The Advent Door

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.

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.