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Door 23: Doing Some Dreaming

December 23, 2007


Doing Some Dreaming © Jan L. Richardson

Among the leaves of a tenth-century illuminated manuscript in the Medici Library in Rome, Joseph lies dreaming. Hands resting on his stomach, brow creased, Joseph sleeps on a multicolored coverlet. Having just discovered that his fiance Mary is pregnant, Joseph has gone to bed thinking he will “dismiss her quietly,” as Matthew tells us in today’s Gospel reading (Mt. 1.18-25). He will wake up with a different plan altogether.

Coming from the upper corner of this manuscript page, an angel with boots and blue wings hurtles toward the slumbering Joseph. “Shooting towards Joseph like a projectile from heaven,” Sister Wendy Beckett says of the angel; “a spiritual rocket is about to land on his anxious slumbers, and his rational world will deconstruct.”

This vivid and homely depiction of Joseph’s dream, and Sister Wendy’s commentary on it, has me thinking today about the intersections between what we tend to call the real world and the world of the imagination, the realm of dreams and visions and stories. Sr. Wendy reminds us that although Jesus’ birth is marked by signs and wonders, it is rooted in the very real experience of a woman who finds herself pregnant and a man who has to discern how to respond to this.

“The birth of Christ,” Sr. Wendy observes in her commentary on this illumination, “can seem utterly removed from the everyday reality of our own life, elevated into a sacred sphere where all is peace and joy. Not so: Mary is living in a real world, though in her innocence she may not have appreciated the full dimensions of it.” (From Sister Wendy’s Nativity and Life of Christ, 1998.)

This artful depiction of the dreaming Joseph and his dive-bombing angel vividly illuminates the intersection of the real world with the dreaming world. Here in the final days of Advent, it’s a timely image, and a timely story, to ponder.

At this point in the Advent season, we may find ourselves wrestling with the hopes and expectations we carried into the season. Ideas we had about how we would spend these days may not have come to pass. Plans we made to have shopping completed by this point, gifts wrapped and under the tree (or in the mail), Christmas cards sent, decorations hung and radiant, cooking preparations under way—and time for intensely meaningful quiet reflection in the midst of it all—well, that just might not have happened quite the way we’d hoped. The real world—the realm in which people get sick, wars continue, death comes to call, relationships crumble, and women find themselves unexpectedly pregnant—may be impinging heavily on us in this season, and for some folks, there is deep dissonance between the culturally expected cheer of this season and the realities of what this month has brought.

How do we move beyond this dissonance to open ourselves to that deeper place where the real world and the dream world intersect?

The past few days of this Advent season have found me trying to discern my way through some chaos that erupted in my personal ecosystem. I’ve spent a fair chunk of time having conversations in my head with a couple of folks who have me sorely vexed. I’ve been focused on trying to move through the emotional layers toward a reasoned, rational, grounded response. But in contemplating the text that Matthew has given us for today, I find myself wondering, what if there’s some other realm I need to open myself to as I discern my way through this? Beyond the realm of emotion, and beyond the realm of reason—both of which are important realms to pay attention to—might there be an additional source that has some help and wisdom waiting for me?

I imagine that Joseph knew about emotion, that he had some kind of visceral reaction when Mary told him she was pregnant. In response, he drew on reason and rationality to form a plan.

And then, Matthew tells us, Joseph dreamed. And his dream came as an interruption, a disruption to both the emotional and reasoned realms he had been inhabiting and acting from. In that powerful collision between the real world and the dreaming world, so literally depicted in the manuscript in the Medici Library, a new way opened up for Joseph. And for Mary. And for Jesus.

As I continue to discern what role I’m being called to take in the chaos that’s gotten stirred up this week, I’m feeling challenged to carry that image of Joseph. His story, and its placement at this point in the Advent season, feels like an invitation to pay attention to my dreaming world. I’m not referring just to my night dreams; I’m thinking also of other realms where the unconscious bubbles up into my awareness. In my creative work, in my life of prayer and contemplation, in the landscape of my imagination: what wisdom might God be offering in those places? What messages might that realm have to offer, as Joseph discovered in his dreaming sleep?

How have you been experiencing the so-called real world in these Advent days? What hopes and expectations did you carry into this Advent season, and what are your hopes now? Who’s got your ear these days—family, friends, news media, old voices you’ve been carrying around in your head, sorely vexatious people with whom you’re having imaginary conversations—and what are they telling you?

What message do you need to hear? What realms are you listening into? How do you—how do we—cultivate an openness to the place where the real world and the dreaming world intersect and offer us the message that we most need?

[To use the “Doing Some Dreaming” 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, Gospel of Matthew, lectionary, medieval, religion, sacred time | 1 Comment »

Door 22: In Which We Get Called on the Carpet

December 22, 2007


Carpet Page © Jan L. Richardson

Ah, Paul.

The opening of his letter to the Romans serves as the Epistle reading for tomorrow, the fourth Sunday of Advent. With this brief and potent passage, Paul nimbly and fervently encapsulates his understanding of his ministry, of Christ, and of who we are beckoned to be as followers of Christ:

Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God, which he promised beforehand through his prophets in the holy scriptures, the gospel concerning his Son, who was descended from David according to the flesh and was declared to be Son of God with power according to the spirit of holiness by resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord, through whom we have received grace and apostleship to bring about the obedience of faith among all the Gentiles for the sake of his name, including yourselves who are called to belong to Jesus Christ. To all God’s beloved in Rome, who are called to be saints: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. (Romans 1.1-7, NRSV)

In this brief opening passage, Paul has managed to tell the Christian community in Rome who he is, who Jesus is, what Jesus has done for us, and what God is calling them to do as people who belong to Christ. For the most part, Paul’s greeting is one long sentence, a paroxysm of words tumbling out upon one another in his zeal to convey the heart of the gospel message to his sisters and brothers in Rome.

Paul sure knows how to say howdy.

Paul probably wrote his letters before the four Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were penned. When he refers to the gospel for which he has been set apart, Paul is speaking not of a written text. Euangelion is the word that Paul and others use in the original Greek: the gospel is the good news, the story of God’s saving and liberating work for us in Christ. The four evangelists will come to set forth this good news in unique ways in their four different texts. Paul, “called to be an apostle, set apart for the Gospel,” inscribes the good news on his heart and becomes a living gospel for the world.

Paul bears a lion’s share—lion probably being a particularly apt metaphor—of the early church’s work to spread the good news and to form communities that would tell and live out the gospel message. Whatever foibles Paul may have had—and Paul certainly was a textured fellow—his fervor was infectious.

I’ve found myself thinking today of those who, across the span of two millennia, have given themselves to the work of passing on the good news. I think of those who have told the story, those who have proclaimed the gospel not only in word but also in action, those who have preserved and handed down the written text from generation to generation, those who have given flesh to the gospel (and the Word became flesh) in the text of their own lives.

As an artist, I have found myself particularly intrigued by those scribes and artists of earlier centuries who lavished their attention on the gospel message in astoundingly tangible ways. My imagination has been especially captivated by what are often known as the insular gospel books, remarkable manuscripts of the gospels created in Ireland and the British Isles in the Middle Ages. Between the seventh and ninth centuries, scribes and artists drew upon various artful influences, including the visual culture of continental Europe, Scandinavia, and Egypt, and created a style distinctly their own. In their hands, the surface of the page became a landscape brimming with the power, beauty, and complexity of the story of Christ. Within these gospel books, pages teem with intricate patterns of knotwork, spirals, images of humans and intertwined animals, and all manner of symbols that convey both the revelation and the mystery of Christ.

At the core of the scribes’ and artists’ artful labor lay a mighty devotion and profound sense of call that suggests they inherited Paul’s fervor for the gospel. In writing about one of the most remarkable of the insular gospel books, the Lindisfarne Gospels, Michelle Brown describes such work as “preaching with the pen.” She observes that the monk who created such a work

may also have embodied in his work a sustained feat of spritual and physical endurance as part of the Apostolic mission of bringing the Word of God to the furthest outposts of the known world and enshrining it there within the new Temple of the Word and embodiment of Christ—the Book. (From The Lindisfarne Gospels: Society, Spirituality, and the Scribe, 2003.)

Creating today’s door, I was thinking especially of the remarkable pages that are sometimes called carpet pages. Found in the Lindisfarne Gospels and other gospel books, these pages served to divide the four Gospel texts. Containing no written words, a carpet page typically has an intensely intricate design and sometimes incorporates a cross. Similar in style to an Eastern prayer rug (hence the name carpet page), it seems that such a page served a prayerful purpose. Placed opposite the beginning of a Gospel, a carpet page invited the viewer to pause, to become quiet, to reflect, to prepare to enter into the story contained in the following pages.

One could think of it as the artist’s way of saying howdy, and get ready for what lies ahead.

On this Advent day, how is your getting ready going? Three days before the festival of Christmas, how are you preparing your heart to hear the good news that awaits us on Christmas morning?

Are you finding a space that will help you enter into the story?

What is the good news that has been inscribed on your bones, on the walls of your heart, in the labyrinthine passages of your brain? What gospel word inhabits your breath and being?

Is there a place in your life that can serve as a living carpet page, a prayer rug, a space that enables you to hear this word, this news?

In the spirit and tradition of Paul, and the writers of the Gospels, and the scribes and artists who have shared in telling the news, and all the women and men who have kept the story alive and passed it down from generation to generation for two millennia, how are you called to embody and pass along the gospel story in the way that is uniquely yours to do?

[To use the “Carpet Page” 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 | Leave a Comment »

Door 21: Blue Plate Special

December 21, 2007

advent21.jpg

Last night was an insomnia night. After lying wakeful for a long while, I did what I virtually never do when I’m visited by sleeplessness: I got up and worked. Usually it’s working late that stirs my insomnia, but that wasn’t the case last night; I had turned my attention to other things during the evening hours. This time, when insomnia came to call, going to the drafting table in the wee hours seemed to make sense. I turned on the studio lamps and, squinting against their brightness, I began to sift through the piles of painted papers and set to work.

It eventually occurred to me that it seemed a fitting manner in which to while away the darkness on the cusp of the winter solstice. Tonight, in the wee hours, we in the northern hemisphere will be at our farthest remove from the sun. This night will be the longest of the year.

After this collage emerged in the sleepless darkness of this past night, I scribbled some words down on a glue-stained scrap of paper that lay on the drafting table. A night when the moon seems more enduring than the sun, I wrote. And then this, perhaps my tired brain’s idea of a title for the collage: egg over easy on a blue plate.

And perhaps that was fitting, too: that, in the midst of pondering the rhythms of light and shadow on the eve of the winter solstice, an egg should appear, sign of the life, the hope, the potential that stirs in the dark. And not only stirs in the dark, but, for a time, requires it. The egg, the seed, the root: everything that grows must have a season of darkness.

Within and beyond the Christian tradition, we have entrenched stereotypes about light and dark. These deeply held beliefs, which often seem to operate at a primal level, tend to hold that all that is good is light and bright and white, and that which is sinful and evil is dark. Though the stereotypes sometimes hold true, they can keep us—as stereotypes often do—from perceiving the ways that God sometimes works in the opposite direction.

I don’t want to be cavalier or romantic about darkness, despite wanting to recognize the gifts that it can carry. (My middle name is Leila, which comes from the Hebrew word for night; my parents had other reasons for the name, but I like to think it somehow influenced my tendency toward generally loving the nighttime hours.) There’s no getting around the fact that physical darkness can be terrifying, when it offers occasion for violence and fear. The darkness of moods, of emotions, of depression and internal chaos can be equally terrifying. At the same time, daylight can reveal its own fearsome things, and Paul, in his second letter to the Corinthians, writes that “Even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light.”

The solstice and the seasons of Advent and Christmas beckon us to ponder what we think about light and dark, what we find in them, how we experience their rhythms in our lives, and what gifts God has for us in both darkness and daylight.

In the book of Isaiah, God offers these words:

I will give you the treasures of darkness
and riches hidden in the 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)

In seasons of shadows, God invites us to find the treasures that don’t depend solely on sight, whether literal or figurative. How do we know God in those times? How do we allow God to lead us to the riches that don’t require our knowing everything, doing everything, understanding everything, seeing everything?

And still. And still. Even in seasons when darkness is less fearsome—when the darkness comes not with terror but with the shadows of mystery and unknowing that are necessary for the soul’s growth—still, there is a deep and ancient longing for light, a yearning that we carry in our blood and in our bones. This is the season when we give that longing full play, when, in the days of deepest darkness, we hang lights and burn candles (and perhaps even turn on the studio lamps and set to work) and sing of the one who came to us as the light of the world.

From the deep root of Jesse, from the dark womb of Mary, Christ our dayspring comes. More enduring than both moon and sun.

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

Door 20: Getting the Message

December 20, 2007

Image: Getting the Message © Jan Richardson

Reading from the Gospels, Advent 4, Year B: Luke 1.26-38

One of the things that intrigues me about medieval artwork is the way that it has its own stories to tell. In depicting biblical scenes (which provided the material for so much artwork in the Middle Ages), medieval artists sometimes incorporated visual stories that we don’t find in the Bible. Though without an actual scriptural basis, the symbolic text the medieval artists gave us can engage the imagination, raise questions, and illuminate a given story beyond what the written text provides. It works something like an artful midrash that invites us to imagine the worlds between the words.

Here’s my favorite example. In many medieval (and Renaissance) depictions of the Annunciation—that moment when the archangel Gabriel comes to Mary to ask her to become the mother of Jesus—Mary is depicted reading. (The chronic reader in me loves this.) Usually she’s depicted with a book that indicates that she’s at her prayers when Gabriel shows up. Sometimes, in a wonderful bit of anachronism, it’s a Book of Hours that Mary is reading. (The Book of Hours was a popular prayerbook in the Middle Ages. Often lavishly illustrated, Books of Hours always included a section of prayers in honor of Mary, with artwork that illustrates scenes from her life…including the Annunciation, in which the artists depict her reading…a Book of Hours…it’s kind of like one of those time-twisting Star Trek episodes I wrote about earlier.) Other times, her book is open to Isaiah, specifically to a passage from the Hebrew text that the lectionary gives us for this week, in which the prophet says this to King Ahaz:

Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Look, the young woman is with child and shall bear a son, and shall name him Immanuel. (Isaiah 7.14)

The Christian tradition came to interpret this passage as a foretelling of the birth of Jesus, God-with-us, to Mary. In depicting her reading this very text, the medieval artists did some intriguing time-twisting of their own, opening an imaginative portal between the sign given to King Ahaz and the miracle given to Mary.

Though the image of Mary reading at the moment of the Annunciation doesn’t appear in the biblical text, I love this artful notion of the reading, praying Mary. It reveals something of the medieval view of Mary, and it offers evidence of a kind of visual lectio divina the artists did as they pondered Mary’s story. In depicting her with a prayerbook or with the sacred text of her tradition, the artists conveyed the compelling idea that Mary was already immersed in the word before the Word became immersed in her.

This image of Mary challenges me to ponder what texts—written or otherwise—I’m steeping myself in. What words, what images do I give my attention to: on the page, in conversation, in the course of my daily life? In a culture that inundates and sometimes assaults our eyes and ears with messages in all manner of forms, how do we read in a way that keeps us attuned to the sacred?

Am I, like the medieval Mary, immersing myself in the word in a way that helps me notice when a divine messenger shows up with an outrageous invitation? That’s what the word angel means in the original Greek: one who comes with a message. How do I cultivate an openness to that message, to the Word that longs to find a home in me, in us?

[To use the image “Getting the Message,” 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, religion | Leave a Comment »

Door 19: The Inhabited Psalter

December 19, 2007


The Inhabited Psalter © Jan L. Richardson

This week, the lectionary gives us a psalm of heartbreak and hope. Crying out to God in the midst of desperate desolation, the writer of Psalm 80 pleads with the Holy One:

Stir up your might,
and come to save us!
Restore us, O God;
let your face shine, that we may be saved.

Reading the psalmist’s song of gut-wrenching hope, I’ve been thinking about Edward.

I inherited Edward. He was a friend and colleague of my sister when she lived in Atlanta. When I moved to Atlanta to attend seminary, Sally had already moved to another part of the country. When she returned to Atlanta for a visit, I met Edward. He became a blessedly unlikely friend. Totally disconnected from the seminary community around which my life revolved, and with a bit of a wild hair, Edward provided a unique thread of connection to the world beyond.

I went to church with him sometimes. An active member of an Episcopal congregation, Edward introduced me to the riches of Anglican liturgy. One of my favorite memories of being at All Saints’ Church is connected to an evensong service for which Edward played the organ, his creative spirit at play in a way that I imagine he experienced less frequently in his day job in the business world.

One year, during the Advent season, Edward gave me a book in which he had inscribed these words:

Stir up thy power, O Lord,
and with great might come among us;
and, because we are sorely hindered by our sins,
let thy bountiful grace and mercy speedily help and deliver us…

I was unfamiliar with the words, but from his inscription I learned that the words came from the Book of Common Prayer; they are part of the collect for the third Sunday of Advent. It is an old, old prayer that, in one version or another, goes back centuries. I have a Book of Common Prayer whose long-ago text renders it in these words:

O Lord, raise up (we pray thee) thy power, and come among us, and with great might succour us; that whereas, through our sins and wickedness, we are sore let and hindered in running the race that is set before us, thy bountiful grace and mercy may speedily help and deliver us…

Zowie. I love that version.

With roots in this week’s psalm, this prayer links us to generations of those who have cried out for God’s saving power. For millennia the Psalter has served as a wellspring for prayer, both for those who have prayed its verses as well as for those who, as in this collect from the Book of Common Prayer, have woven the psalms into new prayers that echo with the ancient longings that we humans have carried throughout our history.

The Book of Psalms, perhaps more than any other book of the Bible, carries our collective memory as people who have sought the presence of God in every circumstance. The psalms give voice to the full range of human emotion. Desire, rage, hope, vindictiveness, love, despair: nearly everything we are capable of, both exalted and base, is at play in its pages. The psalmist incorporates it all, with no visible fear that he will be judged for bringing his emotions into the presence of God. It reminds me of one of the desert fathers, Abba Poemen, who wisely counseled us to “Teach your mouth to say that which you have in your heart.” The psalmist did. A lot.

Because he (they) did, and because these words were gathered together in a book, we are inheritors of this remarkable body of poetry that has been a central sacred text for the ages, not only for Christians but for Jews as well. As prayers for both public worship and for private contemplation, the Psalms link us with all those, Jewish and Christian alike, who have prayed these words in solitude and in community across generations.

When I open a book that contains the Psalms, it often stirs particular connections with others to whom I am linked by those words. When I open the Benedictine breviary that the community of St. Brigid of Kildare Monastery uses, and pray the psalms contained there, I am mindful that I do not pray alone. Though I may be in solitude, I am praying in community not only with my oblate sisters and brothers but with Benedictines and other monastics around the world and across the ages who have prayed these same psalms that are at the core of monastic life.

I have a Bible that belonged to a beloved great-aunt, and when I read the beautiful cadences of the Psalms in the King James Version, I am mindful that she once prayed these same prayers. Her open Bible becomes a thin place, a space where the veil between worlds becomes permeable.

During the graveside service held last week for a family friend who influenced me greatly, the pastor invited us to pray the 23rd Psalm together (King James, of course, the version inextricably and beautifully bound with that particular psalm). The collective voice of the community gave me shivers; it tapped into a deep well of memory, and the voices lifted by the grave of that beloved mentor, friend, mother, and wife were not just our voices alone.

The Psalms are haunted. Generation upon generation, in dozens of languages, in every circumstance, the people of God have turned to them, have sung them, have whispered them, have wailed them, have chanted them alone and in community. The Psalms are inhabited, filled with the presences of all who have prayed them.

Whom do you hear when you turn to the Psalms? Who inhabits their lines? Who prays them with you?

Today, as I ponder this week’s psalm, Edward is especially present with me. He died more than a decade ago, a few months after I moved from Atlanta. He was altogether too young. In this psalm’s lines of desolation and desire intertwined, I hear the echoes of Edward’s voice. As he journeyed throughout long and thieving months of illness, Edward, and the community that surrounded him, lived the psalmist’s rhythms of heartbreak and hope. And heartbreak. And hope.

Stir up your might,
and come to save us!

O come to us. Come.

[To use the “Inhabited Psalter” 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, lectionary, Psalms, religion, sacred time | 1 Comment »

Door 18: “Build Your Own Door” Day

December 18, 2007

advent18.jpg

Once upon a time, a friend sent me a card in which she included these words:

I had a dream that I was building a door. It was a beautiful wooden door. It was partially open as I was working on it and the frame. Friends came by to help but it was my door—I was in charge and competent enough to build a door. And it wasn’t a ‘keeping out’ door, but it was a ‘going through’ door. I think that’s just where I am in my life. I need to claim me, my doors, and my ability to make them with the intention of going through them.

So—in that spirit, it’s “BUILD YOUR OWN DOOR” DAY here at The Advent Door. I’ve scooped up a handful of scraps from the (large) piles that have been accumulating on my drafting table this season. They’re for you. Use them lavishly. There’s plenty more where these came from.

What kind of door are you needing in this season? Is it a “keeping out” door, a “going through” door, an “I’m going to need to ponder it for a while until I figure out what kind of door it is” door?

Is it a door that opens out, or opens in?

What do you need for the building of your door?

How will you get what you need?

Who or what could provide sustenance as you create your door?

Today, I’m needing a “Turning My Attention to What Hasn’t Gotten Done While I’ve Been Living Between the Drafting Table and the Computer” kind of door. I’m thinking it’s time to start figuring out Christmas presents. My sweetheart says I could tell my family that I’m dedicating a day’s blog post to each of them as their gift this year. Intriguing, but…!

Here’s a prayer for your door-making in this season:

When I scan other skies
for signs of hope,
and when I walk other paths
with a longing for home,
God of the exile,
lead me back through my own door.

Tell me
my forgotten stories,
feed me
the words I have given away,
and draw my gaze
from the far horizon
that I may see the lights
in my own sky.

©Jan L. Richardson, from Night Visions:
Searching the Shadows of Advent and Christmas

A blessing upon you and your Advent door.

Posted in Advent, art, Christmas, religion | 1 Comment »

Door 17: In Which We Knock from the Inside

December 17, 2007

advent17.jpg

One of my absolute favorite things about my vocation is getting to witness what emerges when folks are given time, tools, and space to reflect on their lives. In retreat and workshop settings, I always make some collage supplies available as one possible avenue for reflection. Collage is great because anyone who made it through kindergarten has the necessary skills to do it. Cut. Tear. Paste. Voilà! Even folks who tend to freak out in the face of an invitation to create are sometimes able to engage the collage process, which I work to make as user-friendly as possible (and I make it clear that doing art is always an invitation, not a requirement).

At a workshop I did a bunch of years ago, one of the participants picked up a few pieces of paper and spent the next bit pacing and chanting, “I’m a linear thinker, I’m a linear thinker…” Eventually he settled in and created an amazing collage. The amazing part lay largely in his willingness to enter into the process, in which he found himself able to think in a different way about something that was going on in his life.

My favorite collage exercise involves inviting folks to think about their lives as a landscape. I ask them to reflect on their commitments, their relationships, whatever makes up the terrain of their days, and then to create a collage that evokes something of that landscape. Often I give them just a small, 4 x 6 piece of paper for the background, to make it as manageable as possible for them.

It’s amazing what a landscape people can fit into 24 square inches.

I like doing a quick process of lectio divina with folks who have created a collage. A little collagio divina, if you will. (Lectio collagina is probably more accurate but is more cumbersome on the tongue.) In much the same way that we can read a written text, we can also read the visual text of a piece of art, whether it’s something we’ve created or a piece that we’ve encountered. I invite them to silently ponder their collage as I offer a few questions. One of the questions I ask is this:

When you turn your collage—your landscape—in a different direction, what do you see?

Things turn up in collages that we’re not always aware of at the time, and getting a different perspective helps us notice these things.

I’ve been thinking about landscape-of-life and perspective lately as I’ve been pondering the Advent texts. The Advent lections are full of God’s reversals: swords into plowshares, spears into pruning hooks, wolf living with the lamb, cow and bear grazing together, the desert blossoming, the blind seeing, the lame leaping, streams flowing through the desert, the powerful brought down, the lowly lifted up, the hungry filled with good things. God reverses not simply for the sake of reversing—though one might hope that it would help keep us on our toes and increase our ability to recognize and receive God’s surprises—but to bring about restoration, a theme that we hear echoed in this week’s lection from Psalm 80:

Restore us, O God;
let your face shine, that we may be saved. (Ps. 80.3)

It seems especially fitting to think about reversals on this day. It’s the anniversary of the death of the Persian poet Rumi, a mystical Sufi poet who lived in Afghanistan between 1207-1273. In the Sufi tradition, the night of December 17 is called the Wedding Night, celebrating Rumi’s union with the Divine Beloved.

As a poet, Rumi delights in turning things on their heads, shaking up our assumptions and tightly-held beliefs, seeing what different perspective he can stir up in himself and his hearers. In one poem (or, rather, in a version of it by Coleman Barks, who, though he’s often called a translator, does not himself read Rumi’s language and is more accurately termed an interpreter of Rumi’s work; a brilliant one, but it’s important to remember that we’re getting a very filtered version of Rumi. But that’s another story…) As I was saying, in one poem, Rumi speaks of how he has lived on the lip of insanity, knocking on a door, then realizes: “I’ve been knocking from the inside!” (Copyright considerations prevent me from including the entire poem here, though I’ve managed to allude to practically the whole thing, but I have no compunction about inviting you to another site where you can read it: visit World Prayers.)

Is there any place you’ve been pushing intently, when pulling back might clear the path? What helps you gain perspective, a different view of the landscape of your life? Is there any piece that needs turning, considering from a different angle, in order to better see what’s there?

Sometimes the reversal that we need, the shift in perspective, is one that we have to find within us rather than looking everywhere around us.

On this Advent day, on this Wedding Night, may you open a door from the inside.

Posted in Advent, art, Christmas, lectio divina, poetry, religion | 2 Comments »

Door 16: The News in Prison

December 16, 2007

advent16.jpg
The News in Prison © Jan L. Richardson

The third Sunday of Advent gives us Matthew 11.2-11 for our Gospel reading. In pondering this passage, I keep coming back to the first words of the opening verse:

When John heard in prison what the Messiah was doing…

John in prison, thrown there by Herod because he dared tell the king that it was unlawful for him to have married his brother’s wife.

John, locust-and-honey-eating prophet of the wilderness, confined to a cell.

John the way-maker, his own way ending in captivity and, shortly, a gruesome death.

But there, from behind his bars, John hears what Jesus is doing. I keep wondering what it must have been like for John, imprisoned, to receive word of the Messiah, the one for whom John had made a way. I wonder what wedge of hope, freedom, possibility the news must have stirred in John. I suspect he well knew he would never leave his physical captivity, but when this preparer of Jesus’ path receives word of what the Messiah is up to…what chains must have fallen away, what light must have gathered there in his cell?

When John heard in prison what the Messiah was doing…

So today I find myself thinking about the word of Christ that comes to those in captivity. I think of how in recent months I’ve felt drawn to pray for those who live in various kinds of bondage in body and/or soul: those in prison, those who have been kidnapped, those living with addictions that have bent and broken them. I think of, and pray for, those who live within systems of oppression and those who create their own systems and situations that rob them of power. I think of those who live in ostensible freedom but who, for reasons of fear or ignorance or seeming convenience or who knows what else, have given their power away little by little, in such small increments that they (we) hardly notice it until it’s nearly gone. In John’s company today, I find myself wondering where those prayers might lead me, what path they might be preparing.

When John heard in prison what the Messiah was doing…

In the space of lectio divina, today’s Advent Gospel also invites me to ponder whether there are any places of bondage within myself, any part of my being that lives with less freedom, less fullness than God intends. I think of occasions when I’ve struggled within an institutional system, or a relationship in which I gave too much power to the other person, or times in my life when things got so complicated that fatigue set in, and I allowed it to consume energy that would have been better spent figuring a way out of the complications.

I don’t beat myself up (anymore) (usually) about those occasions when I haven’t lived as fully as hindsight might have wished. Berating ourselves and giving power to regret is another form of bondage, and I’m not sorry for the wisdom I wrested from those times. It helps keep my vision clear as I continue down the path, and it increases the chances that I’ll recognize more quickly when I’m giving up some form of power that God means for me to keep.

When John heard in prison what the Messiah was doing…

On this Advent day, is there any place of unfreedom within you? Is there any part of your soul, your spirit, your mind that lives in confinement? To what, or to whom, are you giving power and control these days? Why?

What news of Christ, what word of hope, is God offering in that place of confinement? What is one tiny step that would lead to greater freedom?

How are you called to enter into the places where others live in bondage and captivity, and to speak news of liberation in those places?

The design for today’s Advent door drew inspiration in part from a quilt made by one of the amazing quilters of Gee’s Bend. A community of African-American women living in a rural enclave of Alabama, they have, over the course of generations, created vividly unique quilt forms that in recent years have drawn international attention and major exhibitions. Making today’s door while I pondered John in prison, I thought also of these women who, in their bones and in their collective memory, know about bondage and freedom, about making a way out of no way, about the power that the good news brings.

When John heard…

[To use the “News in Prison” 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, Gospel of Matthew, religion, sacred time | Leave a Comment »

Door 15: Another Name for Patience

December 15, 2007

advent15.jpg
Another Name for Patience © Jan L. Richardson

Today I’m hanging out with James. The Revised Common Lectionary turns our attention toward his letter for tomorrow’s Epistle reading. In the selected lection (James 5.7-10), James tells us this:

Be patient, therefore, beloved, until the coming of the Lord. The farmer waits for the precious crop from the earth, being patient with it until it receives the early and the late rains. You also must be patient. Strengthen your hearts, for the coming of the Lord is near. Beloved, do not grumble against one another, so that you may not be judged. See, the Judge is standing at the doors! As an example of suffering and patience, beloved, take the prophets who spoke in the name of the Lord. (NRSV)

I’m struck by James’s repetition of the word beloved. Once, and again, and a third time still he uses this word, addressing his correspondents with a trinity of beloveds. Belovedbelovedbeloved. The repetition has become like a heartbeat as I’ve lived with his words this week.

James tells his beloved ones to be patient as they wait for the coming of Christ. Patience is a word I have trouble with; virtuous though it may be, patience tends to carry connotations of idleness, of biding one’s time because one can’t or won’t do something to move things along.

I know the wisdom of having times of not-doing. I am well accustomed to stillness, to emptying, to delayed gratification. I know how to take the long view, to be rather than do, to understand that things have their seasons.

Still, I don’t like the word patience. I think part of my trouble is that the word is sometimes used by folks who seem to have the most power in a given situation, the people who have the means to produce the desired result but who, for whatever reason, are tarrying, or have no intention of getting things done.

There are times of waiting that call us to stillness. And there are times of waiting that call us to doing, to find some measure of power, to find good work to offer. Even in times of stillness, there is cultivation to be done.

James tells his beloved ones to be patient (in the equivalent Greek word, a form of makrothumeo). But he offers some images that I find helpful, that flesh it out and lend depth and power to what seems like an overdone word.

Here are some lines that came from my pondering of James’s words.

Another Name for Patience

Beloved,
don’t tell me
to be patient.
I am done
with this idle
not-doing,
this waiting that
wastes
and dulls.

Tell me, beloved,
to strengthen my heart.
Tell me to look to the ones
who spoke fire.
Tell me there is work to do
in the waiting,
a field to be cultivated,
a place to labor
during the watching

until,
beloved,
I lay myself down
among the
ready harvest,
spent and
drenched with the rains
early and
late.

On another note, here’s a handful of miscellaneous treasures for a contemplative journey through Advent and Christmas:

If you’re in the mood for some cool Christmas music that’s different from the usual fare, I invite you to check out Music and Mystery.

Speaking of music, the radio program Harmonia offers some great early music resources for the season (and throughout the year). In a wondrous stroke of technology and generosity, they have made their archived shows available online. Visit Harmonia Archives to check out their offerings. The 2007 list includes a show titled “Magnificat anima mea” (07-38), which features a delicious variety of settings of the Magnificat. The 2005 archives include a holiday special titled “La Noche Buena.”

Sound and Spirit is another splendid radio program; it looks to music, myth, folklore, and literature from across cultures in exploring various themes of the spirit’s journey. Their archived shows include refreshing, imaginative explorations of holiday themes.

Christine Valters Paintner offers an artful, contemplative space through her web site at Abbey of the Arts, and during this season her blog offers some nourishing Advent fare.

A blessing to you on this Advent day. May your heart be strengthened.

[To use the “Another Name for Patience” 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, lectionary, poetry, religion, sacred time | 2 Comments »

Door 14: Remembering Forward

December 14, 2007

Image: Where Hope Lives © Jan Richardson

Canticle, Advent 4: Luke 1.46b-55

Today finds me still pondering the Magnificat. Mary’s song has me thinking about a passage in Lewis Carroll’s book Through the Looking-Glass, in which the White Queen and Alice have this exchange:

“The rule [says the White Queen] is, jam to-morrow and jam yesterday—but never jam to-day.”

“It must come sometimes to ‘jam to-day,'” Alice objected.

“No, it can’t,” said the Queen. “It’s jam every other day: to-day isn’t any other day, you know.”

“I don’t understand you,” said Alice. “It’s dreadfully confusing!”

“That’s the effect of living backwards,” the Queen said kindly: “it always makes one a little giddy at first—”

“Living backwards!” Alice repeated in great astonishment. “I never heard of such a thing!”

“—but there’s one great advantage in it, that one’s memory works both ways.”

“I’m sure mine only works one way,” Alice remarked. “I can’t remember things before they happen.”

“It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards,” the Queen remarked.

“What sort of things do you remember best?” Alice ventured to ask.

One of the things that strikes me most about Mary’s canticle is that in singing about how God turns the world upside down, she sings as if these things have already come to pass. In Mary’s chosen tense, God has already accomplished the righting of the world. Mary knew, as we know, that redemption and restoration was still a work in progress. But so transformed was Mary that she could sing of this as though it had already happened. She is remembering forward.

We have a fancy theological term for what Mary does there.

It’s called hope.

Hope is a tricky thing. Given how intimately it’s intertwined with our longings and desires, both conscious and subconscious, hope can sometimes slide into delusion or obsession, when we’re so consumed by a desired outcome that it can distort our perceptions. Or hope can dissipate into wishful thinking, in which we want something to happen but are idly waiting for someone else to take care of it.

You may recall that hope was the last thing left in Pandora’s box. After all the plagues, griefs, sorrows, and misery had flown out of the box in order to visit themselves upon humanity, hope remained. There’s some debate as to whether hope was the final curse of the box, or its great gift.

Some say that hope is a plague that keeps us too much in the future, that it prevents us from clearly perceiving the present and our role in it. I think these folks have a limited definition of hope. Hope may turn our eyes toward the horizon, but true hope, full hope, roots us deeply in the present. It beckons us to do more than wish or want or wait for someone else to do something. It calls us to discern what’s beneath our wishes, to discover the longings beneath our longings, to dig down to the place where our deepest yearning and God’s deepest yearning are the same. And when we find that, when we uncover those deepest desires, hope invites and impels us to participate in bringing about those things for which we most keenly long.

That’s why Mary could sing about these events as if they had already happened. She carried within her the meeting place of her longing and God’s yearning. Her yes to God, to bearing the God who was already taking flesh and form within her, was a microcosm of what God was doing in the world. What God had accomplished within her, God was accomplishing within the world. Had accomplished. Would accomplish.

Tenses fail me.

I just saw an episode of Star Trek: Voyager a couple days ago, one of those episodes where they were playing around with the time line. When I see one of these, I have to just sit back and not try to make too much sense of things or I’ll get a headache. In this episode, a couple of fellows from the future, or maybe the past, who knows, have shown up because the space-time continuum has been disturbed (again), and they’re trying to fix it. One of them, in explaining what’s going on, finally says, “I gave up trying to figure out tenses a long time ago.”

I know the feeling.

This kind of hope, the kind that bends our understanding of time and tenses, recognizes that God has a very different relationship with time than we do. Though God dwells within history, to say that God’s sense of time is largely non-linear is vastly understating it. The tense that Mary uses in her Magnificat strikes me because it is unusual, but I suspect it’s the kind of tense that God uses continually.

I have a couple of writer friends I meet with every month or so. In addition to sharing something we’ve been working on, we also spend a few minutes on an impromptu writing exercise. One year around this time, we wrote about how we spent our holidays. The better portion of the holidays still lay ahead of us. We wrote out of a sense of hope and longing for what God would/did bring about in our lives, in the world, in the holy days to come.

Taking a cue from the White Queen, from Alice, from Mary, from my writing companions, I want to ask: What sort of things do you remember best about this Advent, this Christmas, this coming year? What did God bring to pass in the days to come? How did you participate with God in the living out of your deepest hopes, those hopes that, like Mary’s, were so powerful that they transformed not only you but the world as well?

In his book Trumpet at Full Moon, W. Paul Jones writes, “Hope is the simple trust that God has not forgotten the recipe for manna.” May manna (perhaps with a side of jam to-day) abound in this Advent season.

And so it did.

[To use the image “Where Hope Lives,” 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 | 2 Comments »

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