surprising, horrendous news about her young husband’s health. Yesterday, word of the death of a colleague’s son in an accident. My prayer list for those in peril—medical, financial, emotional—steadily grows. And here in Advent, as those of us in the northern hemisphere journey through the darkest part of the year, we gather these words about ourselves and pray for tender mercy. Not in denial, but, like Zechariah, in the place where wild hope is born.

I read the lines again, and again I hear the voices of my sisters and brothers, praying at dawn. Praying for dawn. Praying the dawn. Voices rising, falling, rising again.

In darkness, we sing.

In the shadow of death, we sing.

Blessing, we sing.

Blessed.

Whom do you hear as you read the lines of this canticle? How do you watch and wait and sing for the light? Who does this for you when you cannot? Who might need you to do it for them? What wild hope do you carry in these days?

Amid the shadows, may we lift our voices in blessing. Peace to you.

[To use the “Benedictus” image, please visit this page at janrichardsonimages.com. Your use of janrichardsonimages.com helps make the ministry of The Advent Door possible. Thank you!]

Posted in Advent, art, Gospel of Luke, lectionary, poetry, religion, sacred time | 4 Comments »

Advent 2: The Mystery of Approach

December 2, 2009

Reading from the Gospels, Advent 2, Year C: Luke 3.1-6

In his book Anam Cara, John O’Donohue has a section called “The Mystery of Approach,” in which he writes,

For years I have had an idea for a short story about a world where you would approach only one person in the course of your life. Naturally, one would have to subtract biological considerations from this assumption in order to draw this imaginary world. You would have to practice years of silence before the mystery of presence in the Other, then you could begin to approach.

I’m taken with O’Donohue’s notion that to approach another person is an act of reverence that requires preparation. Most of us cross paths with so many people in the course of our life that we often forget that to encounter someone, to truly meet another, is a sacred act. Given how very many of us there are on this planet, and how frequently we allow the image of God in us to become obscured, it’s easy to overlook the way in which coming into the presence of another—a being who is created in the likeness of God—is a sacrament and a wonder.

This week, John the Baptist, along with his predecessor Isaiah, has been calling me to remember what it means to prepare to encounter another: in this case, of course, to come into the presence of one who is not just created in the image of God but who is God. In describing what the Baptist has come to do, Luke evokes the potent words of Isaiah, words that are full of an ancient hope for one who will come to restore and redeem:

The voice of one crying out in the wilderness:
‘Prepare the way of the Lord,
make his paths straight.
Every valley shall be filled,
and every mountain and hill shall be made low
and the crooked shall be made straight,
and the rough ways made smooth;
and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.’

One can imagine that John the Baptist, this locusts-and-wild-honey-eating, camel’s-hair-wearing prophet, must have spent his own time of preparation in the wilderness before he began to call people to prepare for the one who was coming. It was only by making himself ready—by straightening the paths within himself and smoothing out all that was rough in his interior landscape—that John was able to do the work that God had called him to do. And so we, too, are called in this season: to attend to and prepare our inner terrain so that we may welcome Christ in our lives and in our world.

But I have to tell you: this vision of straight paths, filled valleys, and mountains and hills leveled out—it rather gives me the willies. What Isaiah describes, and what John the Baptist is testifying to and working for, is a world that has undergone an apocalyptic leveling out. What will be left, it seems, is a landscape marked by little but its even, unrelenting flatness.

I wonder at that, because I think that part of what God loves about us is the stuff that makes us complicated and complex—the things that give texture to our terrain. By and large, we humans are not simple, are not smooth going, do not make things easy. I have a hunch that God takes a shine to us because of this: God likes a good challenge. And so the prospect of a landscape that is uncomplicated, that is flat, that does not have any meandering paths that take me to places I had never imagined going yet where I find God nonetheless: this strikes me less as a heavenly vision than a vision of a place far removed from paradise.

And yet. And yet. As one who not infrequently is prone to making my life more complicated than it needs to be, I find myself pondering Isaiah’s words, and pondering them again. In this season of preparation, Isaiah and John challenge me to consider: amidst the complexities and complications of my life, is there something I need to do to make it easier for Christ to enter my terrain and to be known in this world? Is there some path through my soul that I need to straighten, to smooth? Is there some mountainous obstacle that needs to be brought down—not to flatten my soul into a stultifying sameness, but so that Christ may meet less resistance within me?

It may be tempting to think that we should prepare ourselves more strenuously to encounter and welcome Christ than to meet anyone else. This season, however, beckons us to remember that the incarnation takes place anew each day, and that Christ comes in the form of those whom we meet on our path. How are we preparing ourselves to encounter Christ in them? How do we ready ourselves for this sacrament, this mystery, this miracle? Amid the graced and necessary complexities involved in being who God has created and called us to be, how do we make a space for the One who desires to approach and meet us in this and every season?

Blessings and peace to you on your path of preparation.

[For related reflections on this passage, visit these posts at The Advent Door: The Pilgrim’s Coat, A Way in the Wilderness, and Door 9: Making Way.]

[To use the image “Preparing the Way,” please visit this page at janrichardsonimages.com. Your use of janrichardsonimages.com helps make the ministry of The Advent Door possible. Thank you!]

Posted in Advent, art, Book of Isaiah, lectionary, religion, sacred time | 9 Comments »

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