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Advent 3: Home with Rejoicing

December 11, 2011

Image: Shall Come Home with Joy © Jan Richardson

Reading from the Psalms, Advent 3, Year B: Psalm 126

Those who go out weeping, bearing the seed for sowing,
shall come home with shouts of joy, carrying their sheaves.
—Psalm 126.6

Visiting with friends a few weeks ago, on the edge of this season. Talking on the porch as the almost-Advent evening gathers around us. One among us speaks of the great storm he has been going through for some years. “I believe in the providence and care of God,” he tells us. “But if you could just pray that God would take his foot off my neck.”

All around us, there are reminders that for many—and perhaps for us, ourselves—this is a season in which joy can be elusive. Economic pressures, broken relationships, disasters, violence, illness, isolation: these do not abide by a holiday schedule. And though God does not will the brokenness, still I want to cry out, on behalf of those who suffer in this season, “How long, O Lord?”

And alongside this awareness, Sunday’s psalm sidles up, offering its vivid images of rejoicing, restoration, return. The psalmist remembers what God has done for God’s people: “When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion,” he exults, “we were like those who dream…. The Lord has done great things for us, and we rejoiced.” But then time shifts for the psalmist, his remembrance of restoration past becoming a prayer for rejoicing yet to come: “Restore our fortunes, O Lord,” he pleads. “May those who sow in tears reap with shouts of joy. Those who go out weeping, bearing the seed for sowing, shall come home with shouts of joy, carrying their sheaves” (NRSV).

Perhaps more than any liturgical season, Advent possesses the sort of already-but-not-yet quality that the writer evokes in this psalm. Even as we remember and celebrate the Christ who came to us, the season calls us also to anticipate his promised return. This can be a difficult tension to navigate, especially when it may seem that Christ left so much undone in his earthly life and is tarrying overlong in completing his work of restoration.

The Advent season does not seek to explain away or release God from culpability for coming up with a cosmic design that leaves so much to be desired. Advent is an invitation, however, to stretch ourselves toward God’s sense of time, to reach into that realm where God has already brought about the healing of the world. We will see this divine sense of time with particular clarity next week, when the lectionary gives us the Magnificat and we hear Mary sing of God’s redeeming work as if it has already taken place with completeness. These days beckon us to stand with those—such as Mary and the psalmist—who can sing of restoration that has already been accomplished, even as we, so immersed in chronological time, know it is still to come.

Advent urges us to push at the limits of linear time, to tug at the place where the “already” intersects with the “not yet.” One of the ways we do this is by seeking to discern how God is calling us to participate in bringing restoration into reality: to learn to look at the world through the eyes of a God who has already somehow, in some realm, made it whole, and then to look for how God is asking us to help bring about that wholeness now.

We lean into God’s sense of time also by following the psalmist’s example of rejoicing, which is about so much more than a sensation of happiness. The rejoicing that the psalmist writes of is not so much a natural disposition as it is a practice, a habit, a way of being that does not depend solely on external events. The rejoicing to which God invites us in Advent, and in every season, is a rejoicing that goes deeper than the often contrived cheer that the marketers try to sell us in this season. This rejoicing does not involve ignoring the pain that is present in the world. It means, rather, seeing the world as it is, in all its beauty and its brokenness. It means choosing to resist being overwhelmed by the brokenness; recognizing and celebrating the presence of beauty and relationship; and developing a capacity for hope and working toward what we hope for—and what God hopes for in and through us.

As we seek to do this, we need all the blessings we can get—and give. A blessing is a kind of prayer that calls upon the God who dwells both within and beyond time. It is an invocation and plea that God, who promises restoration in the fullness of time, will see fit to infuse this present time with that restoration and healing. When we receive a blessing, or offer one, we stand at that place where promise and reality intertwine, and a space of possibility opens itself to us.

As you continue to journey through the days of Advent, whether these days offer delight or difficulty or some measure of both, may God stir up in you a habit of rejoicing, and bless you to bless those who need encouragement in this season.

Blessing to Summon Rejoicing

When your weeping
has watered
the earth.

When the storm
has been long
and the night
and the season
of your sorrowing.

When you have seemed
an exile
from your life,
lost in the far country,
a long way from where
your comfort lies.

When the sound
of splintering
and fracture
haunts you.

When despair
attends you.

When lack.
When trouble.
When fear.
When pain.

When empty.
When lonely.
When too much
of what depletes you
and not enough
of what restores
and rests you.

Then let there be
rejoicing.

Then let there be
dreaming.

Let there be
laughter in your mouth
and on your tongue
shouts of joy.

Let the seeds
soaked by tears
turn to grain,
to bread,
to feasting.

Let there be
coming home.

—Jan Richardson

2015 update: “Blessing to Summon Rejoicing” appears in Jan’s new book Circle of Grace: A Book of Blessings for the Seasons. You can find the book here.

[To use the image “Shall Come Home with Joy,” 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, blessings, lectionary, Psalms | 3 Comments »

Advent 2: While You Are Waiting

December 4, 2011

Image: Like One Day © Jan Richardson

Reading from the Epistles, Advent 2, Year B: 2 Peter 3.8-15a

Wait. It’s the word perhaps most associated with the season of Advent, often showing up in the company of the word patience. And indeed in today’s lection from the epistles we see these kindred words make their appearance together as Peter counsels his friends—beloved, he calls them—about time and waiting.

So often we talk about waiting as a passive state, a condition in which we can only cool our heels while a desired result makes its slow and seemingly meandering way toward us. And yet, as we frequently see in the readings for Advent, waiting is a practice that often calls us to work. Peter’s letter is a great example of this. In this missive written to a church in need of encouragement and hope, he uses a fistful of active verbs to tell of how we are to wait for God: leading lives, hastening the coming of the day of God, strive, regard.

I’m struck by how, when Peter uses the word patience or patient, he isn’t simply describing how we are to wait; he is talking about an aspect of God. He tells his friends of how God “is patient with us, not wanting any to perish.” He urges them, “Regard the patience of the Lord as our salvation.”

Sometimes I wait in a way that seems to distance me from God. I push against time; I push against God, who I think should be moving with greater speed and whose sense of time, as Peter points out, is so different from ours. Patience can feel punishing and solitary; it’s what’s left to me while God—who has all the time in the world—takes God’s sweet time.

Yet Peter’s words challenge me to be mindful that patience is not simply something God expects of us; it is also an aspect of God’s own nature. And in telling us of how God is patient with us, I sense that Peter means that God is not only patient toward us—we who, in our flawed state, require so much forbearance from the Divine—but also that God is patient alongside us: that patience is a quality and a practice that God and humans share in together. Waiting is a point of connection between us and God as we all wait with one another for the fullness of time.

It’s important to remember that there is holy waiting—patience that draws us deeper into the heart and the designs of God. And there is waiting that is something other than holy—those occasions when our waiting actually is resistance to taking a necessary action. Or when someone else tells us to be patient because in fact they are unwilling to act or do not want us to act. I think of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” in which he wrote, “For years now I have heard the word ‘Wait!’ It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This ‘Wait’ has almost always meant ‘Never.’”

And so there is a third word we must bear in mind when waiting and patience make their appearance: discernment needs to be in their company, that we may recognize the time for waiting and the time for taking right action. Discernment itself is a kind of waiting, a practice by which we seek to know the next step God would have us take, rather than relying on our own impulses.

Waiting—and the discernment to which waiting calls us—requires that we clear away what distracts us from seeing clearly. It bids us to make a space in which, in the midst of all the input that comes from those seeking to tell us what we should do, we still ourselves and listen. Making this kind of space can be wrenching, when we are so attached to the things that help us fill our time. Yet this space is rich with possibility and with presence; to use an Advent image, it is pregnant.

“Absence, emptiness, is a bowl of receptivity,” writes artist and calligrapher Laurie Doctor. “Often we want to fill it quickly—and then it gets crowded with all kinds of replacements: busyness, self-importance, lists, talking, TV, email, Scrabble. But waiting, active waiting, as if that bowl will be filled with presence as easily as it was emptied, leads us somewhere else.”

How are you waiting? Where is your waiting leading you? In this season, how are you making a space for stillness and for listening, that you might know what you need to wait for and how God is calling you to participate in what God is bringing about?

Blessing for Waiting

Who wait
for the night
to end

bless them.

Who wait
for the night
to begin

bless them.

Who wait
in the hospital room
who wait
in the cell
who wait
in prayer

bless them.

Who wait
for news
who wait
for the phone call
who wait
for a word

who wait
for a job
a house
a child

bless them.

Who wait
for one who
will come home

who wait
for one who
will not come home

bless them.

Who wait with fear
who wait with joy
who wait with peace
who wait with rage

who wait for the end
who wait for the beginning
who wait alone
who wait together

bless them.

Who wait
without knowing
what they wait for
or why

bless them.

Who wait
when they
should not wait
who wait
when they should be
in motion
who wait
when they need
to rise
who wait
when they need
to set out

bless them.

Who wait
for the end
of waiting
who wait
for the fullness
of time
who wait
emptied and
open and
ready

who wait
for you,

o bless.

—Jan Richardson

2015 update: “Blessing for Waiting” appears in Jan’s new book Circle of Grace: A Book of Blessings for the Seasons. You can find the book here.

P.S. For a related reflection on waiting, click the image or title below:


Door 15: Another Name for Patience

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

*Resources for the Season*

Posted in Advent, art, blessings, Gospel of Mark, lectionary, poetry | 2 Comments »

Advent 2: Blessing the Way

December 1, 2011

Blessing the Way © Jan Richardson

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

To write this piece, I had to go for a walk, had to be in motion as I pondered Mark’s words about John the Baptist, this man who devoted his life to preparing a way. Up one street and down another, I thought about roads that I had taken. I remembered an enchanted afternoon spent with friends in rural Virginia, walking through the woods on a pathway that had been there since colonial times. I thought of the small stretch of the Appalachian Trail that I hiked one day, and of my brother who had traveled the entire length of the trail, nearly 2200 miles, the year before. I recalled occasions that I have navigated a labyrinth, tracing the ancient pattern that has provided a contemplative path for centuries.

In my vocation as an artist/writer/minister, I live constantly with the awareness that there are no maps for what I am doing; that I am making the path as I go, with all the wonders and challenges this brings. Yet Advent is a season that calls me to remember that even as I move across what seems like uncharted territory, there is a way that lies beneath the way that I am going. Others have traveled here ahead of me, each in their own fashion yet providing pieces that I can use: scraps of words, images, prayers, stories; fragments that help me to find my way and enable me to smooth the path a bit for others yet to come.

In some sense we are all creating the road as we go. Yet beneath this, undergirding this, is a path carved by those who have traveled here before us, who followed the God who called them to the journey, who gave themselves to preparing a way for the One who came into the world to walk with us.

What path are you traveling in this Advent season? What do you find along the way that can help you create the road as you go? Who has helped to fashion the path and has provided inspiration to walk it in your own manner? How might you prepare the way—and become part of the way—for the Christ who comes to us?

Blessing the Way

With every step
you take,
this blessing rises up
to meet you.

It has been waiting
long ages for you.

Look close
and you can see
the layers of it,

how it has been fashioned
by those who walked
this road before you,

how it has been created
of nothing but
their determination
and their dreaming,

how it has taken
its form
from an ancient hope
that drew them forward
and made a way for them
when no way could be
seen.

Look closer
and you will see
this blessing
is not finished,

that you are part
of the path
it is preparing,

that you are how
this blessing means
to be a voice
within the wilderness

and a welcome
for the way.

—Jan Richardson

2015 update: “Blessing the Way” appears in Jan’s new book Circle of Grace: A Book of Blessings for the Seasons. You can find the book here.

P.S. For a previous reflection on this passage, click the thumbnail or title below:


A Way in the Wilderness

Since John the Baptist appears in the Advent lectionary each year—and more than once—there are a number of reflections here that feature him. To find them, simply enter “John the Baptist” in the search bar near the top of this page.

[To use the image “Blessing the Way,” 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, blessings, Gospel of Mark, lectionary, poetry | 10 Comments »

Advent 1: In Which We Stay Awake

November 24, 2011

Image: The Luminous Night © Jan Richardson

Reading from the Gospels, Advent 1, Year B: Mark 13.24-37

“Shall I make a pot of coffee?” Gary asked me late last night—much too late last night—as I was burning the after-midnight oil, trying to finish everything on my list before leaving for the Thanksgiving holiday. He knows I don’t drink coffee (though I love the smell); it was his way of asking if I really planned on being up all night. At that point I was wrestling with technology that had chosen the worst moment to break down, and I could probably have stayed up till dawn trying to fix it, but finally I shut everything down for the night, left my studio, and went to bed. Where I then lay awake until the wee hours, as sometimes happens when I have worked too long and too late.

As I lay there, willing myself toward sleep, the Gospel reading for this Sunday floated through my insomniac brain (this blog post being another thing I didn’t manage to finish before I left). It was not lost on me, alert in the small hours, how Advent always begins with a word about wakefulness. “Beware, keep alert; for you do not know when the time will come,” Jesus says in this passage about the end of days that, along with its parallels in Matthew and Luke’s Gospels, is known as the “Little Apocalypse.” “…And what I say to you I say to all: Keep awake.”

It’s a different kind of wakefulness, of course, that Jesus is talking about here as he tells his hearers how to recognize the signs of his returning. The wakefulness that Jesus describes is a state—a practice, a way of being—that bears little resemblance to the ways we usually try to keep ourselves (or unwittingly find ourselves) awake, methods that usually leave us jangly-nerved and less than fully functional.

Jesus urges us toward a kind of awareness in which, whatever else we are doing—even in resting and sleeping—some part of us remains open, stays alert, pays attention to what is unfolding and reflects on what it means. Jesus is talking here about cultivating the habit of keeping vigil: the art of waiting. He is describing a kind of awareness and attention in which we learn to not rely solely on what we can see (“the sun will be darkened,” Jesus says, “and the moon will not give its light.”) but turn to the wisdom of the other senses, to discern what they can tell us about what is unfolding in the world around us.

Contemplating this Gospel reading, I thought of this collage (above) that I created during Advent last year. It’s not even a full-blown collage, but one scrap among many that were on my drafting table in that season. I used it in a reflection here about finding myself in a stuck place in the studio. I realized that I had arrived at one of those threshold times that happens in the creative process, when something new is trying to work itself out but is taking its sweet time to make itself known. Like any birth, it tends to be messy. It is a kind of mini-apocalypse in which our familiar landmarks disappear, our sources of illumination go dim, our familiar ways of working no longer work.

It can be daunting to stay soul-awake when these mini-apocalypses come along, whether in the creative process or in life itself, which is its own creative art. It can grow wearying to persist in showing up to what is messy, to what is frustrating, to what lies in shadow, to what seems like it isn’t going anywhere. Yet as Mark’s Gospel reminds us here at the threshold of Advent, such times call us to trust that even in the dark, God is at work, is traveling toward us, has somehow already arrived.

As we enter into Advent, what draws you into the kind of awareness that Jesus describes? How do you enter into a waking that doesn’t depend on stimulants but that calls the deepest layers of our soul to keep a space ready, to pay attention, to turn all our senses toward perceiving where Christ may show up? How do you keep vigil and practice the art of waiting?

Blessing for Waking

This blessing could
pound on your door
in the middle of
the night.

This blessing could
bang on your window,
could tap dance
in your hall,
could set a dog loose
in your room.

It could hire a
brass band
to play outside
your house.

But what this blessing
really wants
is not merely
your waking
but your company.

This blessing
wants to sit
alongside you
and keep vigil
with you.

This blessing
wishes to wait
with you.

And so
though it is capable
of causing a cacophony
that could raise
the dead,

this blessing
will simply
lean toward you
and sing quietly
in your ear
a song to lull you
not into sleep
but into waking.

It will tell you stories
that hold you breathless
till the end.

It will ask you questions
you never considered
and have you tell it
what you saw
in your dreaming.

This blessing
will do all within
its power
to entice you
into awareness

because it wants
to be there,
to bear witness,
to see the look
in your eyes
on the day when
your vigil is complete
and all your waiting
has come to
its joyous end.

—Jan Richardson

P.S. Happy Thanksgiving to those celebrating the holiday today! For a brief morsel of a reflection from a previous year, see On the Occasion of Thanksgiving… And for an earlier reflection on this Sunday’s Gospel reading, visit Through the Door.

Posted in Advent, art, blessings, Gospel of Mark, lectionary, sacred time | 4 Comments »

Blessing the Door

November 23, 2011


Blessing the Door © Jan L. Richardson

Welcome to Advent, almost! I have been eagerly looking forward to opening The Advent Door once again and journeying with you through the coming season. This is The Advent Door’s fifth year. When I first began this blog, I hardly imagined where it would take me—how it would change me as an artist and writer, how it would bring connections with folks around the world in cyberspace, how it would draw me ever deeper into the wonders and mysteries contained in the sacred stories of this season. Every year I learn, all over again, that when you open a door, you never quite know where it will lead.

Advent begins this Sunday. As we cross into this new season—which, in the liturgical calendar, begins a new year as well—I’m standing with my toes on the threshold, peeking through the doorway, wondering just what this season might hold in store. I’ll be keeping vigil in the studio and am curious to see what will emerge here after a season that has seemed fairly fallow, art-wise. Though this fallow time has had its frustrations, I know also that if Advent has taught me anything, it’s that waiting—a word that’s always attached to this season of anticipation—is much more active than we usually make it out to be. Even in fallow times, preparation is taking place deep underground in ways we can’t always perceive.

So today, we begin with a door, and with a blessing. As you stand on the edge of Advent, here at the door, what do you hope for the season ahead? How will you keep yourself—your eyes, your ears, your heart—open for the unimagined surprises the coming weeks will hold, and for the Christ who has been waiting for you?

Blessing the Door

First let us say
a blessing
upon all who have
entered here before
us.

You can see the sign
of their passage
by the worn place
where their hand rested
on the doorframe
as they walked through,
the smooth sill
of the threshold
where they crossed.

Press your ear
to the door
for a moment before
you enter

and you will hear
their voices murmuring
words you cannot
quite make out
but know
are full of welcome.

On the other side
these ones who wait—
for you,
if you do not
know by now—
understand what
a blessing can do

how it appears like
nothing you expected

how it arrives as
visitor,
outrageous invitation,
child;

how it takes the form
of angel
or dream;

how it comes
in words like
How can this be?
and
lifted up the lowly;

how it sounds like
in the wilderness
prepare the way.

Those who wait
for you know
how the mark of
a true blessing
is that it will take you
where you did not
think to go.

Once through this door
there will be more:
more doors
more blessings
more who watch and
wait for you

but here
at this door of
beginning
the blessing cannot
be said without you.

So lay your palm
against the frame
that those before you
touched

place your feet
where others paused
in this entryway.

Say the thing that
you most need
and the door will
open wide

and by this word
the door is blessed
and by this word
the blessing is begun
from which
door by door
all the rest
will come.

P.S. This blessing is from my new eBook, Through the Advent Door: Entering a Contemplative Christmas. Available now on Kindle! Preview & order here on Amazon: Through the Advent Door.

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

Posted in Advent, art, blessings, poetry | 3 Comments »

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