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Righteousness Seeking Peace for Friendship, Possible Relationship

December 7, 2008

Meeting © Jan Richardson

Reading from the Psalter, Advent 2: Psalm 85.1-2, 8-13

In her imaginative work The Book of Qualities, writer and artist J. Ruth Gendler assembles an ensemble of human emotions and attributes. One by one she evokes their personalities with poetic detail, describing each with the skill of someone who is intimately acquainted with them. Among her cast of characters is Wisdom, who “likes to think about the edges where things spill into each other and become their opposites”; Despair, who “papered her bathroom walls with newspaper articles on acid rain”; Change, who “likes to come up quietly and kiss me on the back of my neck when I am at my drawing table”; and Devotion, who “braids her grandmother’s hair with an antique comb.”

Gendler’s impulse to personify these qualities places her in good and ancient company. For generations, humans have sought to understand and describe the emotions and characteristics that animate us by, in turn, animating them, personifying them as human figures. We have sought to do this with the Divine as well, exploring the aspects of God by singling them out and giving them form, life, and agency. This week’s lection from the Psalms provides a great example of this—more than one, in fact, for in Psalm 85 the psalmist offers us a quartet of God’s qualities that, in the psalmist’s hands, take dynamic form:

Steadfast love* and faithfulness** will meet;
righteousness and peace will kiss each other.
Faithfulness will spring up from the ground,
and righteousness will look down from the sky.

*sometimes translated as mercy
**sometimes translated as truth

The medieval imagination took this impulse to personify the attributes of God and brought it to full flower. In that period, characteristics of the nature of God became a cast of characters that ranged across visual art, literature, poetry, and drama. A number of these characteristics became known as the Virtues, often appearing in contrast to a series of personified Vices. Among the Virtues, four in particular were singled out as the “Daughters of God”: Mercy, Peace, Righteousness (sometimes known as Justice or the wonderfully poetic Rightwiseness), and Truth, our friends from Psalm 85.

These four Daughters of God became the subjects of a medieval allegory that took various visual and literary forms. They starred, for instance, in a 15th-century English morality play called The Castle of Perseverance, in which Justice, supported by Truth, debates with Mercy, aided by Peace. The subject of the debate is the soul of a man who has allowed himself to be taken in by a character called World, whose servants Lust and Folly dress the man in expensive clothes and lead him on misadventures. Ultimately, God sides with Mercy and Truth, and the man is saved. As Lynette R. Muir notes in The Biblical Drama in Medieval Europe, presenting the Daughters of God in the mode of a debate is a typical motif, derived in part from the work of theologians who sought to reconcile the seeming tension between God’s justice and God’s mercy.

We see the personified attributes of God moving also through mystical literature as well as the lives of the saints. St. Francis’ “Lady Poverty,” whom he called his bride, is perhaps the most well known example of this. Wisdom is among the most frequently personified qualities, often holding greater status than the other Virtues; her ubiquitous appearance and high status perhaps owe to the richness with which the Bible personifies the wisdom of God, as in Proverbs 9, where she appears as a woman calling her hearers to join in her feast. In the medieval period, Wisdom appears, for instance, in the visions of the German mystic Hildegard of Bingen, who in her work Scivias (Know the Ways) describes Wisdom as a beautiful woman standing on top of a high dome, crying out to the people of the world to come and receive the help of God.

Barbara Newman offers an intriguing approach to these personified qualities of God in her work God and the Goddesses: Vision, Poetry, and Belief in the Middle Ages. Newman observes that these characters, which medieval artists, writers, and visionaries depicted so often as women, made the qualities of God accessible to the imaginations of medieval folk and invited them to “participate in divinity” by embracing and embodying the qualities of God in their own lives. By appealing to the religious imagination, the dynamic and lively Virtues helped cultivate one’s devotion to the God who defies definitive description.

So where do we see the qualities of God at play in our own day, in our own imaginations? How do the infinite characteristics of God live and move and take form in our contemporary world? In art, in writing, in liturgy, in the daily living out of our desire to follow Christ, how do we see God taking shape around us and within us? Where do we witness the meeting places of mercy and truth, of peace and justice? In this season of celebrating the incarnation, how do we open our own selves to be a meeting place for the qualities of God?

Here’s one way I imagine it happening.

Saturday Morning, 10 AM

Justice and Peace meet at the café,
sit together,
hands folded around steaming cups,
heads bent over the paper.

They are not taking in
the news of the world
with sorrowing eyes
and the clucking of tongues.

They are instead planning their itinerary,
plotting their map,
looking for the places where
they might slip in.

Their fingers touch, release,
touch again as they read,
moving with the half-aware habits
that come only with long living alongside.

They have met, parted,
met again on countless mornings
like this one, torn and taken
by turns.

They put the paper aside
they brush away the crumbs
they talk quietly
they know there is work to do.

But they order one more cup:
there is savoring they must do before
the saving begins.
They lean in,

barely touching
across the table for
a kiss that makes a way,
a world.

—Jan Richardson

In these Advent days, may we witness and work for the meeting of mercy and truth, justice and peace around us and within us. Blessings.

[To use the image “Meeting,” 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, Christmas, Gospel of Mark, lectio divina, lectionary, medieval, Psalms | 1 Comment »

The Pilgrim’s Coat

December 5, 2008

advent-door-blog-2008-12-5Image: The Pilgrim’s Coat © Jan Richardson

Reading from the Hebrew Scriptures, Advent 2: Isaiah 40.1-11

When I returned home from my Thanksgiving holiday, I found the latest copy of Selvedge waiting for me. Published in England, Selvedge is a wondrous magazine devoted to textiles from around the world. Though I don’t do a lot with textiles (in my artwork, I mean; I do make good use of them, for instance, as a wearer of clothes), this magazine has become a source of enchantment and inspiration.

Savoring my way through the pages of the newly arrived issue, I lighted on a picture of a garment that immediately seized my imagination. The caption identified it as a Japanese pilgrim’s coat from the early twentieth century. Painted with Buddhist mantras in flowing Japanese calligraphy, a simple coat such as this would have been worn by a person as they traveled from temple to temple on their spiritual journey. Each temple had its own stamp, and a typical pilgrim’s coat is laden with vivid cinnabar imprints gathered from the temples. The coat of a pilgrim who had been traveling for some time would have looked something like a cross between a passport and prayerbook, with the cinnabar stamps and calligraphic mantras mingling together to enfold the wearer.

A web search for “pilgrims’ coats” turned up the intriguing Sri Threads site, which specializes in antique textiles and has a section devoted to what they describe as “Buddhist Pilgrim’s Accoutrements.” In describing the pilgrims’ coats, the folks at Sri comment that the temples that the pilgrims visit “are situated on a single holy mountain, and getting on foot from temple to shrine to temple is an act of faith and bravery. These pilgrims’ coats,” they go on to observe, “are an outward manifestation of the faith of the wearer, who endured much hardship and showed much fortitude in pursuit of perfecting his faith.”

With my love of fabric and calligraphy and tales of pilgrimage, I could hardly fail to be seized by the imagery of these artful, sacred garments. So my imagination and I got busy and headed into the studio, taking along this wondering:

What would an Advent pilgrim’s coat look like?

As I pondered this in my studio, I found myself thinking of this Sunday’s lection from Isaiah, the passage from which the gospel writers draw in describing John the Baptist. “Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God,” the text begins. “Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that she has served her term…” The writer of Isaiah 40 goes on to describe a voice that cries out,

In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord,
make straight in the desert
a highway for our God.
Every valley shall be lifted up,
and every mountain and hill be made low;
the uneven ground shall become level,
and the rough places a plain.
Then the glory of the Lord shall be revealed,
and all people shall see it together,
for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.

Writing to a people in exile, this author promises a pathway that will lead to redemption and return. The transformation of creation that he describes with such vivid imagery will envelop the people as well: within the community, within the individual, the interior landscape will change utterly, and through it will appear a road for the God who will come to redeem and restore.

It is a passage about wilderness, about making a sacred way, about transformation that happens within and without. These are classic images of pilgrimage, that sacred journey in which we become more than tourists, more than bodies merely moving through a landscape. The ancient practice of pilgrimage beckons us to find the places of connection between the terrain we carry inside us and the landscape beyond us, whether it’s the landscape of the natural world, or of a story, or of a season. Pilgrimage calls us to give ourselves to a terrain that we may find foreign and unsettling, and to open ourselves to the sacred and surprising places that it holds. Altered by our engagement with those places, we are able to reenter the familiar terrain of our lives and to see it with different and deeper vision.

So, there at my drafting table, I made myself a pilgrim’s coat for the season of Advent. In it I embedded a portion of the passage from Isaiah, taking his wilderness words as a blessing, a prayer for this Advent journey. Pondering this image, I wonder what sacred places God has in store for me on this Advent path, and whether I’ll be open to seeing them, and how they will change me.

What kind of pilgrimage might the season of Advent invite you to? What would your pilgrim’s coat look like? What prayers would you paint upon it, to bless you on your way? What are the names of the temples, the holy places—within or without—that you long to visit in this season, and what kind of imprint would they leave on your coat; how would they mark you? How open are you to the surprises that God might have in store on your Advent path? In whose company will you travel?

I’m happy to share my pilgrim’s coat with you, till you find or fashion one of your own. With gratitude for sharing the path, I pray for blessings and traveling mercies on your way.

[To use the image “The Pilgrim’s Coat,” 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, lectionary, religion | 2 Comments »

A Way in the Wilderness

November 30, 2008

Image: A Way in the Wilderness © Jan Richardson

Reading from the Gospels, Advent 2: Mark 1.1-8

Growing up, I was a girl who kept an eye firmly fixed on the horizon. I spent much of high school preparing for college, much of college preparing for seminary, much of seminary preparing for my first pastoral appointment—wherever it would be. When I finally landed at my first church, I soon came to a screeching halt. I had finally arrived at the place for which I had been preparing, and for which God had been preparing me, all these years.

What the heck was I supposed to do now?

I had built up a lot of forward momentum and had amassed many skills at getting ready for the next place on my journey. Once I arrived at St. Luke’s, however, I had no idea how long I would be there, or where I would go when it was time to leave. I realized I needed to learn what it meant to be fully present in that place, to not have one foot out the door throughout my time there, to be less devoted to the distant horizon. I remember telling a friend, in my first year of ministry, that whenever I left, I wanted to be able to say I had been present to these people and that I had made a home there. I had to learn some new skills in order to do this, but when I did leave—four years later and for a new ministry I could hardly have envisioned when I first arrived at St. Luke’s—it was a home and a community I was leaving, not a stepping-stone.

The season of Advent invites us to live within the kind of tension that I discovered in my first pastoral appointment. These days invite and challenge us to turn our eyes toward the horizon, that we may perceive the Christ who is to come again; yet they also draw our attention toward the present, where the presence of God is already stirring. The lectionary readings of Advent 1 have already hinted at this tension, reminding us there is work to do as we wait for the fullness of God. In next Sunday’s gospel reading, we see the intersections and invitations of future and present with particular clarity in the person of John the Baptist.

John makes his appearance at the opening of Mark’s Gospel, from which Sunday’s reading comes. Like the other Gospel writers, Mark casts the Baptizer as the messenger described in Isaiah, the one “who will prepare your way; the voice of one crying out in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.’” With his eyes on the horizon, John has been waiting for Jesus, but he has been at work, too, ministering to those beset by brokenness, preaching to them, and offering them baptism as a sign and ritual of repentance and healing. John the Baptizer is distinctly not inclined to sit around as he waits for the Messiah. For him, waiting and working are inextricable.

John appears in the gospels as a wildly liminal figure, a character who lives and works in a threshold space. He dwells in the wilderness; hangs out by a river; offers the ritual of baptism, which is an initiatory rite, even in this pre-Christian context; and devotes himself to preparing a way for the one who is to come. These actions and images by which the gospel writers describe John all speak to his status as one who inhabits liminal space—an in-between place—and whose purpose is not only to make a path for Christ but also to help others cross into a deeper relationship with God. John is present, too, at pivotal points in Jesus’ life, further emphasizing his liminal character: in Luke’s telling, John and Jesus meet when they are in utero, with John leaping in his mother Elizabeth’s womb as he recognizes and rejoices in encountering his cousin. He is the one who baptizes Jesus, helping to prepare him as he begins his public ministry. Even in death, John continues to serve a liminal role in Jesus’ life; as Matthew tells it, the news of John’s death prompts Jesus to withdraw by boat to a deserted place. That’s what Jesus intends, at least; instead of finding solitude, he is met by the masses, and the miraculous feeding of the five thousand ensues.

What intrigues me about the threshold nature of John the Baptizer is the way in which the past, present, and future come together within him. Grounded in the words of the prophet who spoke in centuries past about one who would prepare the way, John turns his face toward the future, and he flings himself into the present and the work that is at hand. He holds past, present, and future in dramatic and creative tension, not becoming overly attached to any one of these realms. Open to the ways that the God of the ages is at work, John is able to recognize Christ when he comes, when he reveals himself in the fullness of time.

These Advent days can be disorienting in the ways that they call us not only to remember the past but also to anticipate the future and attend to the present. Yet this is the work of the threshold, and Advent is a threshold season, a liminal place in the calendar, an in-between time of preparation and expectation. Thresholds offer a heady mix of possibility and peril. They are wildly unpredictable, they stir up questions, they call us to live with uncertainty, they compel us to develop skills at attending to the present even as we discern the future. Ultimately, they are places of initiation, taking us deeper into God and into the person God has created us to be. As I experienced in my first pastoral appointment, as those who received baptism from John experienced, as the Baptizer himself knew: to follow God does not always mean traveling with certainty about where God will lead us; rather, following God calls us to be present to the place where we are, for that is the very place where God shows up.

In these Advent days, how do you live within the tension of past, present, and future? What role does each of these play in your life and in your imagination? Which one are you living in the most these days? How do you experience God in the threshold spaces, the in-between times in your life? What gifts and challenges do the thresholds offer, and what skills do they call forth? What new place and way of being might God be initiating you into in this Advent season? What way is God making within and through you? What way are you making for God?

May God provide what will sustain you in every passage. Blessings.

[To use the image “A Way in the Wilderness,” 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, Christmas, Gospel of Mark, lectionary, religion | 4 Comments »

Advent 1: I Spy with My Little Eye

November 30, 2008

Waiting for the Revealing © Jan Richardson

Lection from the Epistles, Advent 1, Year B: 1 Corinthians 1.3-9

Thanksgiving week has found me hanging out with my family, for whom this holiday is a big reunion time. For the past few days I’ve had a makeshift studio set up on my parents’ kitchen table, where I’ve been creating collages in between the fortifying feasts that we’ve enjoyed. Being in a slightly less solitary space than my studio at home, the kitchen table studio has afforded a few opportunities to receive feedback on the work that’s been taking shape there. As I was working on the collage for this reflection, one family member looked at it and said, “A prayer rug!” Another, upon seeing the completed collage, mentioned Venetian blinds. Now I cannot look at the collage without thinking of either of these things.

Hearing what others notice in my artwork has provided a good reminder of what a multivalent and revelatory process art is. As an artist, I live with an awareness that each image I create reveals something about who I am, including some things that I may not necessarily intend for my work to reveal. The ways that I see, the experiences and stories that I carry, my skills as well as my shortcomings, my creative vision as well as my blind spots: all these aspects and more enter into the artistic process, entwining themselves with my work and giving form to it. I’ve found that it’s best not to fixate too much on what might become revealed in the process, otherwise I would never be able to send any of my work into the world.

Beyond my own artwork, I find myself fascinated by exploring the revelatory creative process with others. When I’m engaging folks in an artful mode in a retreat or workshop, one of the things I love to do is take them through a form of lectio divina with a piece of art they have created, most often a paper collage. Artwork, after all, can be a sacred text, no less so for being nonverbal. As with written texts, doing lectio with a piece of art—our own or someone else’s—invites us to notice the connections between the image and our own life, and to meet God within those connections. Call it collagio divina, perhaps. After I’ve invited participants to reflect on their work and what it reveals about their own story, I sometimes invite them to reflect on one another’s collages and to share what they see—what they read—in those visual texts. Seeing the collage from within their own story, the viewer has her own reading, his own perspective. Hearing these responses from others often deepens the creator’s experience of their own work. It also reveals something about the one who sees.

In much the same way that a piece of art reveals something about the artist, what others see in that work reveals something about their own selves. What we see, and how we see, tells about who we are, what has formed us, what experiences we carry, what texts—sacred and otherwise—we harbor within us. The revelatory quality of art—what it tells about the artist, what it tells about our own selves—can be both wondrous and threatening in the ways that it challenges and confronts us with our habits of seeing.

It’s Paul who has gotten me thinking about this business of revelation here at the outset of Advent. In the passage from 1 Corinthians that is today’s reading from the Epistles, revelation is Paul’s concern. In greeting the church at Corinth, Paul writes of the power of the spiritual gifts that sustain them as they wait for the revealing of Jesus Christ, who, Paul writes, “will strengthen you to the end.” The word that Paul uses for revealing is apokalypsis, from which we derive the word apocalypse. Though we most often use the word to refer to a destructive ending of momentous magnitude—namely, the end of the world—at its root, apocalypse simply means revelation: how God unhides Godself.

As with each of the readings this week, Paul’s words speak to the community’s longing for God to take form and be present in their lives. In concert with Jesus, who tells of how the Son of Man will come with power and glory; and with the writer of Isaiah, who challenged God to tear open the heavens and come down; and with the psalmist, who prayed for God’s face to shine upon him and his community, Paul reveals his desire to fully know and be known by God.

These texts that have ushered us into this first week of Advent are bracing, to say the least; they pose potent questions about how we will enter this season of expectation. These passages remind us that the season of Advent calls us not only to remember and celebrate Christ’s birth—his first coming—two millennia ago, but also to give attention to how we anticipate his second coming, an aspect that mainstream Christianity has had a far more difficult time talking about. How we respond to these texts and to this Advent invitation reveals something about who we are and how we see. Is the Christ for whom we wait, the Christ whom we anticipate, a Christ whom we see as vengeful, a deity who will dole out punishment when he comes? Or are we waiting and looking for a Christ who sees us as beloved, who desires to know us completely?

Each of these readings challenges us to consider what it is that we think of this God who wants to be intimately involved in our lives, this God who is working not only toward Apocalypse-with-a-capital-A, however that will look, but who also works within the daily apocalypses that accompany us. The God who often takes eons to bring about a particular result also works moment by moment, constantly revealing Godself, taking flesh and form in the daily unfolding of our lives. This God beckons us to perceive the ways the divine is at work and to respond even now.

In his greeting to the church at Corinth, Paul reminds them, and us, that there is work to do in the waiting. He writes of divisions that need healing, brokenness that needs mending, relationships that need tending, spiritual gifts that need fostering, wisdom that needs deepening. He calls this community to see what is important, to resist the behaviors that distract them from the real work at hand, and to give themselves to loving one another and the One whom we will one day see face to face, and know fully, even as we are now fully known (1 Cor. 13.12).

So what are we looking for in this season, and what does this reveal about us? How do we open our eyes to the possibility of seeing the Christ who is not merely waiting for an Apocalypse before he shows up but who is in our midst even now? How do we perceive this quotidian Christ who is already present in the everyday-ness of our lives, who comes in all manner of guises, who calls us to work even as we wait?

This is the Christ I pray to see, even as I sometimes resist the kind of knowing to which he calls me. Annie Dillard’s words that I shared at the beginning of this week still linger with me: What is it that I’m doing in seeking to see and know this Christ? Do I want to know and be known with such fullness, with such completeness? Do I really want to reveal that much of myself?

I look again at today’s collage and think, yes. Yes to that kind of knowing, that kind of seeing, that kind of seeking. With my face pressed to the prayer rug, with my searching eyes peeking out through the blinds, I pray to see the Christ who comes, and who is already here, revealing his presence in this and every season.

In all his guises, may we see him. Blessings.

[To use the image “Waiting for the Revealing,” 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, Christmas, lectio divina, lectionary, religion | Leave a Comment »

Advent 1: When Night Is Your Middle Name

November 29, 2008

Image: When Night Is Your Middle Name © Jan Richardson

Lection from the Psalter, Advent 1: Psalm 80.1-7, 17-19

I am a night owl. I love the dark hours. Periodically I work on going to bed earlier, but it feels like entering alien territory, trying to make sense of a landscape and a language that I have a hard time fathoming. A friend, knowing my dark ways, once asked me, so what do you do at night? Oh, what there is to do at night! I read, I told him; or perhaps write, or pray, or soak up the quiet, or unwind in front of the TV. It is a time to gather up the threads of the day, a period in which interruptions are rare and intrusions are few, a space in which my soul can catch up with me. If I’ve spent the day around people, my inner introvert is in particular need of having quiet time before sleep. If I haven’t gotten enough solitary space by the end of the day, insomnia often ensues.

There is darkness even in my name. My middle name, Leila, means night in Hebrew. My parents did not know this at the time—the name belongs to a great-grandmother—but it proved a felicitous choice.

I’m inclined to think there’s a link between my fondness for night and my level of comfort with mystery. Perhaps because my path in life has taken some unusual turns, I’ve become fairly adept at living with a sense of unknowing. I have had plenty of occasion to develop skills that help keep me grounded as the conundrums of my life unfold. Being connected with a Benedictine community has been a great help in this regard. When you hang out with folks who are part of a tradition that’s been around for more than a millennium and a half, you learn a few things about taking the long view and about practicing in the midst of mysteries that can take years and decades and centuries to reveal themselves.

As we lean into Advent, however, I find myself wondering, what illumination might God be offering to me in this season? Are there any mysteries I’ve become too willing to live with, any space in my soul that needs to be brought out of the shadows?

It’s one thing, after all, to live with the mysteries that come with our human lives, to enter into the rhythms of the sometimes strange ways that God works with us. The older I get, the more I think of God as the Ancient of Days, the Holy One of the Long Haul, who seems so deeply fond of working things out over vast expanses of time. This is the aspect of God that calls us to trust, that challenges us to step out without being able to see what’s ahead.

It’s another thing, however, to become too enthralled by the shadows. Mystery has its own enchantments; without spiritual practices and habits of discernment to ground us, those enchantments can lull us into becoming overly comfortable with the shadows and the places of unknowing that attend our journeys. If I don’t know something, after all; if I’m endlessly willing to live in a ceaseless process of discernment that never leads to action, if I don’t see a place of brokenness in my own soul or in the soul of the world, then I don’t have to do anything about it.

That’s called denial.

So as we tilt into these Advent days—and nights—I find myself praying along with the author of the psalm for this Sunday. In Psalm 80 we find a communal lament during a time of devastation. As in the reading from Isaiah, the psalmist’s community struggles with its sense of God’s absence and anger, yet its members still cry out to God to turn toward them and come into their midst. Repeatedly in Psalm 80 the psalmist offers a version of the refrain, “Restore us, O God; let your face shine, that we may be saved.”

The psalmist and his community are not living in denial of their brokenness. They may yet have some distance to go in discerning and reckoning with their responsibility for their own pain, but they perceive clearly their desperate need for the God who can heal them. Once, twice, and yet again the psalmist cries out for God to illumine them, to save and restore them, to clarify God’s presence among and within them.

Let your face shine.

How might it be to carry this prayer into this season? Is there some corner of my soul that has lived too long in shadow? Of the mysteries I have been content to live with, is there one that God might be ready to solve? Am I ready to receive the clarity that might come? How will I meet the God who longs to shine God’s face not only on me but through me as well? How will you?

May we have the courage to turn our faces to the God who meets us in darkness and in daylight. Blessings.

[To use the image “When Night Is Your Middle Name,” 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, Christmas, lectionary, Psalms, religion | 1 Comment »

Advent 1: No Between

November 26, 2008

No Between © Jan Richardson

Lection from the Hebrew Scriptures, Advent 1: Isaiah 64.1-9

Whenever I lead a retreat, I take along some art supplies for folks who want to do some creative work in our times of reflection. Paper collage—the medium through which I began to experience myself as an artist—is a particularly user-friendly medium that I love to use with groups, and so I always bring an array of gorgeous papers of wondrous patterns and textures and hues. I tell people that it’s okay to tear the papers, and that tearing them often creates more interesting effects than simply using scissors. I know my own work took a richer turn when I gave myself permission to be less precise and to trust the unpredictability that comes with ripping the papers. I can’t always control the direction the tear will go. That is the challenge, and the gift.

People often have a hard time tearing into the papers. “They’re too pretty to rip!” they say. When they make one small tear, however, and see the edge that’s revealed, something in them shifts. One of my favorite sounds is a quiet room filled with the music of paper giving way and new edges appearing, meeting, joining.

I will admit, though, that I found it hard to tear today’s collage. I really liked how it looked when it first took shape: a slice of a universe, twelve square inches of firmament pieced together there on my drafting table. I had gone into it knowing I would, in due course, rend it. But when it was time to tear my collaged cosmos, I balked. What if it didn’t tear the right way? What if I ruined the little universe I had so painstakingly fashioned?

I tore. The piece, after all, is a visual reflection on this week’s lection from Isaiah, in which the writer cries out to God, “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down.” He is pleading with the Creator to rip apart the cosmos, to come close, to cross the distance that the writer and his people are feeling so keenly.

The author of this portion of Isaiah most likely wrote these words during the time following the Israelites’ return from their exile in Babylon. Having made their way home, they were wrestling with questions of what their life, their community, their relationship with God would look like now. Isaiah 64 gives voice to their longing for a God who seems absent, even as they grapple with guilt over their own brokenness.

“You have hidden your face from us,” the writer says to God. His accusation haunts me, as does God’s response in the following chapter: “I was ready,” God replies, “to be sought out by those who did not ask, to be found by those who did not seek me. I said, ‘Here I am, here I am,’ to a nation that did not call on my name” (Is. 65.1).

It might be easy to chide the writer for accusing God of hiding when, in fact, the people of Israel seem to have been the ones turning their faces from God. Yet I know that very impulse in my own self, am well acquainted with the part of me that yearns for God even at the same time that I put up resistance.

In the midst of that “Come closer, go away” dance that I sometimes do with God, I periodically stop to wonder, what is it that I’m doing anyway, asking for the living God to become known to me? I think of Annie Dillard’s question in her book Teaching a Stone to Talk, where, in reflecting on the ways we speak to God in worship services, she asks, “Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke?” She goes on to observe, “It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.”

That’s the crux of it, that latter possibility that Dillard offers: at the heart of my resistant longing for God is the knowledge that to call upon the living God, to ask the Creator to tear open and rip into my universe, means giving myself to the prospect, the surety, that God will draw me out to places from which I can never return. Like tearing into the paper, but on a vaster scale, I cannot control the direction this will go.

That is the challenge, and the gift.

This business of asking God to come close, though, to tear through the separateness in order to reach us: that’s not how it really works, of course. The tearing doesn’t go in that direction, as if God needed to punch a hole in some far-off heaven in order to come down to us. The incarnation, which we anticipate and celebrate in this season, reminds us that God is ever present, immanent, closer than our breathing. Just this week I came again across this reminder from Julian of Norwich: “Betwixt us and God,” the medieval English mystic wrote, “there is no between.”

If God pervades all creation, pervades us, then the barrier that needs to be torn away isn’t outside us; it’s within. In our own interior universe, in the cosmos we carry inside us, God lives, moves, breathes. What do we need to tear away, to tear through, to tear down, in order to receive this? What do we balk at tearing because we think it is too precious to us or because we fear to lose control over the direction it will go? How do we need to unhide ourselves in order to find and welcome the God who is already with us? What door in our souls does God long for us to open? In these Advent days, how will we turn our faces toward the God who welcomes the exiles home?

Betwixt you and God, may you know no between. Blessings.

[To use the image “No Between,” 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, lectionary, religion | 3 Comments »

Advent 1: Through the Door

November 23, 2008

advent-door-blog2008-11-23Image: In Those Days © Jan Richardson

Gospel lection, Advent 1, Year B: Mark 13.24-37

I admit it. When I realized that Mark 13.24-37 was the gospel lection for the first Sunday of Advent this year, I cringed. Sometimes called the “little apocalypse,” this passage contains Jesus’ description of the end of the age. “But in those days,” he says, “after that suffering,

the sun will be darkened,
and the moon will not give its light,
and the stars will be falling from heaven,
and the powers in the heavens will be shaken.

Jesus goes on to talk about how, on a day and hour that no one knows, the Son of Man will come in the clouds with power and glory, and he exhorts his followers to “keep awake.”

In describing the end of the age, Jesus draws on imagery that we find embedded in the Hebrew scriptures, such as the book of Joel:

The sun and the moon are darkened,
and the stars withdraw their shining. (Joel 2.10)

It’s the same kind of imagery that fuels John’s vivid, visionary account in the book of Revelation, as in this passage:

…I looked, and there came a great earthquake; the sun became black as sackcloth, the full moon became like blood, and the stars of the sky fell to the earth as the fig tree drops its winter fruit when shaken by a gale. (Rev. 6.12)

In this text that launches us into Advent, Jesus employs a complex and sobering visual lexicon that’s rich with ancient layers of symbolism and meaning. In doing so, he offers his hearers a vision that disrupts their everyday world. Jesus calls upon them to attend to the signs around them, to look beneath the surface of their patterns of relationships and rhythms of life. He urges them to discern for themselves the activity of God.

We should not wonder that immediately following Jesus’ discourse, Mark tells of the plot to kill him.

I have been wishing for an easier start to the season, for words that would welcome us into Advent with a more graceful sense of hospitality. This lection doesn’t so much beckon us across the threshold as it throws open a door, tosses a cup of cold water in our face to wake us, and shoves us through.

But perhaps, instead of a cozy welcome into the season, this is precisely what we need as we enter Advent: a heaping serving of mystery, a vivid reminder that we can’t know everything, can’t see everything, can’t predict everything that will happen in the days to come. With its depiction of sun and moon going dark and stars falling from heaven, this passage challenges us to give up our usual sources of illumination, to let go of our habitual ways of knowing, to question our typical ways of seeing, so that we may receive the God who comes to us in the dark.

Mystery is rarely comfortable. We want to understand what it is we’re doing here, to see more clearly how God is at work, to know how the future will unfold. This gospel passage confounds us, reminds us that God works in the darkness as well as in the daylight. In the book of Isaiah, God says through the prophet,

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. (Is. 45.3)

Here at The Advent Door, I’ll be exploring some of those secret places—the texts, images, symbols, and stories that this sacred season offers to us, approaching them as doorways into the mystery of the God who comes to dwell among us. In the spirit of having some space to breathe during this season, I’ll be posting several times a week rather than every day, as I did last year. I would love to have your company on the path.

If you’re new to The Advent Door, welcome! It might help to know that the reflections here emerge from a practice called lectio divina, a Greek term that means sacred reading. An ancient way of praying with sacred texts, lectio invites us to find the connections—the thin places, to borrow a term from the Celtic tradition—between the landscape of the scriptures and the landscape of our own lives, and to meet God there.

The images that accompany these reflections are painted paper collages. They’re not meant merely to illustrate the reflections; rather, they are part of my lectio process. They are a way that I pray. Creating artwork gives me a doorway into these Advent texts. These images, too, become texts of their own, creating a visual vocabulary that helps me navigate and articulate what I’m finding in the landscape of this season. Though the collages tend toward the abstract, they draw much inspiration from medieval artwork, particularly as found in illuminated manuscripts such as the jewel-like Books of Hours, Psalters, and the like. The luminous images contained in those medieval manuscripts did more than elaborate the texts they accompanied; rather, the images had their own story to tell. They offered doorways into the mysteries that words alone could not contain.

And so may it be here. May the words and images that emerge in this season offer entryways into the story of the One who came in the midst of darkness to be with us. As we cross the threshold into Advent, what do you need to carry with you? What do you need to let go of, so that you can receive what lies ahead?

Welcome to Advent! Blessings on your way.

[To use the image “In Those Days,” 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, Christmas, Gospel of Mark, lectio divina, lectionary, medieval | 6 Comments »

A Harvest of Thresholds

October 26, 2008

With Advent just around the corner (this year it begins on November 30), the coming season is on my mind. I am all for not rushing into the next season before this one is done (though Ordinary Time does go on for such a long stretch and I’m about ready for a shift), but I did treat myself to one Christmas CD recently (the wondrous La Bela Naissença: Christmas Carols from Provence) to inspire me as I worked on a new print. The print features the twenty-five collages that I created for this blog last year.

The new print is available on my web site, either by visiting the main page at janrichardson.com or by going straight to the Color Prints page. With its invitation to cross the thresholds of Advent with a mindfulness that sometimes eludes us in the weeks leading to Christmas, it makes a nifty gift for yourself and others. I’d be delighted for you to stop by and check it out, and also to pay a visit to my other blog, The Painted Prayerbook, where I’ll continue to write and create art until Advent begins. I look forward to painting some new thresholds here at The Advent Door when the new season gets rolling.

Until then, may the presence of God linger close to you in these ordinary days.

Posted in Advent, art, Christmas, religion | Leave a Comment »

Door 25: The Book of Beginnings

December 25, 2007

Image: In the Beginning © Jan Richardson

Reading from the Gospels for Christmas Day: John 1.1-14

In a French Book of Hours fashioned in the Middle Ages, the Virgin Mary stands admiring the infant Jesus. Shed of his makeshift manger bed, Jesus has moved up to fancier digs: he is cradled in a book, securely enclosed by the leather strap that holds it shut.

And thus has the medieval artist sought to capture one of the core beliefs of the Christian tradition, one that we hear in today’s reading from the prologue to the Gospel of John: the Word became flesh and lived among us, full of grace and truth.

Christ the Word, cradled among words. It’s an artful depiction that’s both terribly literal-minded and also deeply imaginative. I admit it delights the bibliophile in me, the one who has a hard time separating her love of the Word from her love of words. Words are one of the primary ways I come to know the world, and myself within it, and the one who created it.

And here, at the opening of his Gospel, John clearly means for us to recall the one who brought the world into being. In the beginning, John writes, and with these words he opens a passageway to another book that begins in the same fashion.

With these words, in the beginning, John means for his hearers to recall the book of Genesis, the book of beginnings. He intends to conjure in his hearers’ minds the God who spoke into the chaos and, word by word, articulated creation. This God who worded the world into being, John tells us, is the very Word who took flesh and came to walk among us.

And this Word was life.

And this Word was light.

And the darkness did not overcome it.

And what more shall we say on this Christmas day?

Perhaps just this: that for John, the Book of Beginnings was still being written, a story both ancient and new, a sacred text that God was yet inscribing among God’s people. And is inscribing still. We who celebrate the birth of Christ are called also to be his body, and to participate in the ongoing process of the Word becoming flesh in this world. In us, in us, Christ continues to be born. In this and every season.

Many blessings upon you as we cross the threshold into Christmas, and into the beginnings that God will write within us. In the darkness and in the day, may Christ our Light, the Word made flesh, be your companion and your hope.

[To use the image “In the Beginning,” 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, Christmas, religion | 4 Comments »

Door 24: The Secret Room

December 24, 2007


The Secret Room © Jan L. Richardson

Reading from the Gospels, Christmas Eve, Years ABC: Luke 2:1-14, (15-20)

In his book The Art of Pilgrimage, Phil Cousineau writes that in every pilgrimage, 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 farmhouse. 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.

On this Christmas Eve, the lectionary gives us a reading from Luke’s Gospel. Luke tells of shepherds and angels, good news and glad tidings, and a child wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger. Luke tells us of the shepherds’ journey to the manger, and of how they tell Mary and Joseph about the news they had received of their child. “All who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds told them,” Luke writes.

But Mary, the Gospel writer tells us, treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart. (Luke 2.19)

Over the past 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 for months, 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 the secret room.

And you, have you found a secret room for yourself in these Advent days? On your journey through these weeks of anticipation and preparation, has there been a space, a moment, a place of wonder or wisdom or sheer respite, that helped you discover the purpose of this pilgrimage?

I think of a recent evening spent at the home of my childhood friend whose mother died early in this Advent journey. A mile down the road from where I grew up, my friend and her family opened their home for a festive evening. When I arrived, having traveled straight from my home a couple hours away, I was met in the foyer by another childhood friend who now lives in California and whom I hadn’t seen in a couple of years. She, and our friend hosting the gathering, and I had spent most of our childhood in one another’s company, a tightly intertwined trio. As we visited, the house began to fill with others from the community I grew up in, family and friends whose histories are tightly bound with mine. We all knew the loss that had visited this home in this season, and we attuned our ears to the laughter, and stories, and hopes that also came to visit on that night.

That was a secret room for me on this Advent pilgrimage, a space where, in the midst of all that was said, the unsayable gathered as well: the sense of gratitude for shared history, for calm amidst the chaos stirred in this season, for the deep gladness that went beyond holiday cheer and became a balm for sorrowing hearts, for the gift of hospitality that provided sustenance for body and soul, and for those whose lives embody the good news of the Christ who came to us in a dark time, and comes to us still.

On this final day of Advent, on this Christmas Eve, I am treasuring these things in my heart.

Blessings to you as we cross into the celebration to come. May there be a sacred, secret room for you in these hours.

[For another reflection on this passage, visit Where the Foreign Meets the Familiar.]

[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!]

Posted in Advent, art, Christmas, religion | 4 Comments »

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