The Advent Door

Who Walked in Darkness © Jan L. Richardson

Reading from the Hebrew Scriptures, Christmas Eve: Isaiah 9.2-7

Some years ago, I wrote a prayer for one of my books in which I asked that in those times when we are so focused on providing hospitality to others that we neglect ourselves, God would help us to tend the pilgrim in our own souls “who longs for a welcoming fire and for shelter in the dark.” While the book was in production, I received a note from one of the folks who was working on it, asking me to change that line, as the publishing house avoided the use of language suggesting that darkness was bad.

I understood the concern, being familiar with the ways our culture has long equated lightness and whiteness with goodness, and darkness and blackness with evil. That’s part of what the book was addressing in the first place. With the title Night Visions: Searching the Shadows of Advent and Christmas, the book was something of a hymn to the deity who dwells in darkness as well as in daylight, the God who challenges us to search and know with all our senses and not just with our eyes, the Holy One who says, “I will give you the treasures of darkness, and riches hidden in secret places” (Isaiah 45.3).

I told the person at the publishing house that, committed though I am to finding the presence of God in the dark, I think it’s fair to want a little light sometimes, and to desire a place of shelter when shadows have fallen across the path.

I think it’s fair to want a LOT of light from time to time. I mean, it’s crazy, what’s asked of us: to live in a world, a cosmos, in which we know so little; to have faith that there is meaning and purpose and a sacred pattern in the chaos; to move forward without being able to see what’s ahead; to follow a God who lives in layers of mystery. It’s nuts for God to ask us to reach beyond our natural instinct toward self-absorption and attend to those around us, to extend hospitality to those who are strangers, to organize ourselves into functioning communities when history has shown us how difficult this is to sustain. How audacious, how wild of God to think we can even begin to do any of this.

And I think God knows this, too, knows how impossible it sometimes seems to live in this world that is strange and difficult as well as wondrous. And so God works to shine some light our way. In this season we celebrate God’s bright impulse in a big way, and with song and story and prayer and ritual we rejoice at the ways that God has illuminated our world. The passage from Isaiah that we read on Christmas Eve gives perhaps the most gorgeous words for what we celebrate on this day:

The people who walked in darkness
have seen a great light;
those who lived in a land of deep darkness—
on them has light shined….
For a child has been born for us,
a son given to us;
authority rests upon his shoulders;
and he is named Wonderful Counselor…
Prince of Peace.

The light that Isaiah speaks about: the light that breaks the yoke, the bar, and the rod of the oppressor; the light that consumes the trappings of war; the light that comes in the form of a child of peace: yes, God, more of this light, please.

It’s important to note that the texts that originated with our Jewish forebears, the texts that Christians usually call the Old Testament, can stand on their own. They do not take on meaning for the people of Christ solely by our reading and interpreting them with our Christian eyes. What Isaiah offers here are powerful words for those in darkness in any time, in any place.

At the same time it’s right that we in the Christian tradition find particular hope, solace, and meaning in these words on this day. The vivid, brilliant imagery of Isaiah undergirds and resonates with and gives poetic expression to the images and stories that we receive from the other texts that we hear this week. He prepares us to hear the astonishing story of what has come in the person of Christ. Isaiah reminds us that the longing for light is an ancient human longing. He assures us that in the presence of the darkness of this world—be it friendly darkness or foul—God is present, working to help us know God more clearly and to live together with deeper compassion, justice, and peace.

May the light that we celebrate this Christmas help us to see, to widen our vision to all the ways that God shows up in darkness and in the day. When you have need of it, may you find a welcoming fire and shelter in the shadows, and may we offer these in turn. Blessings to you on this Christmas Eve and all the days—and nights—to come.

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

Image: Raising the Ruins © Jan Richardson

Reading from the Hebrew Scriptures, Advent 3: Isaiah 61.1-4, 8-11

They shall build up the ancient ruins,
they shall raise up the former devastations.
—Isaiah 61.4

When I made my trip to Rome several years ago, one of the things that fascinated me was the presence of ruins. The Eternal City offers a layered landscape; everywhere we went, the strata of history were visible to us. Past and present inhabit the terrain as companions. I had more than one occasion to wander around the Forum, where there’s a particularly high concentration of ancient ruins: basilicas, triumphal arches, temples of gods and goddesses, the House of the Vestal Virgins.

I’ve been mentally revisiting those ruins as I’ve contemplated this week’s passage from Isaiah 61. The text overwhelms with its imagery of repair and restoration; the author lavishes the reader with his stunning litany that lists the ways that God will bring healing and release to those in captivity of various kinds. To those who have lived with imprisonment, oppression, and grief, the writer offers a prophecy of how they will receive garlands instead of ashes, the oil of gladness, the mantle of praise. He tells of how God has garbed him with the garments of salvation and covered him with a robe of righteousness like a bridegroom decked with a garland, like a bride who adorns herself with jewels. There is further visual fare: “For as the earth brings forth its shoots,” he exults, “and as a garden causes what is sown in it to spring up, so the Lord God will cause righteousness and praise to spring up before the nations.”

In the midst of this dizzying litany, the writer tells of how those whom God heals and frees “shall build up the ancient ruins, they shall raise up the former devastations; they shall repair the ruined cities, the devastations of many generations.” It was this image, amongst the many that he drenches us with, to which I kept returning as I pondered this passage. And it was the Roman ruins that I thought of, those leavings that persist in the present landscape, reminding their visitors of what has gone before.

I wonder what it does to a person’s psyche to live in a place that’s old enough to have ruins, how it is to be perpetually reminded that we humans are part of a pattern of history. And I wonder what it does to a psyche, and to a soul, to live in a landscape that is largely devoid of ruins—in the typical sense of them, at least—as those of us living in the United States largely do. The absence of ruins makes it more challenging to remember how we inhabit our history, and to recognize and reckon with what haunts us. The ruins we do have, we tend to hide: the burned-out buildings, the falling-down dwellings, the places not considered worth building up. We route traffic around them, or sometimes construct walls along the freeways so those who pass by don’t have to see them.

It’s easy to become romantic about ruins when they are ancient, when they are lovely, and when we have a less immediate sense of the events that brought about their ruination. In the absence of really knowing those who first lived among them, it’s tempting to project our own ideas and imaginings onto what is left behind and to smooth away the sharp edges of memory. Largely removed from the visible past, we don’t have to wrestle with it so much.

But there are plenty of ruins that we carry inside, individually and collectively. It’s sometimes harder to see them, more difficult to discern the interior terrain of people and families and communities and churches marked by loss, abandonment, struggle, private battles, migration.

What does it mean to rebuild those ruins? When it comes to the losses and devastations that we harbor within us, how do we discern what God might be inviting us to restore?

Rebuilding a ruin, literal or metaphorical, doesn’t allow for much nostalgia. Doing the work of restoration—redeeming a place instead of living with its remnants—gives us little room to hold on to the way things were, or how we thought they were. Reclaiming a ruin—tangible, intangible—challenges us to go into the rubble and to see clearly what yet remains: to discern what is yet solid, to find walls that can bear weight, to sort through the debris and retrieve what we can use. Rebuilding a ruin calls upon our imagination in a deeper, sharper way that romanticizing it does. To restore what has been destroyed, we have to resist seeing the landscape only the way it was, and learn to imagine what is possible now.

Isaiah has gotten me thinking about what has fallen into ruin in my life, and what God might be inviting me to rebuild. How about you? Is there a broken relationship, an abandoned project, a dream you left behind? How do you discern where God might be calling you to begin the work of restoration? Not all ruins are meant for redemption, after all; some are best to flee. How do we tell the difference? What helps us see the ruins clearly and to resist the hazards they may hold: the overabundance of nostalgia that keeps us from imagining what is yet possible in that place (or some better place), or the enchantments that deter us from moving on, or the pain that clouds our vision?

Luke tells us in his Gospel that when Jesus got up to speak in the synagogue, he opened the scroll to this passage from Isaiah and, after reading it, told his hearers that on this day, the scripture had been fulfilled (Luke 4.16-30). In this season and beyond, may you know the presence of the one who came as the embodiment of redemption and restoration. Blessings.

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

Image: 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!]

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!]