The Advent Door

Image: Apocalypse, Again © Jan Richardson

Lectionary Readings for Advent 1, Year C:
Jeremiah 33.14-16, Psalm 25.1-10,
1 Thessalonians 3.9-13, Luke 21.25-36

Amid the destruction and devastation that are ever taking place in the world, Christ beckons us to perceive and to participate in the ways that he is already seeking to bring redemption and healing for the whole of creation.

—from Advent 1: Practicing the Apocalypse
The Advent Door, November 23, 2009

This year, most of my Advent energy will be going toward the new online retreat I’ll be offering from December 1-28. It’s been a long time since our last retreat, and I am so looking forward to it. If you haven’t already registered, I would love for you to join us! You can do the retreat from anywhere you are, in the way that works best for you. For info and registration, visit the overview page at ILLUMINATED 2018: An Online Journey into the Heart of Christmas or click the Illuminated icon below:

Intertwining reflections, art, music, and community, the Illuminated retreat is a great way to travel toward Christmas in contemplation and conversation, from anywhere you are. If you’re hungry for an experience that draws you into the season without feeling like it’s just one more thing to add to your schedule, this is for you. We have individual, group, and congregational rates available. You can also give the retreat as a gift!

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Here at The Advent Door blog, we are entering our twelfth season. We have crossed a lot of terrain in our time here, and as we prepare to set out into this new season, I’ve gathered up a collection of reflections for you from previous years.

Many blessings to you as Advent arrives! May these days hold wonders for you.

Luke 21.25-36

Advent 1: Drawing Near
Advent 1: Practicing the Apocalypse

Related Reflections on the Gospel

Advent 1: The Vigil Kept for Us
Advent 1: Blessing When the World Is Ending
Advent 1: In Which We Stay Awake
Advent 1: Where Advent Begins
Advent 1: Through the Door

Psalm 25.1-10

Advent 1: A Blessing for Traveling in the Dark

1 Thessalonians 3.9-13

Advent 1: A Path of Blessing

Using Jan’s artwork
To use the image “Apocalypse, Again” please visit this page at janrichardsonimages.com. Your use of janrichardsonimages.com helps make the ministry of The Advent Door possible. During Advent, subscribe to Jan Richardson Images and receive unlimited digital downloads for use in worship for only $125 per year (regularly $165). Click here to subscribe.

Using Jan’s words
For worship services and related settings, you are welcome to use Jan’s blessings or other words from this site without requesting permission. All that’s needed is to acknowledge the source. Please include this info in a credit line: “© Jan Richardson. janrichardson.com.” For other uses, visit Copyright Permissions.

Image: The Sanctuary Between Us © Jan Richardson

Reading from the Gospels, Advent 4, Year C: Luke 1:39-45, (46-55)

In those days Mary set out and went with haste
to a Judean town in the hill country,
where she entered the house of Zechariah
and greeted Elizabeth.
—Luke 1.39-40

The archangel Gabriel has extended his astounding invitation. Mary has given her astonishing yes. Now she is alone—suddenly, entirely, dangerously alone—save for the unlikely child she now carries.

She flees: toward her kinswoman, toward refuge, toward sanctuary.

In the home of Elizabeth, in the company of her cousin who is herself pregnant in most unusual circumstances, Mary finds what she most needs. Elizabeth gathers and enfolds her. Welcomes her. Blesses her.

In response to Elizabeth’s blessing, Mary sings. And how she sings! She sings of a God who brings down the powerful, who lifts up the lowly, who fills the hungry with good things. Strangely, wonderfully, Mary sings of a God who not only will do these things, but who has done these things. She sings as if God has already accomplished the redemption and restoration of the world.

O my friends, this is what a blessing has the power to do. The blessing that Elizabeth speaks and enacts through her words, her welcome, her gift of sanctuary: such a blessing has the power to help us, like Mary, speak the word we most need to offer. Such a blessing gives us a glimpse of the redemption that God, in God’s strange sense of time, has somehow already accomplished. Such a blessing stirs up in us the strength to participate with God in bringing about this redemption in this time, in this world.

Where will we go, like Mary, to find and receive such a blessing?

How will we open our heart, like Elizabeth, to offer it?

A Blessing Called Sanctuary

You hardly knew
how hungry you were
to be gathered in,
to receive the welcome
that invited you to enter
entirely—
nothing of you
found foreign or strange,
nothing of your life
that you were asked
to leave behind
or to carry in silence
or in shame.

Tentative steps
became settling in,
leaning into the blessing
that enfolded you,
taking your place
in the circle
that stunned you
with its unimagined grace.

You began to breathe again,
to move without fear,
to speak with abandon
the words you carried
in your bones,
that echoed in your being.

You learned to sing.

But the deal with this blessing
is that it will not leave you alone,
will not let you linger
in safety,
in stasis.

The time will come
when this blessing
will ask you to leave,
not because it has tired of you
but because it desires for you
to become the sanctuary
that you have found—
to speak your word
into the world,
to tell what you have heard
with your own ears,
seen with your own eyes,
known in your own heart:

that you are beloved,
precious child of God,
beautiful to behold,*
and you are welcome
and more than welcome
here.

—Jan Richardson
from Circle of Grace

*Thanks to the Rev. Janet Wolf and the congregation of Hobson United Methodist Church in Nashville, Tennessee, for the story in which these words—“beloved, precious child of God, and beautiful to behold”—were offered to help transform the life of a member of their community. You can read the story here.

JUST RELEASED!
CIRCLE OF GRACE: A Book of Blessings for the Seasons

Within the struggle, joy, pain, and delight that attend our life, there is an invisible circle of grace that enfolds and encompasses us in every moment. Blessings help us to perceive this circle of grace, to find our place of belonging within it, and to receive the strength the circle holds for us. —from the Introduction

Beginning in Advent and moving through the sacred seasons of the Christian year, Circle of Grace offers Jan’s distinctive and poetic blessings that illuminate the treasures each season offers to us. A beautiful gift this Advent and Christmas. Available in print and ebook.

ORDER THE BOOK

Advent Bonus! One of Gary’s wondrous songs for Advent was inspired by the story of Mary and Elizabeth. It’s called “Celebrate the Coming of the Lord,” and I would love to share it with you. To listen, simply click the Play button on the audio player below. (For my email subscribers: if the audio player doesn’t appear in your email, click adventdoor.com to visit the blog and see the audio player.) The song is from Gary’s CD Songmaker’s Christmas.

For previous reflections on the Gospel reading for this coming Sunday, click the image or title below.

Advent 4: For Joy

Using Jan’s artwork…
To use the image “The Sanctuary Between Us,” please visit this page at janrichardsonimages.com. Your use of janrichardsonimages.com helps make the ministry of The Advent Door possible. Advent special! During this season, subscribe to Jan Richardson Images and receive unlimited digital downloads for only $125 per year (regularly $165). Click Subscribe to sign up.

Using Jan’s words…
For worship services and related settings, you are welcome to use Jan’s blessings or other words from this blog without requesting permission. All that’s needed is to acknowledge the source. Please include this info in a credit line: “© Jan Richardson. janrichardson.com.” For other uses, visit Copyright Permissions.

Image: A Road Runs Through It © Jan Richardson

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

The voice of one crying out in the wilderness:
‘Prepare the way of the Lord,
make his paths straight.’
—Luke 3.3-4

This is the first year in a while that I haven’t been preparing to lead an online retreat for Advent. (More about that decision, and finding “the next right thing,” here.) So here I am, at the beginning of Advent, suddenly wondering, What am I preparing for?

It’s not that there isn’t plenty to do; in fact, I’m working to resist feeling overwhelmed by all that’s asking for my attention. And the decision not to offer an Advent retreat this year was, in part, about making room for some new creative work that has been knocking at the door of my soul. I can’t help but wonder, though, how it will be to enter into the space where that creative work will take place—the space of the studio, the space of my heart that, in these past two years since Gary’s death, has been broken open and enlarged beyond imagining, widened with both grief and wonder.

I am not feeling terribly prepared for this season. And that, perhaps, is where the heart of the invitation lies for me this Advent. We sometimes fall so easily into thinking that preparing is something we do. To be sure, preparing is part of Advent’s invitation to us, as the season calls us to echo and embody the words of Luke and Isaiah, and “prepare the way of the Lord.”

But this Advent, as I look back on the path since Gary’s death (two years ago this December 2), I feel drawn to ask, How have I already been prepared? What way has been made within me, without my having been aware of it at the time? On this road that runs through the hollow of my heart, how is Christ walking toward me, even now?

And you? How might it be to look back on the past week, the past month, the past year and ask what way has already been made in you? What road runs through your heart even now, ready for Christ to enter?

Prepare
A Blessing for Advent

Strange how one word
will so hollow you out.
But this word
has been in the wilderness
for months.
Years.

This word is what remained
after everything else
was worn away
by sand and stone.
It is what withstood
the glaring of sun by day,
the weeping loneliness of
the moon at night.

Now it comes to you
racing out of the wild,
eyes blazing
and waving its arms,
its voice ragged with desert
but piercing and loud
as it speaks itself
again and again:

Prepare, prepare.

It may feel like
the word is leveling you,
emptying you
as it asks you
to give up
what you have known.

It is impolite
and hardly tame,
but when it falls
upon your lips
you will wonder
at the sweetness,

like honey
that finds its way
into the hunger
you had not known
was there.

—Jan Richardson
from Circle of Grace

Within the struggle, joy, pain, and delight that attend our life, there is an invisible circle of grace that enfolds and encompasses us in every moment. Blessings help us to perceive this circle of grace, to find our place of belonging within it, and to receive the strength the circle holds for us. —from the Introduction

Beginning in Advent and moving through the sacred seasons of the Christian year, Circle of Grace offers Jan’s distinctive and poetic blessings that illuminate the treasures each season offers to us. A beautiful gift this Advent and Christmas. Available in print and ebook.

Order the book

Book Celebration: If you’re in the Orlando vicinity on Saturday, December 5, from 2-4 PM, we’d love for you to join us for a gathering to celebrate the publication of Circle of Grace! It will be held at the fantastic White House (in their beautiful vertical concert hall) near downtown Orlando. You can find details in my latest newsletter here.

For a previous reflection on the Gospel reading for this coming Sunday, click the image or title below.

Advent 2: The Mystery of Approach

Using Jan’s artwork…
To use the image “A Road Runs Through It,” please visit this page at janrichardsonimages.com. (This is also available as an art print. After clicking over to the image’s page on the Jan Richardson Images site, just scroll down to the “Purchase as an Art Print” section.) Your use of janrichardsonimages.com helps make the ministry of The Advent Door possible. Advent special: During this season, subscribe to Jan Richardson Images and receive unlimited digital downloads for only $125 per year (regularly $165). Click Subscribe to sign up.

Using Jan’s words…
For worship services and related settings, you are welcome to use Jan’s blessings or other words from this blog without requesting permission. All that’s needed is to acknowledge the source. Please include this info in a credit line: “© Jan Richardson. janrichardson.com.” For other uses, visit Copyright Permissions.