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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 »

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 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 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 »

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