The Advent Door

With Advent just around the corner (this year it begins on November 30), the coming season is on my mind. I am all for not rushing into the next season before this one is done (though Ordinary Time does go on for such a long stretch and I’m about ready for a shift), but I did treat myself to one Christmas CD recently (the wondrous La Bela Naissença: Christmas Carols from Provence) to inspire me as I worked on a new print. The print features the twenty-five collages that I created for this blog last year.

The new print is available on my web site, either by visiting the main page at janrichardson.com or by going straight to the Color Prints page. With its invitation to cross the thresholds of Advent with a mindfulness that sometimes eludes us in the weeks leading to Christmas, it makes a nifty gift for yourself and others. I’d be delighted for you to stop by and check it out, and also to pay a visit to my other blog, The Painted Prayerbook, where I’ll continue to write and create art until Advent begins. I look forward to painting some new thresholds here at The Advent Door when the new season gets rolling.

Until then, may the presence of God linger close to you in these ordinary days.

Image: In the Beginning © Jan Richardson

Reading from the Gospels for Christmas Day: John 1.1-14

In a French Book of Hours fashioned in the Middle Ages, the Virgin Mary stands admiring the infant Jesus. Shed of his makeshift manger bed, Jesus has moved up to fancier digs: he is cradled in a book, securely enclosed by the leather strap that holds it shut.

And thus has the medieval artist sought to capture one of the core beliefs of the Christian tradition, one that we hear in today’s reading from the prologue to the Gospel of John: the Word became flesh and lived among us, full of grace and truth.

Christ the Word, cradled among words. It’s an artful depiction that’s both terribly literal-minded and also deeply imaginative. I admit it delights the bibliophile in me, the one who has a hard time separating her love of the Word from her love of words. Words are one of the primary ways I come to know the world, and myself within it, and the one who created it.

And here, at the opening of his Gospel, John clearly means for us to recall the one who brought the world into being. In the beginning, John writes, and with these words he opens a passageway to another book that begins in the same fashion.

With these words, in the beginning, John means for his hearers to recall the book of Genesis, the book of beginnings. He intends to conjure in his hearers’ minds the God who spoke into the chaos and, word by word, articulated creation. This God who worded the world into being, John tells us, is the very Word who took flesh and came to walk among us.

And this Word was life.

And this Word was light.

And the darkness did not overcome it.

And what more shall we say on this Christmas day?

Perhaps just this: that for John, the Book of Beginnings was still being written, a story both ancient and new, a sacred text that God was yet inscribing among God’s people. And is inscribing still. We who celebrate the birth of Christ are called also to be his body, and to participate in the ongoing process of the Word becoming flesh in this world. In us, in us, Christ continues to be born. In this and every season.

Many blessings upon you as we cross the threshold into Christmas, and into the beginnings that God will write within us. In the darkness and in the day, may Christ our Light, the Word made flesh, be your companion and your hope.

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

The Secret Room © Jan L. Richardson

Reading from the Gospels, Christmas Eve, Years ABC: Luke 2:1-14, (15-20)

In his book The Art of Pilgrimage, Phil Cousineau writes that in every pilgrimage, there is a secret room, a place along the path that gives us a different perspective on the deep mystery of our journey. In describing this hidden room, Cousineau draws on a story that poet Donald Hall tells of friends who purchased an old farmhouse. Cousineau writes,

It was a ‘warren of small rooms,’ and once they settled in and began to furnish their new home they realized that the lay of the house made little sense. ‘Peeling off some wallpaper, they found a door that they pried open to reveal a tiny room, sealed off and hidden, goodness knows why: They found no corpses nor stolen goods.’ For Hall, the mystery of poetry to evoke powerful feelings finds its analogy here, in its ability to be sealed away from explanation, this is the place where ‘the unsayable gathers.’

And so it is on the pilgrim’s path. Everywhere you go, there is a secret room. To discover it, you must knock on walls, as the detective does in mystery houses, and listen for the echo that portends the secret passage. You must pull books off shelves to see if the library shelf swings open to reveal the hidden room.

I’ll say it again: Everywhere has a secret room. You must find your own, in a small chapel, a tiny cafe, a quiet park, the home of a new friend, the pew where the morning light strikes the rose window just so.

As a pilgrim you must find it or you will never understand the hidden reasons why you really left home.

On this Christmas Eve, the lectionary gives us a reading from Luke’s Gospel. Luke tells of shepherds and angels, good news and glad tidings, and a child wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger. Luke tells us of the shepherds’ journey to the manger, and of how they tell Mary and Joseph about the news they had received of their child. “All who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds told them,” Luke writes.

But Mary, the Gospel writer tells us, treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart. (Luke 2.19)

Over the past nine months, Mary has entertained an archangel, said yes to becoming the mother of the Son of God, made the journey to visit Elizabeth, and lifted up a song of hope that has endured across centuries. She has waited with Elizabeth for months, made the journey back home, and traveled with her husband Joseph to Bethlehem to be included in the registration ordered by Emperor Augustus. She has labored to give birth to her son, enfolded him in strips of cloth, laid him in a manger, and welcomed those who came to marvel at what had come to pass.

Luke tells us that in response to their amazement, Mary treasures these words in her heart. Luke’s description conjures an image of a woman who, amid the tumult of angels and signs and visitors and miracles, holds all these happenings in a place of stillness. Among the memories of nine months of adventures she never could have imagined, Mary embodies a sense of wonder that is quiet and deep and wise.

Mary has found the secret room.

And you, have you found a secret room for yourself in these Advent days? On your journey through these weeks of anticipation and preparation, has there been a space, a moment, a place of wonder or wisdom or sheer respite, that helped you discover the purpose of this pilgrimage?

I think of a recent evening spent at the home of my childhood friend whose mother died early in this Advent journey. A mile down the road from where I grew up, my friend and her family opened their home for a festive evening. When I arrived, having traveled straight from my home a couple hours away, I was met in the foyer by another childhood friend who now lives in California and whom I hadn’t seen in a couple of years. She, and our friend hosting the gathering, and I had spent most of our childhood in one another’s company, a tightly intertwined trio. As we visited, the house began to fill with others from the community I grew up in, family and friends whose histories are tightly bound with mine. We all knew the loss that had visited this home in this season, and we attuned our ears to the laughter, and stories, and hopes that also came to visit on that night.

That was a secret room for me on this Advent pilgrimage, a space where, in the midst of all that was said, the unsayable gathered as well: the sense of gratitude for shared history, for calm amidst the chaos stirred in this season, for the deep gladness that went beyond holiday cheer and became a balm for sorrowing hearts, for the gift of hospitality that provided sustenance for body and soul, and for those whose lives embody the good news of the Christ who came to us in a dark time, and comes to us still.

On this final day of Advent, on this Christmas Eve, I am treasuring these things in my heart.

Blessings to you as we cross into the celebration to come. May there be a sacred, secret room for you in these hours.

[For another reflection on this passage, visit Where the Foreign Meets the Familiar.]

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

Carpet Page © Jan L. Richardson

Ah, Paul.

The opening of his letter to the Romans serves as the Epistle reading for tomorrow, the fourth Sunday of Advent. With this brief and potent passage, Paul nimbly and fervently encapsulates his understanding of his ministry, of Christ, and of who we are beckoned to be as followers of Christ:

Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God, which he promised beforehand through his prophets in the holy scriptures, the gospel concerning his Son, who was descended from David according to the flesh and was declared to be Son of God with power according to the spirit of holiness by resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord, through whom we have received grace and apostleship to bring about the obedience of faith among all the Gentiles for the sake of his name, including yourselves who are called to belong to Jesus Christ. To all God’s beloved in Rome, who are called to be saints: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. (Romans 1.1-7, NRSV)

In this brief opening passage, Paul has managed to tell the Christian community in Rome who he is, who Jesus is, what Jesus has done for us, and what God is calling them to do as people who belong to Christ. For the most part, Paul’s greeting is one long sentence, a paroxysm of words tumbling out upon one another in his zeal to convey the heart of the gospel message to his sisters and brothers in Rome.

Paul sure knows how to say howdy.

Paul probably wrote his letters before the four Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were penned. When he refers to the gospel for which he has been set apart, Paul is speaking not of a written text. Euangelion is the word that Paul and others use in the original Greek: the gospel is the good news, the story of God’s saving and liberating work for us in Christ. The four evangelists will come to set forth this good news in unique ways in their four different texts. Paul, “called to be an apostle, set apart for the Gospel,” inscribes the good news on his heart and becomes a living gospel for the world.

Paul bears a lion’s share—lion probably being a particularly apt metaphor—of the early church’s work to spread the good news and to form communities that would tell and live out the gospel message. Whatever foibles Paul may have had—and Paul certainly was a textured fellow—his fervor was infectious.

I’ve found myself thinking today of those who, across the span of two millennia, have given themselves to the work of passing on the good news. I think of those who have told the story, those who have proclaimed the gospel not only in word but also in action, those who have preserved and handed down the written text from generation to generation, those who have given flesh to the gospel (and the Word became flesh) in the text of their own lives.

As an artist, I have found myself particularly intrigued by those scribes and artists of earlier centuries who lavished their attention on the gospel message in astoundingly tangible ways. My imagination has been especially captivated by what are often known as the insular gospel books, remarkable manuscripts of the gospels created in Ireland and the British Isles in the Middle Ages. Between the seventh and ninth centuries, scribes and artists drew upon various artful influences, including the visual culture of continental Europe, Scandinavia, and Egypt, and created a style distinctly their own. In their hands, the surface of the page became a landscape brimming with the power, beauty, and complexity of the story of Christ. Within these gospel books, pages teem with intricate patterns of knotwork, spirals, images of humans and intertwined animals, and all manner of symbols that convey both the revelation and the mystery of Christ.

At the core of the scribes’ and artists’ artful labor lay a mighty devotion and profound sense of call that suggests they inherited Paul’s fervor for the gospel. In writing about one of the most remarkable of the insular gospel books, the Lindisfarne Gospels, Michelle Brown describes such work as “preaching with the pen.” She observes that the monk who created such a work

may also have embodied in his work a sustained feat of spritual and physical endurance as part of the Apostolic mission of bringing the Word of God to the furthest outposts of the known world and enshrining it there within the new Temple of the Word and embodiment of Christ—the Book. (From The Lindisfarne Gospels: Society, Spirituality, and the Scribe, 2003.)

Creating today’s door, I was thinking especially of the remarkable pages that are sometimes called carpet pages. Found in the Lindisfarne Gospels and other gospel books, these pages served to divide the four Gospel texts. Containing no written words, a carpet page typically has an intensely intricate design and sometimes incorporates a cross. Similar in style to an Eastern prayer rug (hence the name carpet page), it seems that such a page served a prayerful purpose. Placed opposite the beginning of a Gospel, a carpet page invited the viewer to pause, to become quiet, to reflect, to prepare to enter into the story contained in the following pages.

One could think of it as the artist’s way of saying howdy, and get ready for what lies ahead.

On this Advent day, how is your getting ready going? Three days before the festival of Christmas, how are you preparing your heart to hear the good news that awaits us on Christmas morning?

Are you finding a space that will help you enter into the story?

What is the good news that has been inscribed on your bones, on the walls of your heart, in the labyrinthine passages of your brain? What gospel word inhabits your breath and being?

Is there a place in your life that can serve as a living carpet page, a prayer rug, a space that enables you to hear this word, this news?

In the spirit and tradition of Paul, and the writers of the Gospels, and the scribes and artists who have shared in telling the news, and all the women and men who have kept the story alive and passed it down from generation to generation for two millennia, how are you called to embody and pass along the gospel story in the way that is uniquely yours to do?

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

Last night was an insomnia night. After lying wakeful for a long while, I did what I virtually never do when I’m visited by sleeplessness: I got up and worked. Usually it’s working late that stirs my insomnia, but that wasn’t the case last night; I had turned my attention to other things during the evening hours. This time, when insomnia came to call, going to the drafting table in the wee hours seemed to make sense. I turned on the studio lamps and, squinting against their brightness, I began to sift through the piles of painted papers and set to work.

It eventually occurred to me that it seemed a fitting manner in which to while away the darkness on the cusp of the winter solstice. Tonight, in the wee hours, we in the northern hemisphere will be at our farthest remove from the sun. This night will be the longest of the year.

After this collage emerged in the sleepless darkness of this past night, I scribbled some words down on a glue-stained scrap of paper that lay on the drafting table. A night when the moon seems more enduring than the sun, I wrote. And then this, perhaps my tired brain’s idea of a title for the collage: egg over easy on a blue plate.

And perhaps that was fitting, too: that, in the midst of pondering the rhythms of light and shadow on the eve of the winter solstice, an egg should appear, sign of the life, the hope, the potential that stirs in the dark. And not only stirs in the dark, but, for a time, requires it. The egg, the seed, the root: everything that grows must have a season of darkness.

Within and beyond the Christian tradition, we have entrenched stereotypes about light and dark. These deeply held beliefs, which often seem to operate at a primal level, tend to hold that all that is good is light and bright and white, and that which is sinful and evil is dark. Though the stereotypes sometimes hold true, they can keep us—as stereotypes often do—from perceiving the ways that God sometimes works in the opposite direction.

I don’t want to be cavalier or romantic about darkness, despite wanting to recognize the gifts that it can carry. (My middle name is Leila, which comes from the Hebrew word for night; my parents had other reasons for the name, but I like to think it somehow influenced my tendency toward generally loving the nighttime hours.) There’s no getting around the fact that physical darkness can be terrifying, when it offers occasion for violence and fear. The darkness of moods, of emotions, of depression and internal chaos can be equally terrifying. At the same time, daylight can reveal its own fearsome things, and Paul, in his second letter to the Corinthians, writes that “Even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light.”

The solstice and the seasons of Advent and Christmas beckon us to ponder what we think about light and dark, what we find in them, how we experience their rhythms in our lives, and what gifts God has for us in both darkness and daylight.

In the book of Isaiah, God offers these words:

I will give you the treasures of darkness
and riches hidden in the 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)

In seasons of shadows, God invites us to find the treasures that don’t depend solely on sight, whether literal or figurative. How do we know God in those times? How do we allow God to lead us to the riches that don’t require our knowing everything, doing everything, understanding everything, seeing everything?

And still. And still. Even in seasons when darkness is less fearsome—when the darkness comes not with terror but with the shadows of mystery and unknowing that are necessary for the soul’s growth—still, there is a deep and ancient longing for light, a yearning that we carry in our blood and in our bones. This is the season when we give that longing full play, when, in the days of deepest darkness, we hang lights and burn candles (and perhaps even turn on the studio lamps and set to work) and sing of the one who came to us as the light of the world.

From the deep root of Jesse, from the dark womb of Mary, Christ our dayspring comes. More enduring than both moon and sun.

Once upon a time, a friend sent me a card in which she included these words:

I had a dream that I was building a door. It was a beautiful wooden door. It was partially open as I was working on it and the frame. Friends came by to help but it was my door—I was in charge and competent enough to build a door. And it wasn’t a ‘keeping out’ door, but it was a ‘going through’ door. I think that’s just where I am in my life. I need to claim me, my doors, and my ability to make them with the intention of going through them.

So—in that spirit, it’s “BUILD YOUR OWN DOOR” DAY here at The Advent Door. I’ve scooped up a handful of scraps from the (large) piles that have been accumulating on my drafting table this season. They’re for you. Use them lavishly. There’s plenty more where these came from.

What kind of door are you needing in this season? Is it a “keeping out” door, a “going through” door, an “I’m going to need to ponder it for a while until I figure out what kind of door it is” door?

Is it a door that opens out, or opens in?

What do you need for the building of your door?

How will you get what you need?

Who or what could provide sustenance as you create your door?

Today, I’m needing a “Turning My Attention to What Hasn’t Gotten Done While I’ve Been Living Between the Drafting Table and the Computer” kind of door. I’m thinking it’s time to start figuring out Christmas presents. My sweetheart says I could tell my family that I’m dedicating a day’s blog post to each of them as their gift this year. Intriguing, but…!

Here’s a prayer for your door-making in this season:

When I scan other skies
for signs of hope,
and when I walk other paths
with a longing for home,
God of the exile,
lead me back through my own door.

Tell me
my forgotten stories,
feed me
the words I have given away,
and draw my gaze
from the far horizon
that I may see the lights
in my own sky.

©Jan L. Richardson, from Night Visions:
Searching the Shadows of Advent and Christmas

A blessing upon you and your Advent door.