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Contemplating Christmas

November 30, 2009

It’s official: as of yesterday, Advent has begun. As I set out into the season, I’m aware of how often I’ve lived out this scenario: I’m in church on Christmas Eve, catching my breath as the intense weeks of December come to a close, and I think, “Okay, now I’m ready for Advent to begin!”

This Advent season isn’t likely to be any less full than previous ones, but I’m working to discern how to move through it in a mindful fashion, one in which I can catch my breath earlier and more often. I have found myself thinking of Etty Hillesum, a young Dutch Jewish woman who composed an astounding series of journals before being sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp, where she died in 1943. In one of those journals, Etty wrote, “…sometimes the most important thing in a whole day is the rest we take between two deep breaths, or the turning inwards in prayer for five short minutes.”

On this Advent night, I’m taking a few deep breaths, and I would love your company. As a way of offering a space of rest and reflection amid these days, I’ve designed a video called Contemplating Christmas: Finding Quiet in a Season of Mystery and Hope. The video intertwines images from The Advent Door with a piece of stunning Christmas music from my sweetheart, Garrison Doles. For a few short minutes—six, all told, and hopefully a few beyond that—I invite you to breathe, and to ponder, and to rest.

In addition to the version of the video above (which is linked from YouTube), I also have a large-format, high-resolution version available for use in worship and other settings where you might like to invite others to enter some creative quiet. You can find this version by visiting Contemplating Christmas Video.

The song on the video is the title song from the CD The Night of Heaven and Earth, a wondrous collection of Garrison’s original Christmas music. You can find the CD and listen to samples here: The Night of Heaven and Earth.

On this day and all the days to come, I send you many blessings and pray that God will draw you into spaces of rest and delight. A Merry Advent to you!

Posted in Advent, art, Christmas, lectionary, religion, sacred time | 10 Comments »

Advent 1: A Path of Blessing

November 28, 2009

Image: Night and Day We Pray for You © Jan Richardson

Reading from the Epistles, Advent 1, Year C: 1 Thessalonians 3.9-13

While I was in New Brunswick, Canada, last weekend (a wondrous place to prepare to enter into Advent), I had the opportunity to preach at a United Church of Canada congregation in Riverview. One of the pastors invited me to be part of the children’s time in worship, during which several of the children asked me a few questions. One of them asked me, “Do you like writing or making art more, and why?” As I shared my response, I told her what I often tell folks who ask me if I enjoy writing: I say, “I enjoy having written.”

Even though I’ve understood myself as a writer nearly from the time I could first hold a pencil, and experience it as being at the core of my vocation and calling, the practice of writing is oftentimes a place of struggle and resistance for me. For the most part, I much prefer reaching the end of a piece of work than being in the midst of it. I have come, however, to understand this wrestling as part of the process: navigating and negotiating the struggle is part of the creative work. Still, there are moments of pleasure along the way that come as pure grace and help stir up my energy: times when the words come together in just the right way and I’m able to articulate—or to allow the Spirit to articulate—what it is that I want to say.

I’ve spent most of this year working on a new book. It’s been a tremendously engaging process in that it’s brought together much of what I’ve been studying and pondering and praying with and chewing on for the past fifteen years. At the same time, it’s probably the most demanding writing project I’ve ever undertaken. It has tapped every reserve of creative persistence I possess, and has compelled me to search for sustenance in ways I haven’t had to before.

Many of the moments of grace and pleasure that I’ve found in the persevering—and that have helped stoke my endurance—have come in writing a series of blessings for the book. The book consists primarily of reflections that draw from the often hidden wellsprings of women’s history and experiences in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Each reading closes with a blessing. With nearly two hundred readings, this means I have written a bunch of blessings. I won’t say that the blessings have come easily. Yet I find that crafting blessings is more like composing poetry than like writing prose. Poetry seems to come from a different place in my soul than prose does, though they are kin and live in the same neighborhood. Whatever or wherever that poetry-generating place in me is, it’s a space in which I move about with rather less resistance than when I’m writing prose, and that’s been tremendously refreshing.

I also love the way in which writing a blessing is a very personal act that intentionally honors the reader. These blessings have come from my guts (to use a technical term): they’ve come from my deepest self in hopes of blessing the deepest self of another. I don’t know into whose hands this book will make its way, but I have written each blessing with the desire that the words will come to the reader as a moment of grace amid whatever is stirring in the landscape of their life in that moment, and will help provide sustenance for the path ahead.

Whenever we offer a blessing, it is an intimate act that acknowledges that we are connected with another and that we desire the wholeness of that person—or that place, or whatever it is that we are blessing. A blessing is a reminder that God has not designed us to live by our own devices: we are bound together with one another and with all of creation, and we are called to work for the well-being of those whom we share this life with—and those who will follow. Offering a blessing is an act of profound hope. In blessing one another, we recognize and ally ourselves with the presence of God who is ever working to bring about the healing of the world.

In their introduction to the “Blessings and Invocations” section in their lovely book Earth Prayers, editors Elizabeth Roberts and Elias Amidon speak to the interconnectedness that characterizes creation, and how blessings are a way of responding to what one writer has called our state of being “inexplicably inextricable” (Southquest blog, “Cold Calling”). “Some scientists,” Roberts and Amidon write, “now recognize that each object in the world is not merely itself but involves every other object. All events are in some way interdependent, and everything we do affects the whole.

“Invoking the powers of the universe,” they go on to say, “or bestowing our blessing on the Earth or other beings is neither a simple benevolent wish nor an act of hubris. Rather it is an act of creative confidence.”

An act of creative confidence. In his first letter to the church at Thessalonica, Paul offers such an act. Having written of the gratitude and joy that he feels because of the faithfulness of his beloved sisters and brothers there, and telling them of the prayers that he offers for them night and day, he offers powerful words of blessing. Praying that God may “direct our way to you,” Paul (who is also writing on behalf of Silvanus and Timothy) tells his friends,

And may the Lord make you increase and abound in love for one another and for all, just as we abound in love for you. And may he so strengthen your hearts in holiness that you may be blameless before our God and Father and the coming of our Lord Jesus with all his saints.

Amid the struggles of the early church, Paul offers words that he has chosen with great care and love in order to encourage and sustain the community. It is clear that these Thessalonian friends have been a tremendous source of blessing to Paul because of their faithfulness and their care for him and for his companions in ministry. He offers these words—and this whole letter—as a blessing to them in return. And that’s how blessings work: we offer them in recognition of the gifts we have received, and in hope of passing these gifts along, that others may flourish.

Paul offers us a powerful blessing and challenge to take with us into the coming weeks. As we enter the season of Advent this Sunday, Paul’s words beckon us to ask, what blessings have we received? What blessings might we need for our journey through Advent? Who in our lives might be in need of a blessing that we can offer, and how will we offer it? In word, in action, what can we give to another that will honor our inexplicable, inextricable connection and will sustain them on the path ahead?

In these holy days, know that your presence on the path is a joy to me and that I pray for you. May God strengthen your hearts this Advent, and may our very lives be a blessing for the wholeness of this world.

[To use the image “Night and Day We Pray for You,” 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, lectionary, religion, sacred time | 8 Comments »

Advent 1: Practicing the Apocalypse

November 23, 2009

Image: Apocalypse, Again © Jan Richardson

Reading from the Gospels, Advent 1, Year C: Luke 21.25-36

As I write this, I’m en route from Orlando to New Brunswick, Canada, where I’ll be leading a women’s retreat as we prepare to enter into Advent. It seems fitting that my journey into Advent, a season characterized by waiting, is beginning with flight delays. The delay in Orlando turned out great not only because the extra hour and a half that I spent there provided one of the calmest interludes that I’ve had amidst the extra-full pace of the past few weeks, but also because it reduced the amount of time I’m currently having to spend laid over at an airport that shall remain nameless.

The airport is absolutely crammed with people, and my inner introvert is reeling. I’m usually really good at being able to find a semi-quiet spot in any airport, but this evening I’m doing well just to have found a few square feet of space here on the floor outside a door marked “Bus Hold Room” as I eat my second turkey sandwich of the day. (Not because I have a hankering for turkey; let’s just say that the airport could do with a few more food options at this terminal.) Amid the masses, it feels like I’m in some cosmic way station. I find myself marveling at the endless variety by which humans can take shape, and also overwhelmed by their sheer numbers, close proximity, and noise.

All in all, I’m finding this a good place to think about the apocalypse.

Each year, the lectionary for the first Sunday of Advent gives us a version of Jesus’ words about the end of days. This year Luke does the honors. In Luke 21.25-36, we read of celestial signs, cataclysms of nature, and distress upon the earth. Jesus speaks of fear and foreboding that will come upon the people. He tells of how, in the days to come, the powers of the heavens will be shaken.

Along with its parallels in the gospels of Matthew and Mark, this passage forms part of what is sometimes called the “little apocalypse.” It seems a sobering and grim way to welcome us into a season that in the Christian tradition is a time of expectation and celebration and that the wider culture typically depicts as cheery. Yet in greeting us as we cross the threshold into Advent, this apocalypse-in-miniature reminds us that this season bids us not only to remember and celebrate the Christ who has already come to us, but also to anticipate and look toward the fullness of time when he will bring about the redemption of the world.

That’s what Jesus is really getting at in this passage, after all: he is not offering these apocalyptic images in order to scare the pants off people but rather to assure his listeners that the healing of the world is at hand, and that they need to stay awake, stay alert, and learn to read the signs of what is ahead. He is calling them not to crumble or quail when intimations of the end come but instead to “stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.” Jesus urges his hearers—and us—toward practices that help them stay grounded and centered in their daily lives so that they won’t be caught unawares in the days to come.

This is the message that the lectionary gives us each year as we enter into Advent. Again and again, we are called to circle back around the apocalypse, to revisit its landscape, to take in its terrain. With its annual return, and its repetitive challenge to us, this passage puts me in mind of an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Preparing to save the world yet again, a weary Buffy has this exchange with Giles, her Watcher:

Buffy: How many apocalypses is this now?
Giles: About six, I think.
Buffy: Feels like a hundred.

The season of Advent gives us the apocalypse each year not only so that we might recognize it, should it come, but also—and perhaps especially—that we might enter more mindfully into our present landscape and perceive the signs of how God is working out God’s longing in the world here and now. The root meaning of the word apocalypse, after all, is revelation. And God is, in every time and season, about the work of revealing God’s presence. The one who came to us two millennia ago as Emmanuel, God-with-us, and who spoke of a time when he would come again in fullness, reveals himself even now in our midst, calling us to see all the guises in which he goes about in this world.

Advent reminds us, year in and year out, that although we are to keep a weather eye out for cosmic signs, we must, like the fig tree that Jesus evokes in this passage, be rooted in the life of the earth. And in the rhythm of our daily lives here on earth, Christ bids us to practice the apocalypse. He calls us in each day and moment to do the things that will stir up our courage and keep us grounded in God, not only that we may perceive Christ when he comes, but also that we may recognize him even now. There is a sense, after all, in which we as Christians live the apocalypse on a daily basis. Amid the destruction and devastation that are ever taking place in the world, Christ beckons us to perceive and to participate in the ways that he is already seeking to bring redemption and healing for the whole of creation.

As we enter the season of Advent, and spiral yet again around the landscape that this first Sunday gives to us, how might Christ be inviting you to practice the apocalypse? What are the habits that keep you centered in God, that sharpen your vision, and that help you recognize the presence of Christ in this world? How do you participate in the redemption that God is ever working to bring about within creation? What is it that you long for in these Advent days?

Blessings and peace to you in this coming season.

[For last year’s reflection on Mark’s version of this passage, visit Through the Door.]

[To use the image “Apocalypse, Again,” 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, Gospel of Luke, lectionary, religion, sacred time | 9 Comments »

Approaching Advent

November 9, 2009

Wise Women Also Came © Jan L. Richardson

In her book Dakota: A Spiritual Geography, Kathleen Norris tells a story that’s said to come from a Russian Orthodox monastery. A seasoned monk, long accustomed to the tradition of monastic hospitality that welcomes all guests as Christ, says to a young monk, “I have finally learned to accept people as they are. Whatever they are in the world, a prostitute, a prime minister, it is all the same to me. But sometimes,” the monk continues, “I see a stranger coming up the road and I say, “Oh, Jesus Christ, is it you again?”

Advent is just around the corner (this year the first Sunday of Advent is on November 29), and I have found myself thinking about this story as I begin to turn my attention toward this season of anticipation. In the rhythm of the Christian year, Advent is a time that beckons us to consider how—and whether—we are looking for the Christ who comes to us anew in this season. How do we keep our eyes open to the holy one who is so fond of hiding out in the most surprising disguises, again and again and again? On those occasions when we do recognize the presence of Christ, how do we welcome him into our midst? Are we leaving enough space in our days to linger with the Christ who comes to us in this and every season?

These are a few of the questions I’m pondering as I prepare to enter into the coming Advent days. How about you? What’s on your mind and tugging at your soul as this sacred season draws close? What do you hope to welcome into your life as we begin to journey toward the celebration of Christmas?

After an intense year of working on an almost-finished new book, and taking a bit of a break from blogging at The Painted Prayerbook as a result, one of the things I’m looking forward to in the coming weeks is creating new art and reflections here at The Advent Door. I look forward to sharing the coming days with you and would love to hear what’s stirring for you as the season unfolds.

Along with the art and reflections I’ll be posting here, I have a few other resources for Advent and Christmas that I’d be delighted to share with you:

IMAGES ONLINE: Jan Richardson Images enables churches and other communities to download high-resolution files of my artwork for use in worship, education, and other settings. The images are available for $15 each, or you can sign up for an annual subscription, which gives you unlimited downloads for a year (within the Guidelines for Use). To celebrate the approach of Advent, I’m offering a festive discount on annual subscriptions: for just $100, you can sign up for an artful year (regular $165). The site offers lots of images for Advent, Christmas, and beyond. Visit Subscribe to Jan Richardson Images to sign up.

BOOKS: Published through my small press, The Luminous Word: Entering the Mysteries of Advent & Christmas offers artwork and reflections on the sacred texts and themes of the coming season. Visit Wanton Gospeller Press to find out more about these handmade books. Also, thanks for the inquiries I’ve received about Night Visions: Searching the Shadows of Advent and Christmas. We’re working to have it back in print next year and look forward to having it available for you again.

CARDS: I have artful greeting cards available for the season; visit Christmas Cards.

ART PRINTS: A great gift for someone else or for your own self. Visit Art Prints, where the available prints include one that gathers together 25 of the images from this blog.

ORIGINAL ART: For an extra special gift, I have a few of the original pieces from the series The Hours of Mary Magdalene available. For details, visit The Hours of Mary Magdalene and click on the individual images.

COOL MUSIC FOR THE SEASON: Check out the post Music and Mystery for some of my favorite tunes that draw me deeper into the season.

ETC: I send out an occasional e-newsletter that includes a seasonal reflection, artwork, information about current offerings and upcoming events, and whatever else strikes my creative fancy. I would be delighted to include you in my mailing list if you haven’t already subscribed. You can sign up here.

Blessings to you as Advent approaches! In the coming days, may we have many occasions to welcome Christ, and may others find his presence in us.

Posted in Advent, art, Christmas, sacred time | 4 Comments »

Festival of Lights

December 21, 2008

Winter Solstice © Jan L. Richardson

Happy Winter Solstice to you! (And a joyous Summer Solstice to my neighbors in the Southern Hemisphere!) Around the world, nearly every culture has a celebration during the darkest time of the year. Typically it’s some form of a Festival of Lights, an occasion to find illumination and cheer in a time of shadows and to anticipate the return of the sun. Today I’m particularly mindful of my Jewish sisters and brothers who will begin their celebration of Hanukkah at sundown this evening.

On this solstice day, here’s one memory of a winter’s celebration:

Festival of Lights

We are dancing in the streets of the city of my college years. The downtown is lit up for the holidays, and the music blares as our feet repeatedly hit the hard surface of the street. Tomorrow we will long for hot baths to soak the soreness from our legs, but tonight we are dancing at the Festival of Lights.

In the years to come I will learn how necessary it is to keep dancing, how celebration is not a luxury but a staple of life, how in the grimmest moments I will need to take myself down to the closest festival at hand. I will go not to drown my sorrow or to mask my despair or to ignore the real suffering of the world or of my own self. I will go to beat out the message with my feet that in the darkness we are dancing, and while we are weeping we are dancing, and our legs are aching but we are dancing. And under the night sky we are dancing; lighting a match to the shadows, we are dancing; starting to sing when they have stopped the music, we are dancing; sending shock waves with our feet to the other side of the world, we are dancing still.

As we tilt toward the bright half of the year (or toward the dark in the south), may you find much to give you cause for celebration. Blessings!

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

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

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The Day of the Lady

December 12, 2008

The Day of the Lady © Jan L. Richardson

Happy Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe! This day commemorates the appearances of Mary to a man named Juan Diego between December 9-12, 1531, in Mexico. Known by various names including the Mother or Patroness of the Americas and La Virgen Morena (The Brown-skinned Virgin), Our Lady of Guadalupe is a culturally unique and passionately beloved manifestation of Mary.

According to the legend, Our Lady of Guadalupe made her appearance to Juan Diego about a decade following the arrival of the Spanish conquistadores, who brought with them, among other things, the practice of Roman Catholicism. An early convert to the new faith, Juan Diego was walking from his village toward what is now Mexico City when, on a hillside, the Virgin appeared to him and, speaking in Diego’s native language of Nahuatl, told him to take a message to the bishop that a sanctuary should be built on that site. Diego made several visits to Bishop Zumárraga, who was naturally skeptical of this peasant man. Finally the bishop asked for a sign. The Virgin provided one. Sending Juan Diego to the top of Tepeyac Hill, Mary told him to pick the roses he would find there. Gathering the out-of-season blooms in his tilma (cloak), he set out once again to see the bishop. When Juan Diego opened his tilma in the presence of Bishop Zumárraga, the stunning December roses spilled forth, but Mary had one more miracle in store: to the amazement of those present, the empty tilma bore an image of the Virgin.

The Lady received her sanctuary.

In the succeeding centuries, controversies have attended the Virgin of Guadalupe, including disputes over the authenticity of her appearances and of the image on the tilma, which still survives. Her role as an indigenous manifestation of Mary receives much attention; emerging from the encounter of native Mexican religion with the Catholicism of the conquistadores, she is perceived by some as a sort of syncretistic, Christianized goddess. Whatever her origins and meanings, Our Lady of Guadalupe persists as a powerful presence of hope and a beloved sign of Mary’s love for the Americas.

In a bookstore several years ago, I picked up a small volume titled Felicidad de México. Published in 1995 to commemorate the centennial of the coronation of the Virgin of Guadalupe, the book is in Spanish, which I understand muy poquito and read just barely enough to be dangerous. I got it for the pictures. Filled with wonderful images of Mary, the pages offer many versions of the apparition of Guadalupe. In these depictions, the blue-cloaked Mary wears a crown, hovers above an angel-held crescent moon, and shimmers in a penumbra of sunlight with rays like knife blades. Always, there are roses.

Here at the midpoint of Advent, the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe invites us to keep our eyes open for the variety of guises in which the sacred shows up. This day beckons us, too, to be mindful of our connections with sisters and brothers of the global church. On this day I am asking myself, To a world in which God is laboring to be born, what difference does my Advent journey make? And what wisdom might the Mother of God have to offer me about that?

A blessed feast day to you! May something miraculous come your way.

[To use the “Day of the Lady” 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, Christmas, religion, sacred time | 3 Comments »

Music and Mystery

December 3, 2008

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 »

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

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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Door 23: Doing Some Dreaming

December 23, 2007

Among the leaves of a tenth-century illuminated manuscript in the Medici Library in Rome, Joseph lies dreaming. Hands resting on his stomach, brow creased, Joseph sleeps on a multicolored coverlet. Having just discovered that his fiance Mary is pregnant, Joseph has gone to bed thinking he will “dismiss her quietly,” as Matthew tells us in today’s Gospel reading (Mt. 1.18-25). He will wake up with a different plan altogether.

Coming from the upper corner of this manuscript page, an angel with boots and blue wings hurtles toward the slumbering Joseph. “Shooting towards Joseph like a projectile from heaven,” Sister Wendy Beckett says of the angel; “a spiritual rocket is about to land on his anxious slumbers, and his rational world will deconstruct.”

This vivid and homely depiction of Joseph’s dream, and Sister Wendy’s commentary on it, has me thinking today about the intersections between what we tend to call the real world and the world of the imagination, the realm of dreams and visions and stories. Sr. Wendy reminds us that although Jesus’ birth is marked by signs and wonders, it is rooted in the very real experience of a woman who finds herself pregnant and a man who has to discern how to respond to this.

“The birth of Christ,” Sr. Wendy observes in her commentary on this illumination, “can seem utterly removed from the everyday reality of our own life, elevated into a sacred sphere where all is peace and joy. Not so: Mary is living in a real world, though in her innocence she may not have appreciated the full dimensions of it.” (From Sister Wendy’s Nativity and Life of Christ, 1998.)

This artful depiction of the dreaming Joseph and his dive-bombing angel vividly illuminates the intersection of the real world with the dreaming world. Here in the final days of Advent, it’s a timely image, and a timely story, to ponder.

At this point in the Advent season, we may find ourselves wrestling with the hopes and expectations we carried into the season. Ideas we had about how we would spend these days may not have come to pass. Plans we made to have shopping completed by this point, gifts wrapped and under the tree (or in the mail), Christmas cards sent, decorations hung and radiant, cooking preparations under way—and time for intensely meaningful quiet reflection in the midst of it all—well, that just might not have happened quite the way we’d hoped. The real world—the realm in which people get sick, wars continue, death comes to call, relationships crumble, and women find themselves unexpectedly pregnant—may be impinging heavily on us in this season, and for some folks, there is deep dissonance between the culturally expected cheer of this season and the realities of what this month has brought.

How do we move beyond this dissonance to open ourselves to that deeper place where the real world and the dream world intersect?

The past few days of this Advent season have found me trying to discern my way through some chaos that erupted in my personal ecosystem. I’ve spent a fair chunk of time having conversations in my head with a couple of folks who have me sorely vexed. I’ve been focused on trying to move through the emotional layers toward a reasoned, rational, grounded response. But in contemplating the text that Matthew has given us for today, I find myself wondering, what if there’s some other realm I need to open myself to as I discern my way through this? Beyond the realm of emotion, and beyond the realm of reason—both of which are important realms to pay attention to—might there be an additional source that has some help and wisdom waiting for me?

I imagine that Joseph knew about emotion, that he had some kind of visceral reaction when Mary told him she was pregnant. In response, he drew on reason and rationality to form a plan.

And then, Matthew tells us, Joseph dreamed. And his dream came as an interruption, a disruption to both the emotional and reasoned realms he had been inhabiting and acting from. In that powerful collision between the real world and the dreaming world, so literally depicted in the manuscript in the Medici Library, a new way opened up for Joseph. And for Mary. And for Jesus.

As I continue to discern what role I’m being called to take in the chaos that’s gotten stirred up this week, I’m feeling challenged to carry that image of Joseph. His story, and its placement at this point in the Advent season, feels like an invitation to pay attention to my dreaming world. I’m not referring just to my night dreams; I’m thinking also of other realms where the unconscious bubbles up into my awareness. In my creative work, in my life of prayer and contemplation, in the landscape of my imagination: what wisdom might God be offering in those places? What messages might that realm have to offer, as Joseph discovered in his dreaming sleep?

How have you been experiencing the so-called real world in these Advent days? What hopes and expectations did you carry into this Advent season, and what are your hopes now? Who’s got your ear these days—family, friends, news media, old voices you’ve been carrying around in your head, sorely vexatious people with whom you’re having imaginary conversations—and what are they telling you?

What message do you need to hear? What realms are you listening into? How do you—how do we—cultivate an openness to the place where the real world and the dreaming world intersect and offer us the message that we most need?

[To use the “Doing Some Dreaming” 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, Christmas, Gospel of Matthew, lectionary, medieval, religion, sacred time | 1 Comment »

Door 19: The Inhabited Psalter

December 19, 2007

This week, the lectionary gives us a psalm of heartbreak and hope. Crying out to God in the midst of desperate desolation, the writer of Psalm 80 pleads with the Holy One:

Stir up your might,
and come to save us!
Restore us, O God;
let your face shine, that we may be saved.

Reading the psalmist’s song of gut-wrenching hope, I’ve been thinking about Edward.

I inherited Edward. He was a friend and colleague of my sister when she lived in Atlanta. When I moved to Atlanta to attend seminary, Sally had already moved to another part of the country. When she returned to Atlanta for a visit, I met Edward. He became a blessedly unlikely friend. Totally disconnected from the seminary community around which my life revolved, and with a bit of a wild hair, Edward provided a unique thread of connection to the world beyond.

I went to church with him sometimes. An active member of an Episcopal congregation, Edward introduced me to the riches of Anglican liturgy. One of my favorite memories of being at All Saints’ Church is connected to an evensong service for which Edward played the organ, his creative spirit at play in a way that I imagine he experienced less frequently in his day job in the business world.

One year, during the Advent season, Edward gave me a book in which he had inscribed these words:

Stir up thy power, O Lord,
and with great might come among us;
and, because we are sorely hindered by our sins,
let thy bountiful grace and mercy speedily help and deliver us…

I was unfamiliar with the words, but from his inscription I learned that the words came from the Book of Common Prayer; they are part of the collect for the third Sunday of Advent. It is an old, old prayer that, in one version or another, goes back centuries. I have a Book of Common Prayer whose long-ago text renders it in these words:

O Lord, raise up (we pray thee) thy power, and come among us, and with great might succour us; that whereas, through our sins and wickedness, we are sore let and hindered in running the race that is set before us, thy bountiful grace and mercy may speedily help and deliver us…

Zowie. I love that version.

With roots in this week’s psalm, this prayer links us to generations of those who have cried out for God’s saving power. For millennia the Psalter has served as a wellspring for prayer, both for those who have prayed its verses as well as for those who, as in this collect from the Book of Common Prayer, have woven the psalms into new prayers that echo with the ancient longings that we humans have carried throughout our history.

The Book of Psalms, perhaps more than any other book of the Bible, carries our collective memory as people who have sought the presence of God in every circumstance. The psalms give voice to the full range of human emotion. Desire, rage, hope, vindictiveness, love, despair: nearly everything we are capable of, both exalted and base, is at play in its pages. The psalmist incorporates it all, with no visible fear that he will be judged for bringing his emotions into the presence of God. It reminds me of one of the desert fathers, Abba Poemen, who wisely counseled us to “Teach your mouth to say that which you have in your heart.” The psalmist did. A lot.

Because he (they) did, and because these words were gathered together in a book, we are inheritors of this remarkable body of poetry that has been a central sacred text for the ages, not only for Christians but for Jews as well. As prayers for both public worship and for private contemplation, the Psalms link us with all those, Jewish and Christian alike, who have prayed these words in solitude and in community across generations.

When I open a book that contains the Psalms, it often stirs particular connections with others to whom I am linked by those words. When I open the Benedictine breviary that the community of St. Brigid of Kildare Monastery uses, and pray the psalms contained there, I am mindful that I do not pray alone. Though I may be in solitude, I am praying in community not only with my oblate sisters and brothers but with Benedictines and other monastics around the world and across the ages who have prayed these same psalms that are at the core of monastic life.

I have a Bible that belonged to a beloved great-aunt, and when I read the beautiful cadences of the Psalms in the King James Version, I am mindful that she once prayed these same prayers. Her open Bible becomes a thin place, a space where the veil between worlds becomes permeable.

During the graveside service held last week for a family friend who influenced me greatly, the pastor invited us to pray the 23rd Psalm together (King James, of course, the version inextricably and beautifully bound with that particular psalm). The collective voice of the community gave me shivers; it tapped into a deep well of memory, and the voices lifted by the grave of that beloved mentor, friend, mother, and wife were not just our voices alone.

The Psalms are haunted. Generation upon generation, in dozens of languages, in every circumstance, the people of God have turned to them, have sung them, have whispered them, have wailed them, have chanted them alone and in community. The Psalms are inhabited, filled with the presences of all who have prayed them.

Whom do you hear when you turn to the Psalms? Who inhabits their lines? Who prays them with you?

Today, as I ponder this week’s psalm, Edward is especially present with me. He died more than a decade ago, a few months after I moved from Atlanta. He was altogether too young. In this psalm’s lines of desolation and desire intertwined, I hear the echoes of Edward’s voice. As he journeyed throughout long and thieving months of illness, Edward, and the community that surrounded him, lived the psalmist’s rhythms of heartbreak and hope. And heartbreak. And hope.

Stir up your might,
and come to save us!

O come to us. Come.

[To use the “Inhabited Psalter” 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, Christmas, lectionary, Psalms, religion, sacred time | 1 Comment »

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