The Advent Door

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.

This entry was posted on December 17, 2007 at 1:25 pm and is filed under Advent, art, Christmas, lectio divina, poetry, religion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.