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Little Red Book

December 11, 2008

advent-door-blog-2008-12-11
Little Red Book © Jan L. Richardson

On a small street near the Pantheon in Rome lies a shop of wonders. Established nearly a century ago, the Cartoleria Pantheon is a place of enchantment for those with a penchant for paper and ink and their enticing accoutrements. Old wooden bookcases offer row upon row of journals, address books, and albums bound in rich leather. Fine pens and inks and more leather-bound books stretch across the few tables that the modest space can hold. Racks spill with marbled papers, Florentine wrapping papers, and other hand-decorated sheets. One of the corners of the shop has come to be known as the Kissing Corner, evidently inspired by those who succumb to the aphrodisiacal qualities of the ancient tools of the writer’s craft.

I know the feeling.

I spotted the Cartoleria while exploring Rome with my sister and a few friends several years ago. The shop was just about to close as we walked in—perhaps not a bad thing, or I might have blown the last of my travel budget in that one place. I savored the few minutes’ enchantment and left the shop with a small journal of thick, handmade Amalfi paper bound in deep red leather. I picked a red one in part because it reminded me of a dream I’d recently had in which I was wearing red cowboy boots. (Boots, books…perhaps my subconscious missed by a letter, or maybe there’s still some splendid footwear in my future?) A thin leather strap winds around the journal, once, twice, tucking under itself. The maker of the journal assembled the pages into eight signatures (gatherings of folded paper), attaching them to the spine with exposed stitches.

It’s the sort of book that hardly needs anything written in it. It has a presence all its own, even without words or sketches. Several years later, its pages are still blank.

I’ve found myself drawn again to the journal in the past few days, thinking about the presence it has even with its empty pages. It’s gotten me thinking about all the things with which we fill the Advent season. I think in particular of how much sound attends these days. The conversations and proclamations and singing and celebrations within the Christmas story inspire us to respond in kind, with music and festivities and liturgies laden with noise.

But there is silence, too, among the stories of this season. Think of Zechariah, father of John the Baptist, who was mute throughout his wife Elizabeth’s pregnancy. Mary, who “pondered all these things in her heart” on the night of Jesus’ birth. And there is Jesus himself. When the Word took flesh, it could not speak, could not articulate why it was here. Christ the Word had to spend long months in his own wordlessness before beginning to learn the language, syllable by syllable.

I spend a lot of time with words, my own and those of others. My imagination, my intellect, my soul all thrive on the process of finding meaning in and among the stories that I live with, including the sacred stories of the scriptures. I give vast quantities of energy to—and am energized by—noticing the connections among the stories, finding the patterns, and giving words to what I discover along the way.

My passion for words comes with a deep desire to be articulate, both on the page and in person. In these Advent days I have become particularly aware of how I am perpetually engaged in a process to find the right words. I have a speaking engagement tomorrow morning, and another one on Sunday; I’m working on this blog; I recently sent out my December e-newsletter; I’m attending to correspondence and conversations (not always very well in this very full season); I am trying to be mindful of offering prayers all along the way. In the midst of all this, and in the spaces between one mode of articulation and another, I am framing words in my head, figuring out which ones will come next.

I am fortunate to have a life that contains an abundance of quiet, a gift that helps make it possible to find the words I need. Yet I wonder if there is a deeper silence to which I am being called in this season. How might it be to take up the red Roman journal as a prayerbook in these days, letting its empty pages have a presence among my own wordfulness? Amid the constant flow of syllables running through my brain and taking shape on my tongue or through my hand, might these lovely, silent pages help create a space in which I can hear, not just my own words, but the Word for whom we wait in this season? Is there some place I might cede some of my own attachment to being articulate, so that the Word can find its way in?

What is filling your days? Do these things help you or hinder you in listening for the Word whom we anticipate and celebrate in this season? Is there anything you need in order to hear and see and open to the Word that seeks to be born in you, in us, in this time?

Among the words, between the words, beneath the words: may we make a way for the Word in us. Blessings.

Visit ◊The Advent Door◊ home.

Posted in Advent, art, Christmas | 4 Comments »

Where I’m From

December 7, 2008

advent-door-blog-2008-12-7Image: Where I’m From © Jan Richardson

Reading from the Gospels, Advent 3: John 1.6-8, 19-28

If you’re experiencing a bit of déjà vu in reading next Sunday’s gospel lesson, it’s understandable. This passage from John circles us back around some of the textual territory that we visited in the gospel reading for Advent 2. John approaches his subject in a different fashion than does Mark, but, as in Mark, John the baptizer makes an early appearance in the gospel. Once again we hear words about making a way in the wilderness. Yet where Mark, along with Matthew and Luke, borrows those way-making words from Isaiah and editorially applies them to John the Baptist, using his authority as a narrator to make clear that the Baptist is the one of whom Isaiah was speaking, John takes an intriguing turn in his gospel.

In John the evangelist’s version of the story, the priests and Levites approach the baptizer, asking him, “Who are you?” He begins by saying who he is not: “I am not the Messiah.” They persist. “What then? Are you Elijah?” John emphasizes he is not Elijah, nor is he the anticipated prophet. They ask him again, “Who are you? Let us have an answer for those who sent us. What do you say about yourself?” In his own voice, John responds,

I am the voice of one crying out
in the wilderness,
‘Make straight the way of the Lord,’
as the prophet Isaiah said.

Where the other gospel writers linked the Isaiah passage with the story of John as an editorial comment, John the evangelist places Isaiah’s ancient words on the baptizer’s own lips. His narrative choice imbues the baptizer with a deep clarity about his role in the story of the Messiah. Though not the promised prophet for whom the people had long waited, John the Baptist’s claiming of Isaiah’s words to describe himself places him firmly in the tradition of the Hebrew prophets. He knows he comes from Elizabeth and from Zechariah, but with his answer he places himself in the lineage of those for whom the wilderness, both literal and metaphorical, was their home, their place of formation as messengers of God. John’s response to his questioners is not only a way of saying who he is, but also where—and whom—he has come from.

In pondering John’s clarity about where he has come from, and how this informs his understanding of what God has formed and fashioned him to do, I’ve found myself thinking about a poem that recently circled my way. Written by Appalachian poet George Ella Lyon, “Where I’m From” offers a litany of the places and people, the artifacts and experiences that hold the poet’s roots. “I am from clothespins,” she begins,

from Clorox and carbon-tetrachloride.
I am from the dirt under the back porch.
(Black, glistening,
it tasted like beets.)

[Read the whole poem here.]

Lyon comments that the poem has traveled widely, circulating as a writing prompt. “People have used it at their family reunions,” she writes, “teachers have used it with kids all over the United States, in Ecuador and China; they have taken it to girls in juvenile detention, to men in prison for life, and to refugees in a camp in the Sudan. Its life beyond my notebook is a testimony to the power of poetry, of roots, and of teachers.”

In our mobile society, it’s sometimes hard to say where we’re from, hard to name the roots that hold us as more and more of us live at a distance from the places (which may have been many) and people we grew up with. And yet Lyon’s poem reminds us that roots happen in a variety of ways, sometimes but not always tied to one particular place. Our increasing physical rootlessness is perhaps itself a kind of wilderness, akin to what John the Baptist experienced—but the wilderness, as John knew, is a place to be from, too.

So on this Advent evening, inspired by the baptizer and by an Appalachian poet, I’ve been thinking about where I’m from, and what direction my roots are turning me toward.

Where I’m From

I am from orange groves
and old Florida,
from a house my parents built
in a field my grandfather gave them.
Black-eyed Susans grew there in the spring,
so thick we played hide and seek
simply by kneeling among them.

I am from a town
with more cows than people,
from Judy and from Joe,
from generations that have grown up
in one place.

I am from peanut butter and
honey sandwiches every morning,
from my grandmothers’ kitchens,
from Thanksgiving feasts in the
community park,
from Christmas Eves in the
white painted church
among the pine trees.

I am from the dictionary we kept
by the dinner table
where we ate words like food,
from hours and days in libraries,
from miles of books.
I am from the path they have made.

I am from solitude and silence,
from the monks and mystics who lived
between the choir and the cell,
from the scribes bent over their books,
from parchment and paint,
from ancient ink and from gold
that turned pages into lamps,
into light.

I am from women less quiet,
women of the shout and the stomp,
testifying wherever they could make
their voices heard.
I am from Miriam and Mary and Magdalena
and from women unknown and unnamed,
women who carried their prayers
not in books
but in their blood
and in their bones,
women who passed down the sacred stories
from body to body.

I am from them,
listening for their voices,
aching to hear,
to tell, to cry out,
to make a way for those
yet to come.

—Jan Richardson

So where are you from? What are the places, the people, the experiences that formed your path? What holds your roots? How does where you’re from help you understand who you are? How does it enable you to make a way for the one who comes in this and every season?

Wherever you’re from, wherever you’re going, peace to you as you continue to find and fashion your path. Blessings.

[To use the image “Where I’m From,” 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, Book of Isaiah, Christmas, Gospel of John, lectionary, medieval, poetry, religion | 4 Comments »

Righteousness Seeking Peace for Friendship, Possible Relationship

December 7, 2008

Meeting © Jan Richardson

Reading from the Psalter, Advent 2: Psalm 85.1-2, 8-13

In her imaginative work The Book of Qualities, writer and artist J. Ruth Gendler assembles an ensemble of human emotions and attributes. One by one she evokes their personalities with poetic detail, describing each with the skill of someone who is intimately acquainted with them. Among her cast of characters is Wisdom, who “likes to think about the edges where things spill into each other and become their opposites”; Despair, who “papered her bathroom walls with newspaper articles on acid rain”; Change, who “likes to come up quietly and kiss me on the back of my neck when I am at my drawing table”; and Devotion, who “braids her grandmother’s hair with an antique comb.”

Gendler’s impulse to personify these qualities places her in good and ancient company. For generations, humans have sought to understand and describe the emotions and characteristics that animate us by, in turn, animating them, personifying them as human figures. We have sought to do this with the Divine as well, exploring the aspects of God by singling them out and giving them form, life, and agency. This week’s lection from the Psalms provides a great example of this—more than one, in fact, for in Psalm 85 the psalmist offers us a quartet of God’s qualities that, in the psalmist’s hands, take dynamic form:

Steadfast love* and faithfulness** will meet;
righteousness and peace will kiss each other.
Faithfulness will spring up from the ground,
and righteousness will look down from the sky.

*sometimes translated as mercy
**sometimes translated as truth

The medieval imagination took this impulse to personify the attributes of God and brought it to full flower. In that period, characteristics of the nature of God became a cast of characters that ranged across visual art, literature, poetry, and drama. A number of these characteristics became known as the Virtues, often appearing in contrast to a series of personified Vices. Among the Virtues, four in particular were singled out as the “Daughters of God”: Mercy, Peace, Righteousness (sometimes known as Justice or the wonderfully poetic Rightwiseness), and Truth, our friends from Psalm 85.

These four Daughters of God became the subjects of a medieval allegory that took various visual and literary forms. They starred, for instance, in a 15th-century English morality play called The Castle of Perseverance, in which Justice, supported by Truth, debates with Mercy, aided by Peace. The subject of the debate is the soul of a man who has allowed himself to be taken in by a character called World, whose servants Lust and Folly dress the man in expensive clothes and lead him on misadventures. Ultimately, God sides with Mercy and Truth, and the man is saved. As Lynette R. Muir notes in The Biblical Drama in Medieval Europe, presenting the Daughters of God in the mode of a debate is a typical motif, derived in part from the work of theologians who sought to reconcile the seeming tension between God’s justice and God’s mercy.

We see the personified attributes of God moving also through mystical literature as well as the lives of the saints. St. Francis’ “Lady Poverty,” whom he called his bride, is perhaps the most well known example of this. Wisdom is among the most frequently personified qualities, often holding greater status than the other Virtues; her ubiquitous appearance and high status perhaps owe to the richness with which the Bible personifies the wisdom of God, as in Proverbs 9, where she appears as a woman calling her hearers to join in her feast. In the medieval period, Wisdom appears, for instance, in the visions of the German mystic Hildegard of Bingen, who in her work Scivias (Know the Ways) describes Wisdom as a beautiful woman standing on top of a high dome, crying out to the people of the world to come and receive the help of God.

Barbara Newman offers an intriguing approach to these personified qualities of God in her work God and the Goddesses: Vision, Poetry, and Belief in the Middle Ages. Newman observes that these characters, which medieval artists, writers, and visionaries depicted so often as women, made the qualities of God accessible to the imaginations of medieval folk and invited them to “participate in divinity” by embracing and embodying the qualities of God in their own lives. By appealing to the religious imagination, the dynamic and lively Virtues helped cultivate one’s devotion to the God who defies definitive description.

So where do we see the qualities of God at play in our own day, in our own imaginations? How do the infinite characteristics of God live and move and take form in our contemporary world? In art, in writing, in liturgy, in the daily living out of our desire to follow Christ, how do we see God taking shape around us and within us? Where do we witness the meeting places of mercy and truth, of peace and justice? In this season of celebrating the incarnation, how do we open our own selves to be a meeting place for the qualities of God?

Here’s one way I imagine it happening.

Saturday Morning, 10 AM

Justice and Peace meet at the café,
sit together,
hands folded around steaming cups,
heads bent over the paper.

They are not taking in
the news of the world
with sorrowing eyes
and the clucking of tongues.

They are instead planning their itinerary,
plotting their map,
looking for the places where
they might slip in.

Their fingers touch, release,
touch again as they read,
moving with the half-aware habits
that come only with long living alongside.

They have met, parted,
met again on countless mornings
like this one, torn and taken
by turns.

They put the paper aside
they brush away the crumbs
they talk quietly
they know there is work to do.

But they order one more cup:
there is savoring they must do before
the saving begins.
They lean in,

barely touching
across the table for
a kiss that makes a way,
a world.

—Jan Richardson

In these Advent days, may we witness and work for the meeting of mercy and truth, justice and peace around us and within us. Blessings.

[To use the image “Meeting,” 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, Psalms | 1 Comment »

The Pilgrim’s Coat

December 5, 2008

advent-door-blog-2008-12-5Image: 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!]

Posted in Advent, art, Book of Isaiah, Christmas, lectionary, religion | 2 Comments »

Music and Mystery

December 3, 2008

christmascds2

Like lots of folks, I rely on music to help me cross into the holiday season and navigate its terrain. During Advent and Christmas we anticipate and celebrate the incarnation, the Word who became flesh, but sometimes it takes more than words alone to evoke and enter into the mysteries of the story of the God who came to be with us.

Over the past few years, I’ve gone in search of Christmas music that takes my ears beyond the customary holiday fare. Although there are some contemporary songs in my stack of holiday CDs, my collection leans pretty heavily toward music that reaches backward in time. This is music that draws the listener deep into the layers of stories and legends surrounding the birth of Christ, music that echoes with the ancient human longing for light and celebration in a dark time. These are songs of signs and wonders, with words and melodies that beckon us to enter into the audacious, mysterious, hopeful, and wild tales they have to tell.

Here’s some of what I’m listening to in this season. Most of these CDs are readily available online through the usual sources. I’ve provided links for a couple that are offered through CD Baby, an excellent site that’s devoted to independent musicians, and would especially encourage your support of their songmaking in this season.

Wolcum Yule: Celtic and British Songs and Carols
Legends of St. Nicholas
On Yoolis Night
Anonymous 4

The women of Anonymous 4 are masters of reaching into the treasures of centuries past to offer sustenance in the present. These three CDs are now available in a boxed set titled Noël: Carols & Chants for Christmas; the set also includes the CD A Star in the East, a collection of medieval chant from Hungary. (As a single CD, A Star in the East is now available under the somewhat more mundane title Christmas Music From Medieval Hungary).

La Bela Naissença: Christmas Carols from Provence
Patrick Vaillant, et al.

Ooohhh, I really love this one; it’s one of the newest in my collection and is among my all-time favorites. I first heard excerpts from it on Harmonia, the splendid radio show that features early music and offers archived shows on its web site. “La Fugida en Egipte” (The Flight into Egypt), with its wry alleluia, is worth the price of the CD, and Patrick Vaillant’s liner notes are a big slab of icing (chocolate) on this Christmas cake. He writes,

The Nativity is not just a series of images. A whole imaginary world is stirring behind them, and it is this that carries the entire story and all its little meanders, giving a bit of legend here and a measure of familiarity there to the whole mystery. The music is there to reveal, to unfold the tale, to give these images their dimension in sound….Christmas carols are witnesses.

The Bells of Dublin
The Chieftains

A great CD with a big dose of Irish flair. Here the Chieftains mix it up with such folks as Elvis Costello, Nanci Griffith, and Marianne Faithfull, plus Jackson Browne with his song “The Rebel Jesus,” which should be part of the Christmas carol canon.

Christmas
Bruce Cockburn

One of the first CDs I purchased when I started searching for nontraditional fare. It’s actually very traditional, in the sense that it draws on lots of old carols, including the haunting “Iesus Ahatonnia” (The Huron Carol, written by a Jesuit missionary in the early 1600s; Cockburn says it’s the first Canadian Christmas carol) and “Down In Yon Forest” (of which Cockburn writes, “If there were a contest for the title of the spookiest Christmas carol, this ought to win hands down”). Though filled with traditional fare, the Canadian Cockburn puts a spin on it that makes it feel like a different animal entirely.

Christmas Through the Ages
Various artists; the composers include Arcangelo Corelli (how could he not have written Christmas music, with a name like that?), Benjamin Britten, and John Rutter

Aside from the tasty Christmas fare this contains, I couldn’t resist having a CD with a cover that features a fantastic depiction of the wise men wearing what look like parti-colored stockings, from a 6th century mosaic in the basilica of San Apollinaire Nuovo in Ravenna, Italy. (Visit the spiffy magi.)

The Black Madonna: Pilgrim Songs from the Monastery of Montserrat
Ensemble Unicorn

This isn’t specifically a Christmas CD, but this wondrous collection of medieval pilgrim songs from Spain begins with a song about the Annunciation to Mary and ends with a Catalan round that makes mention of the magi. Sandwiched in between is a festive array of songs that tell some of the stories and miracles of the mother of Christ. The CD includes a couple of selections from the Cantigas de Santa Maria, an enormous collection of 13th-century songs in praise of the Virgin Mary. Written in Galician-Portuguese during the reign of King Alfonso X, known as “El Sabio” (“The Wise”), a number of the songs are attributed to El Sabio himself. The interaction of Christian, Jewish, and Islamic traditions exerted an intriguing influence on the culture of medieval Spain. The songs included in The Black Madonna bear witness to this; they convey the sense that something very ancient and complex is at work in them.

Mistletoe and Wine
Mediaeval Baebes

Baebes indeed. This CD gathers up songs from a couple of their previous holiday CDs and includes “There Is No Rose Of Swych Vertu” and “The Coventry Carol.”

To Drive the Cold Winter Away
Loreena McKennitt

Containing a couple of original songs from this distinctive Canadian singer-composer, this CD primarily features traditional Christmas music from England, Ireland, and Scotland. She’s also just recently come out with a new holiday collection, A Midwinter’s Night Dream, which takes the five songs from her 1995 recording A Winter Garden and adds eight new ones. Of this new CD, Loreena says, “I really wanted to recapture some of the frankincense and myrrh in this music.” With instruments such as cello, oud, lyra, and lute accompanying her haunting vocals, Loreena achieves an exotic ambience that evokes the mysteries of winter.

A Winter’s Solstice III
Windham Hill Artists

For sentimental reasons. This is one of the oldest in my collection of cool Christmas CDs. I still particularly delight in Pierce Pettis’s take on “In the Bleak Midwinter” and Barbara Higbie’s “Lullay, Lully.”

The Christmas Gift
Cheryl Branz

This just arrived as a wondrous surprise in my mailbox. Singer-songwriter Cheryl Branz is a friend from the Grünewald Guild, and her voice will warm the cockles of your heart. The Christmas Gift is a new release that includes familiar holiday songs and carols as well as an original called “Skating,” which Cheryl wrote for her mom, who skated professionally with The Ice Capades. Available by visiting The Christmas Gift at CD Baby.

The Night of Heaven & Earth
Gary Doles

I’ve been saving my favorite for last. This CD makes me think of a passage from the Book of Isaiah, where God says these words through the prophet: “I will give you the treasures of darkness and riches hidden in secret places” (Isaiah 45.3, NRSV). Gary (also known as Garrison) Doles is an award-winning singer/songwriter who has entered into the shadowy, secret places of the Advent and Christmas seasons and has found the riches there. With this treasure trove of utterly original songs, Gary invites us to come and find the delights and the challenges of the God who put on flesh and came to be with us. He also happens to be my sweetheart, and my enthusiasm about this CD isn’t merely a girlfriend’s bias; it’s this kind of amazing stuff that made me fall in love with him in the first place. Check out The Night of Heaven and Earth at CD Baby.

May your ears find many delights to draw you into the mysteries of this season.

Posted in Advent, Christmas, medieval, sacred time | 5 Comments »

A Way in the Wilderness

November 30, 2008

Image: A Way in the Wilderness © Jan Richardson

Reading from the Gospels, Advent 2: Mark 1.1-8

Growing up, I was a girl who kept an eye firmly fixed on the horizon. I spent much of high school preparing for college, much of college preparing for seminary, much of seminary preparing for my first pastoral appointment—wherever it would be. When I finally landed at my first church, I soon came to a screeching halt. I had finally arrived at the place for which I had been preparing, and for which God had been preparing me, all these years.

What the heck was I supposed to do now?

I had built up a lot of forward momentum and had amassed many skills at getting ready for the next place on my journey. Once I arrived at St. Luke’s, however, I had no idea how long I would be there, or where I would go when it was time to leave. I realized I needed to learn what it meant to be fully present in that place, to not have one foot out the door throughout my time there, to be less devoted to the distant horizon. I remember telling a friend, in my first year of ministry, that whenever I left, I wanted to be able to say I had been present to these people and that I had made a home there. I had to learn some new skills in order to do this, but when I did leave—four years later and for a new ministry I could hardly have envisioned when I first arrived at St. Luke’s—it was a home and a community I was leaving, not a stepping-stone.

The season of Advent invites us to live within the kind of tension that I discovered in my first pastoral appointment. These days invite and challenge us to turn our eyes toward the horizon, that we may perceive the Christ who is to come again; yet they also draw our attention toward the present, where the presence of God is already stirring. The lectionary readings of Advent 1 have already hinted at this tension, reminding us there is work to do as we wait for the fullness of God. In next Sunday’s gospel reading, we see the intersections and invitations of future and present with particular clarity in the person of John the Baptist.

John makes his appearance at the opening of Mark’s Gospel, from which Sunday’s reading comes. Like the other Gospel writers, Mark casts the Baptizer as the messenger described in Isaiah, the one “who will prepare your way; the voice of one crying out in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.’” With his eyes on the horizon, John has been waiting for Jesus, but he has been at work, too, ministering to those beset by brokenness, preaching to them, and offering them baptism as a sign and ritual of repentance and healing. John the Baptizer is distinctly not inclined to sit around as he waits for the Messiah. For him, waiting and working are inextricable.

John appears in the gospels as a wildly liminal figure, a character who lives and works in a threshold space. He dwells in the wilderness; hangs out by a river; offers the ritual of baptism, which is an initiatory rite, even in this pre-Christian context; and devotes himself to preparing a way for the one who is to come. These actions and images by which the gospel writers describe John all speak to his status as one who inhabits liminal space—an in-between place—and whose purpose is not only to make a path for Christ but also to help others cross into a deeper relationship with God. John is present, too, at pivotal points in Jesus’ life, further emphasizing his liminal character: in Luke’s telling, John and Jesus meet when they are in utero, with John leaping in his mother Elizabeth’s womb as he recognizes and rejoices in encountering his cousin. He is the one who baptizes Jesus, helping to prepare him as he begins his public ministry. Even in death, John continues to serve a liminal role in Jesus’ life; as Matthew tells it, the news of John’s death prompts Jesus to withdraw by boat to a deserted place. That’s what Jesus intends, at least; instead of finding solitude, he is met by the masses, and the miraculous feeding of the five thousand ensues.

What intrigues me about the threshold nature of John the Baptizer is the way in which the past, present, and future come together within him. Grounded in the words of the prophet who spoke in centuries past about one who would prepare the way, John turns his face toward the future, and he flings himself into the present and the work that is at hand. He holds past, present, and future in dramatic and creative tension, not becoming overly attached to any one of these realms. Open to the ways that the God of the ages is at work, John is able to recognize Christ when he comes, when he reveals himself in the fullness of time.

These Advent days can be disorienting in the ways that they call us not only to remember the past but also to anticipate the future and attend to the present. Yet this is the work of the threshold, and Advent is a threshold season, a liminal place in the calendar, an in-between time of preparation and expectation. Thresholds offer a heady mix of possibility and peril. They are wildly unpredictable, they stir up questions, they call us to live with uncertainty, they compel us to develop skills at attending to the present even as we discern the future. Ultimately, they are places of initiation, taking us deeper into God and into the person God has created us to be. As I experienced in my first pastoral appointment, as those who received baptism from John experienced, as the Baptizer himself knew: to follow God does not always mean traveling with certainty about where God will lead us; rather, following God calls us to be present to the place where we are, for that is the very place where God shows up.

In these Advent days, how do you live within the tension of past, present, and future? What role does each of these play in your life and in your imagination? Which one are you living in the most these days? How do you experience God in the threshold spaces, the in-between times in your life? What gifts and challenges do the thresholds offer, and what skills do they call forth? What new place and way of being might God be initiating you into in this Advent season? What way is God making within and through you? What way are you making for God?

May God provide what will sustain you in every passage. Blessings.

[To use the image “A Way in the Wilderness,” 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, lectionary, religion | 4 Comments »

Advent 1: I Spy with My Little Eye

November 30, 2008

Waiting for the Revealing © Jan Richardson

Lection from the Epistles, Advent 1, Year B: 1 Corinthians 1.3-9

Thanksgiving week has found me hanging out with my family, for whom this holiday is a big reunion time. For the past few days I’ve had a makeshift studio set up on my parents’ kitchen table, where I’ve been creating collages in between the fortifying feasts that we’ve enjoyed. Being in a slightly less solitary space than my studio at home, the kitchen table studio has afforded a few opportunities to receive feedback on the work that’s been taking shape there. As I was working on the collage for this reflection, one family member looked at it and said, “A prayer rug!” Another, upon seeing the completed collage, mentioned Venetian blinds. Now I cannot look at the collage without thinking of either of these things.

Hearing what others notice in my artwork has provided a good reminder of what a multivalent and revelatory process art is. As an artist, I live with an awareness that each image I create reveals something about who I am, including some things that I may not necessarily intend for my work to reveal. The ways that I see, the experiences and stories that I carry, my skills as well as my shortcomings, my creative vision as well as my blind spots: all these aspects and more enter into the artistic process, entwining themselves with my work and giving form to it. I’ve found that it’s best not to fixate too much on what might become revealed in the process, otherwise I would never be able to send any of my work into the world.

Beyond my own artwork, I find myself fascinated by exploring the revelatory creative process with others. When I’m engaging folks in an artful mode in a retreat or workshop, one of the things I love to do is take them through a form of lectio divina with a piece of art they have created, most often a paper collage. Artwork, after all, can be a sacred text, no less so for being nonverbal. As with written texts, doing lectio with a piece of art—our own or someone else’s—invites us to notice the connections between the image and our own life, and to meet God within those connections. Call it collagio divina, perhaps. After I’ve invited participants to reflect on their work and what it reveals about their own story, I sometimes invite them to reflect on one another’s collages and to share what they see—what they read—in those visual texts. Seeing the collage from within their own story, the viewer has her own reading, his own perspective. Hearing these responses from others often deepens the creator’s experience of their own work. It also reveals something about the one who sees.

In much the same way that a piece of art reveals something about the artist, what others see in that work reveals something about their own selves. What we see, and how we see, tells about who we are, what has formed us, what experiences we carry, what texts—sacred and otherwise—we harbor within us. The revelatory quality of art—what it tells about the artist, what it tells about our own selves—can be both wondrous and threatening in the ways that it challenges and confronts us with our habits of seeing.

It’s Paul who has gotten me thinking about this business of revelation here at the outset of Advent. In the passage from 1 Corinthians that is today’s reading from the Epistles, revelation is Paul’s concern. In greeting the church at Corinth, Paul writes of the power of the spiritual gifts that sustain them as they wait for the revealing of Jesus Christ, who, Paul writes, “will strengthen you to the end.” The word that Paul uses for revealing is apokalypsis, from which we derive the word apocalypse. Though we most often use the word to refer to a destructive ending of momentous magnitude—namely, the end of the world—at its root, apocalypse simply means revelation: how God unhides Godself.

As with each of the readings this week, Paul’s words speak to the community’s longing for God to take form and be present in their lives. In concert with Jesus, who tells of how the Son of Man will come with power and glory; and with the writer of Isaiah, who challenged God to tear open the heavens and come down; and with the psalmist, who prayed for God’s face to shine upon him and his community, Paul reveals his desire to fully know and be known by God.

These texts that have ushered us into this first week of Advent are bracing, to say the least; they pose potent questions about how we will enter this season of expectation. These passages remind us that the season of Advent calls us not only to remember and celebrate Christ’s birth—his first coming—two millennia ago, but also to give attention to how we anticipate his second coming, an aspect that mainstream Christianity has had a far more difficult time talking about. How we respond to these texts and to this Advent invitation reveals something about who we are and how we see. Is the Christ for whom we wait, the Christ whom we anticipate, a Christ whom we see as vengeful, a deity who will dole out punishment when he comes? Or are we waiting and looking for a Christ who sees us as beloved, who desires to know us completely?

Each of these readings challenges us to consider what it is that we think of this God who wants to be intimately involved in our lives, this God who is working not only toward Apocalypse-with-a-capital-A, however that will look, but who also works within the daily apocalypses that accompany us. The God who often takes eons to bring about a particular result also works moment by moment, constantly revealing Godself, taking flesh and form in the daily unfolding of our lives. This God beckons us to perceive the ways the divine is at work and to respond even now.

In his greeting to the church at Corinth, Paul reminds them, and us, that there is work to do in the waiting. He writes of divisions that need healing, brokenness that needs mending, relationships that need tending, spiritual gifts that need fostering, wisdom that needs deepening. He calls this community to see what is important, to resist the behaviors that distract them from the real work at hand, and to give themselves to loving one another and the One whom we will one day see face to face, and know fully, even as we are now fully known (1 Cor. 13.12).

So what are we looking for in this season, and what does this reveal about us? How do we open our eyes to the possibility of seeing the Christ who is not merely waiting for an Apocalypse before he shows up but who is in our midst even now? How do we perceive this quotidian Christ who is already present in the everyday-ness of our lives, who comes in all manner of guises, who calls us to work even as we wait?

This is the Christ I pray to see, even as I sometimes resist the kind of knowing to which he calls me. Annie Dillard’s words that I shared at the beginning of this week still linger with me: What is it that I’m doing in seeking to see and know this Christ? Do I want to know and be known with such fullness, with such completeness? Do I really want to reveal that much of myself?

I look again at today’s collage and think, yes. Yes to that kind of knowing, that kind of seeing, that kind of seeking. With my face pressed to the prayer rug, with my searching eyes peeking out through the blinds, I pray to see the Christ who comes, and who is already here, revealing his presence in this and every season.

In all his guises, may we see him. Blessings.

[To use the image “Waiting for the Revealing,” 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, lectionary, religion | Leave a Comment »

Advent 1: When Night Is Your Middle Name

November 29, 2008

Image: When Night Is Your Middle Name © Jan Richardson

Lection from the Psalter, Advent 1: Psalm 80.1-7, 17-19

I am a night owl. I love the dark hours. Periodically I work on going to bed earlier, but it feels like entering alien territory, trying to make sense of a landscape and a language that I have a hard time fathoming. A friend, knowing my dark ways, once asked me, so what do you do at night? Oh, what there is to do at night! I read, I told him; or perhaps write, or pray, or soak up the quiet, or unwind in front of the TV. It is a time to gather up the threads of the day, a period in which interruptions are rare and intrusions are few, a space in which my soul can catch up with me. If I’ve spent the day around people, my inner introvert is in particular need of having quiet time before sleep. If I haven’t gotten enough solitary space by the end of the day, insomnia often ensues.

There is darkness even in my name. My middle name, Leila, means night in Hebrew. My parents did not know this at the time—the name belongs to a great-grandmother—but it proved a felicitous choice.

I’m inclined to think there’s a link between my fondness for night and my level of comfort with mystery. Perhaps because my path in life has taken some unusual turns, I’ve become fairly adept at living with a sense of unknowing. I have had plenty of occasion to develop skills that help keep me grounded as the conundrums of my life unfold. Being connected with a Benedictine community has been a great help in this regard. When you hang out with folks who are part of a tradition that’s been around for more than a millennium and a half, you learn a few things about taking the long view and about practicing in the midst of mysteries that can take years and decades and centuries to reveal themselves.

As we lean into Advent, however, I find myself wondering, what illumination might God be offering to me in this season? Are there any mysteries I’ve become too willing to live with, any space in my soul that needs to be brought out of the shadows?

It’s one thing, after all, to live with the mysteries that come with our human lives, to enter into the rhythms of the sometimes strange ways that God works with us. The older I get, the more I think of God as the Ancient of Days, the Holy One of the Long Haul, who seems so deeply fond of working things out over vast expanses of time. This is the aspect of God that calls us to trust, that challenges us to step out without being able to see what’s ahead.

It’s another thing, however, to become too enthralled by the shadows. Mystery has its own enchantments; without spiritual practices and habits of discernment to ground us, those enchantments can lull us into becoming overly comfortable with the shadows and the places of unknowing that attend our journeys. If I don’t know something, after all; if I’m endlessly willing to live in a ceaseless process of discernment that never leads to action, if I don’t see a place of brokenness in my own soul or in the soul of the world, then I don’t have to do anything about it.

That’s called denial.

So as we tilt into these Advent days—and nights—I find myself praying along with the author of the psalm for this Sunday. In Psalm 80 we find a communal lament during a time of devastation. As in the reading from Isaiah, the psalmist’s community struggles with its sense of God’s absence and anger, yet its members still cry out to God to turn toward them and come into their midst. Repeatedly in Psalm 80 the psalmist offers a version of the refrain, “Restore us, O God; let your face shine, that we may be saved.”

The psalmist and his community are not living in denial of their brokenness. They may yet have some distance to go in discerning and reckoning with their responsibility for their own pain, but they perceive clearly their desperate need for the God who can heal them. Once, twice, and yet again the psalmist cries out for God to illumine them, to save and restore them, to clarify God’s presence among and within them.

Let your face shine.

How might it be to carry this prayer into this season? Is there some corner of my soul that has lived too long in shadow? Of the mysteries I have been content to live with, is there one that God might be ready to solve? Am I ready to receive the clarity that might come? How will I meet the God who longs to shine God’s face not only on me but through me as well? How will you?

May we have the courage to turn our faces to the God who meets us in darkness and in daylight. Blessings.

[To use the image “When Night Is Your Middle Name,” 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 | 1 Comment »

On the Occasion of Thanksgiving in the United States We Offer Here a Bit of Art and a Brief Prayer that Will Be Rather Shorter than the Title of this Post

November 27, 2008

blog-welcome-table2
The Welcome Table © Jan L. Richardson

God is great,
God is good;
let us give thanks
for our food.

By your hand
may all be fed;
make us, God,
your daily bread.
Amen

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Advent 1: No Between

November 26, 2008

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!]

Posted in Advent, art, Book of Isaiah, Christmas, lectionary, religion | 3 Comments »

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