The Advent Door

Image: Where Hope Lives © Jan Richardson

Canticle, Advent 4: Luke 1.46b-55

Today finds me still pondering the Magnificat. Mary’s song has me thinking about a passage in Lewis Carroll’s book Through the Looking-Glass, in which the White Queen and Alice have this exchange:

“The rule [says the White Queen] is, jam to-morrow and jam yesterday—but never jam to-day.”

“It must come sometimes to ‘jam to-day,'” Alice objected.

“No, it can’t,” said the Queen. “It’s jam every other day: to-day isn’t any other day, you know.”

“I don’t understand you,” said Alice. “It’s dreadfully confusing!”

“That’s the effect of living backwards,” the Queen said kindly: “it always makes one a little giddy at first—”

“Living backwards!” Alice repeated in great astonishment. “I never heard of such a thing!”

“—but there’s one great advantage in it, that one’s memory works both ways.”

“I’m sure mine only works one way,” Alice remarked. “I can’t remember things before they happen.”

“It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards,” the Queen remarked.

“What sort of things do you remember best?” Alice ventured to ask.

One of the things that strikes me most about Mary’s canticle is that in singing about how God turns the world upside down, she sings as if these things have already come to pass. In Mary’s chosen tense, God has already accomplished the righting of the world. Mary knew, as we know, that redemption and restoration was still a work in progress. But so transformed was Mary that she could sing of this as though it had already happened. She is remembering forward.

We have a fancy theological term for what Mary does there.

It’s called hope.

Hope is a tricky thing. Given how intimately it’s intertwined with our longings and desires, both conscious and subconscious, hope can sometimes slide into delusion or obsession, when we’re so consumed by a desired outcome that it can distort our perceptions. Or hope can dissipate into wishful thinking, in which we want something to happen but are idly waiting for someone else to take care of it.

You may recall that hope was the last thing left in Pandora’s box. After all the plagues, griefs, sorrows, and misery had flown out of the box in order to visit themselves upon humanity, hope remained. There’s some debate as to whether hope was the final curse of the box, or its great gift.

Some say that hope is a plague that keeps us too much in the future, that it prevents us from clearly perceiving the present and our role in it. I think these folks have a limited definition of hope. Hope may turn our eyes toward the horizon, but true hope, full hope, roots us deeply in the present. It beckons us to do more than wish or want or wait for someone else to do something. It calls us to discern what’s beneath our wishes, to discover the longings beneath our longings, to dig down to the place where our deepest yearning and God’s deepest yearning are the same. And when we find that, when we uncover those deepest desires, hope invites and impels us to participate in bringing about those things for which we most keenly long.

That’s why Mary could sing about these events as if they had already happened. She carried within her the meeting place of her longing and God’s yearning. Her yes to God, to bearing the God who was already taking flesh and form within her, was a microcosm of what God was doing in the world. What God had accomplished within her, God was accomplishing within the world. Had accomplished. Would accomplish.

Tenses fail me.

I just saw an episode of Star Trek: Voyager a couple days ago, one of those episodes where they were playing around with the time line. When I see one of these, I have to just sit back and not try to make too much sense of things or I’ll get a headache. In this episode, a couple of fellows from the future, or maybe the past, who knows, have shown up because the space-time continuum has been disturbed (again), and they’re trying to fix it. One of them, in explaining what’s going on, finally says, “I gave up trying to figure out tenses a long time ago.”

I know the feeling.

This kind of hope, the kind that bends our understanding of time and tenses, recognizes that God has a very different relationship with time than we do. Though God dwells within history, to say that God’s sense of time is largely non-linear is vastly understating it. The tense that Mary uses in her Magnificat strikes me because it is unusual, but I suspect it’s the kind of tense that God uses continually.

I have a couple of writer friends I meet with every month or so. In addition to sharing something we’ve been working on, we also spend a few minutes on an impromptu writing exercise. One year around this time, we wrote about how we spent our holidays. The better portion of the holidays still lay ahead of us. We wrote out of a sense of hope and longing for what God would/did bring about in our lives, in the world, in the holy days to come.

Taking a cue from the White Queen, from Alice, from Mary, from my writing companions, I want to ask: What sort of things do you remember best about this Advent, this Christmas, this coming year? What did God bring to pass in the days to come? How did you participate with God in the living out of your deepest hopes, those hopes that, like Mary’s, were so powerful that they transformed not only you but the world as well?

In his book Trumpet at Full Moon, W. Paul Jones writes, “Hope is the simple trust that God has not forgotten the recipe for manna.” May manna (perhaps with a side of jam to-day) abound in this Advent season.

And so it did.

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

There Is Silence © Jan Richardson

Speaking of Apocalypse…

In recent Advent days, I’ve found myself thinking of an image from one of the illuminated Apocalypse manuscripts from medieval Spain. The Spanish Apocalypses, produced between 900 and 1100, are significantly different creatures from the Apocalypses produced in England and elsewhere a bit later in the medieval period. Created in a style known as Mozarabic, which drew from a variety of influences including the visual culture of the Islamic community that ruled Spain, the Spanish Apocalypses are wild and wonderful. Using a vivid palette and expressive style, the Spanish artist-monks drenched their pages with the intense drama and emotion of the events described in the Book of Revelation.

In a Spanish Apocalypse owned by the Morgan Library in New York, one can follow the unfolding events of the Apocalypse in the riot of images that follow one after another, including Christ and angels and other heavenly beings, strange creatures, worshipful elders, the opening of the seven seals and the attendant cataclysms. Then, at the beginning of the eighth chapter, a small, spare image leads into the text that tells us that after the opening of the seventh seal, “there was silence in heaven for about half an hour.” I love how John notes this homely detail, how he takes care to recount that in the midst of the cosmic events of the Apocalypse, when there’s all manner of drama and chaos unfolding, there is a space of silence, a breath, a pause. In the midst of the strange time-shifting that takes place in Revelation, with its overlapping of past, present, and future, John has taken care to be pretty specific and chronological about the duration of the silence, as if he has thought to check his Timex in the midst of all this.

To illustrate this space of silence, the artist of the Morgan manuscript detoured from his usual drama and created an image that charms and disarms with its simplicity. On a small rectangular field of orange, the artist painted twelve circles, yellow-gold outlined in blue or black and decorated to look like fleurettes. (Or, to my eye, kind of like pies; a little Apocalyptic dessert.) Lined up in three rows of four, each fleurette has a letter atop it; together, the letters spell SILENCIUS EST.

There is silence.

My idea for today’s post had been to create a collage that evoked this simple image, and to ask where, in the midst of what many folks are experiencing as a chaotic season, you are cultivating a space of silence and rest, or how you might be longing to do this. I figure that if it could happen during the Apocalypse, it ought to be able to happen in Advent. You know, for at least half an hour, like John says.

I went to work on the collage last night, thinking it would be a quick and easy one. An hour and a half later, I was still at the drafting table, moving pieces around and cutting out new ones in an ineffectual attempt to create an image that, without directly mimicking it, would evoke the kind of graceful silence that the apocalyptic artist did with such charm.

It was late, I was tired. Finally I set aside the entire stack of pieces I’d been working with, pulled just a few pieces back out, slapped them down on the blue background, and called it done. It’s a similar color palette as the Apocalypse artist used, more or less, but a pretty different execution. It reminds me a bit of an Amish quilt, which perhaps reflects the deep desire I had at that point to crawl into bed. Which I did, forthwith.

I still want to ask if you’re finding any space of silence and respite in the midst of these days, or how you might get some if you haven’t already. But I also want to ask you this: Is there any place in your life where you’re pushing really hard right now, in a direction that isn’t working? How do you discern when to keep pushing forward, in hopes that circumstances will shift, and when to pull back, so that your inner self might shift instead? Do you experience occasions when you need to give up a cherished vision so that a different vision can take hold, or so that you can simply rest until the next one comes around?

The Advent stories are full of folks who chose to do some sacred shifting. Mary, Joseph, Elizabeth, and Zechariah, among others: each of them gave up their notions of what their lives would be like, so that a different life could take hold. They beckon me to wonder—in the silent spaces and in the occasional chaos of this season—how flexible my soul is these days, and whether I’m leaving space for God to stir up any new visions.

In these Advent days, may the God of both drama and stillness grace you with whatever your soul most needs.

Silencius est.

Image: Making Way © Jan Richardson

A bunch of years ago, I went on a silent retreat during Holy Week. The retreat fell during a pretty complicated time, life-wise. One evening, as I was trying to pray with some of the particularly difficult pieces of the complexity, I asked God, What are you trying to teach me here? With more clarity and immediacy than I usually experience from God, an answer came to the surface: I’m not trying to teach you anything; I am trying to make a way for you.

Ah; that’s something else entirely.

The response didn’t change anything about the situation, but it changed the way I looked at where I was in my life. It helped me recognize that the pieces I was struggling with didn’t have to keep me stuck; God was somehow using them to build a pathway out of there.

I’ve been thinking about that as I’ve ruminated on the Gospel reading for today, the second Sunday of Advent. In Matthew 3.1-12, the wild, desert-dwelling, locust-and-honey-eating, camel’s-hair-clothing-wearing John the Baptist makes his appearance. “This is the one,” Matthew writes, “of whom the prophet Isaiah spoke when he said, ‘The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: “Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.”‘”

John may eat honey, but, when he speaks, his words sure aren’t dripping with it. Brood of vipers, wrath, ax, fire: this is the flavor of the syllables that spill from his lips.

No time for niceties, for diplomacy, for etiquette, evidently. He is trying to make a way, and there are seasons when this is a focused and fiery business.

So I’m thinking about paths today, about the challenge and the grace of way-making, and how God does this in my life, in our lives. My path looks a great deal different than it did on that silent retreat years ago. It’s probably no less complicated, but the pieces fit together a lot better these days. Still, the road isn’t complete, and as I reflect on Matthew’s text, I find myself wondering, what chaff may yet need to be burned, that the way may become more clear?

And you, what way is God making in your life, and with your life, and through your life? What path is God fashioning in and with you in this Advent season, so that the coming Christ may find a way?

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

A couple of nights ago, my sweetheart Gary spirited me away to a nearby bookstore for a tea & dessert & reading session in the bookstore’s café. Working on this Advent blog has—happily—had me pretty much living between my drafting table and my computer for the past week, and I was in deep need of an outing. Once through the door of the bookstore, Gary and I each went in search of some printed goodies to consume along with our dessert. When I caught up with him at the café, I had a trinity of treats in hand: a Get Fuzzy treasury (I’m a huge fan), Maira Kalman’s latest book (lots and lots of her paintings, very cool), and the latest issue of Selvedge, a magazine whose acquaintance I made just a couple of months ago.

I mention Get Fuzzy because it’s my favorite comic strip (which will tell you a few things about me); I’m a bit of a Satchelvangelist and I like to support that crew in whatever small way I can. I mention Maira Kalman because I think her books are charming in a wonderfully funky way. I’m especially fond of her books about Max, a very cool and suave dog of the city; the books are ostensibly for children but give adults plenty to love.

The main reason I’m bringing all this up, however, is mostly to tell you about Selvedge, not because I think you’re going to rush right out and subscribe to a (very pricey but worth it) magazine about “Textiles in Fashion, Fine Art, Interiors, Travel and Shopping” (as they subtitle it) but because, as I savored it along with my tea and lemon-raspberry dessert in the café, I was reminded of how much I need the kind of sustenance that I found as I pondered its pages.

I don’t do much work with textiles (as an artist, I mean; I do have familiarity with certain aspects of textile media as, for instance, a habitual Wearer of Clothes), but Selvedge feeds my eyeballs and my soul in wonderful ways. It’s one of the most artfully designed magazines I’ve ever come across. Published in London, it’s geared toward an international audience, which helps widen my view. The latest issue focuses on Nordic textile traditions, stirring some good memories of the trip I made to Scandinavia about half a lifetime ago to visit a friend who had lived with my family as an exchange student from Norway.

Aside from all the treats for my eyes, I can hardly tell you how much I loved opening a design magazine that uses the word Advent on several occasions. One of the contributors, the photographer Anna Kern, comments on how her “favourite Christmas tradition is the advent calendar”; her mother made one for her, and now she’s making one for her young daughter.

Today’s Advent door found its inspiration in a window that I spotted in the pages of Selvedge. A beautiful creation of leaded green glass, the window reminds me of how I need to seek out the loveliness that is present along the path—and often well off it. I can’t just trust that moments of beauty are going to find me as I pursue my fully scheduled route, even if it’s a happy path that I’m wearing deeper and deeper into the carpet between my drafting table and computer. Thankfully, moments of unsought beauty do present themselves with unaccountable grace, but sometimes I need to remember to come to the surface and take a look around.

Tea, and dessert, and some beautiful pages in the company of someone dear: that’s what brought me to my senses this week. What brings you to yours? In these Advent days, when we are so intensely and sometimes so busily focused on this thing called incarnation, how are you seeking moments of beauty, grace, and respite for your own incarnate self?