While the postings for this week are percolating, here are links to previous reflections on several of the lectionary texts for Advent 4 (December 19). Blessings to you!
Psalm 80:1-7, 17-19: Door 19: The Inhabited Psalter
Romans 1:1-7: Door 22: In Which We Get Called on the Carpet
Matthew 1:18-25: Door 23: Doing Some Dreaming
And a Happy Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe:
Image: The Hour of Lauds: Visitation © Jan Richardson
Canticle for Advent 3 (alternate reading): Luke 1.46-55
Two nights ago we gathered for the Wellspring service, the contemplative worship gathering that Gary and I offer each month. On that Advent night, in that quiet and prayer-soaked chapel, our primary text was Luke 1.39-56, in which we find the story of Mary’s visit to Elizabeth and of the song that Mary pours forth when Elizabeth welcomes and blesses her. This song, which we have come to know as the Magnificat, is our canticle for this third Sunday of Advent.
At the service, during our time for conversation (because, at Wellspring, the act of proclamation is not solely the work of one person), we spoke of how Mary’s song—this song of how God turns the world right side up—comes from Elizabeth’s blessing of her: how Elizabeth’s words seem to release the song, set it loose from Mary’s lips and from her very soul. We spoke of the intimacy of this story, how it is in their meeting, kinswoman to kinswoman, that the blessing and the singing take place. We spoke of how blessing takes place in community, how it depends upon community, how it takes being in community to offer and receive the blessings that will enable us to proclaim the song that God has placed within us. We spoke of how sometimes the best way to receive a deeply needed blessing is to offer a blessing ourselves. And we spoke, too, of how there are times when God calls us—challenges us—to simply receive a blessing that is meant for us, without feeling compelled to respond in turn.
This intimate scene, this exchange between these two woman who find themselves in a stunning intersection of heaven and earth, is the stage by which Luke describes how God transforms the world. And it rests, in large measure, upon the act of blessing: one woman laying her hands upon another and speaking words that penetrate whatever anxiety and uncertainty may be present in Mary as she sets out into a wild and uncharted terrain.
Later, after the service, the power of Elizabeth’s blessing, and what it unleashed, lingered with me. I picked up John O’Donohue’s book To Bless the Space Between Us and turned once again to his brilliant essay at the end of the book, “To Retrieve the Lost Art of Blessing.” Here he writes,
We never see the script of our lives; nor do we know what is coming toward us, or why our life takes on this particular shape or sequence. A blessing is different from a greeting, a hug, a salute, or an affirmation; it opens a different door in human encounter. One enters into the forecourt of the soul, the source of intimacy and the compass of destiny.
Our longing for the eternal kindles our imagination to bless. Regardless of how we configure the eternal, the human heart continues to dream of a state of wholeness, a place where everything comes together, where loss will be made good, where blindness will transform into vision, where damage will be made whole, where the clenched question will open in the house of surprise, where the travails of life’s journey will enjoy a homecoming. To invoke a blessing is to call some of that wholeness upon a person now.
This wholeness is intended not just for the one who receives it; it is linked with the wholeness of the whole world.
“Blessed is she who believed,” Elizabeth the Blesser cried out.
“God has brought down the powerful from their thrones,” Mary the Blessed sings in response, “and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things . . .”
O’Donohue writes this, too:
Who has the power to bless? This question is not to be answered simply by the description of one’s institutional status or membership. But perhaps there are deeper questions hidden here: What do you bless with? Or where do you bless from? When you bless another, you first gather yourself; you reach below your surface mind and personality, down to the deeper source within you—namely, the soul. Blessing is from soul to soul.
In this Advent season, how will you use the power you have to bless? How might God be calling you to offer a blessing—or to receive one?
From my soul to yours and back again: blessings.
[For previous reflections on the Magnificat, visit Door 11: In Which We Get to Sing and Door 14: Remembering Forward.]
[To use the image “Visitation,” please visit this page at janrichardsonimages.com. Your use of janrichardsonimages.com helps make the ministry of The Advent Door possible. Thank you!]
When the Prison Bars Bled Light © Jan L. Richardson
Reading from the Gospels, Advent 2, Year A: Matthew 11.2-11
A week in which I haven’t had a lot of hurry left in me. Much to do that seems important, much of it done, but in the midst of it, a craving for Advent quiet and rest.
Finally, last night, a few hours in the studio. Laying gold paint upon the papers that will find their way into the collages to come. One layer of gold, then another. Placing them to dry on newspapers on the floor. Gary pokes his head into the room, sees the papers, comments on the pathway of gold.
Later, after the drying, I pick up a few of the shimmering sheets. Cover the gold entirely with gray. Let the gray dry just enough, then take sandpaper to it.
All through the painting, the drying, the sanding, watching the gold emerge from the gray, I am thinking about John the Baptist, the Preparer of the Way who now sits in prison. His path brought to an abrupt and unjust end.
This is the John of whom we read in Luke 1, where his mother, Elizabeth, says to her kinswoman Mary, “For as soon as I heard the sound of your greeting, the child in my womb leaped for joy.” A leap of recognition, Luke means us to see: even in his mother’s womb, John the Way-Maker, John the Messenger, is able to discern and recognize the One for whom the world has longed.
It is a far different enclosure that John finds himself in now. He will not emerge from this one into life, as when he left the safe confines of his mother’s womb. This enclosure will lead instead to his death at a gruesome dinner party.
And yet, even here, John’s powers of discernment are at full force. Enclosed within his cell, John has not closed in on himself. This one whom Jesus calls a messenger is still receiving messages. Is still keeping his ears and eyes open. Is still able to turn his attention beyond himself. “When John heard in prison what the Messiah was doing . . .” Matthew writes. That phrase. When John heard in prison what the Messiah was doing. How the Word permeates even the prison walls. Shines forth even through the prison bars. Illuminates the darkest cell.
I think about these things as, beneath the sandpaper, gold begins to peek through the gray. Think of how John in his confinement refused to stop looking, stop preparing, stop seeing. Even in his enforced and final enclosure, John persists in turning an eye toward the Messiah. Seeks him. Inquires after him. When John’s disciples return to him with news of the blind who see, the lame who walk, the lepers made whole, he knows. Recognizes once again. Leaps, perhaps, for joy.
And what of us? In these Advent days, how do we turn our attention beyond our own walls, beyond our own limits? How do we open ourselves to hear and see past what presses in upon us, that we may receive the message, the Word that comes to us?
In this season, may you hear and see the One who comes, and proclaim the news of what he is doing. Blessings.
[To use the “When the Prison Bars Bled Light” image, please visit this page at janrichardsonimages.com. Your use of janrichardsonimages.com helps make the ministry of The Advent Door possible. Thank you!]
With having the launch celebration for my new book a couple of nights ago, and all the preparations that went into that splendid evening, I have not quite finished my first post for Advent 3 (December 12). I’m aiming to publish it tomorrow. In the meantime, though, I would be pleased for you to spiral back around and visit my earlier images and reflections on the readings for the coming Sunday, from my first year of doing The Advent Door, three years ago. You can click on the images or the post titles to find your way.
Now that the book celebration is past, and I’m home for a few weeks, I look forward to posting more frequently here. Not daily, as I did during that first year at The Advent Door! But I invite you to swing back by in the near future to take a breath and savor a few quiet moments in this season that is often so frantic. Know that I’m holding you in prayer in these Advent days.
Blessings to you.
Isaiah 35:1-10: Door 10: Hitting the Highway
Luke 1:47-55 (alternate reading/United Methodist reading): Door 11: In Which We Get to Sing
Matthew 11:2-11: Door 16: The News in Prison
James 5:7-10: Door 15: Another Name for Patience
A Road Runs Through It © Jan Richardson
Reading from the Gospels, Advent 2, Year A: Matthew 3.1-12
Driving home from the Thanksgiving holiday, this gospel passage on my mind, I spent most of my time thinking about roads. I thought of roads I have traveled, the ones already laid down for me: pathways made of concrete, of asphalt, of dirt, of stone. Pathways made of traditions, of the habits of communities, of the patterns of institutions. I thought of roads I have made where, as a minister-artist-writer, there were none: ways I have made through imagination, through dreaming, through effort and intention. Roads made of words, paint, paper; roads fashioned of longing and of prayer.
I thought of what it takes to make a way, how it is that we create a passage from one place to another within the landscape of the world or of our own inner terrain. How we must discern the materials to use, and the tools; how crucial to learn to navigate, to reckon, to read the lay of the land. How we sometimes find a path as much by stumbling as by skill. How we may have to tear up a road, make it again in a different direction.
But I think the Advent road is perhaps not like this. That it is not one that we can fashion from our striving and our skill. That when John the Baptist comes over that wilderness horizon, smelling of camel’s hair, his lips dripping with honey and with fire, he is pointing toward a way that we can make only by what we give up, what we shed, what we let go of.
Looking and sounding so like the prophets who preceded him, John the Baptist is a man drenched in the desert. Although we know little about his life prior to now, the gospel writers viewed him as the one of whom Isaiah wrote, “The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.’” John has been schooling himself in divestment, shedding himself of everything that would obstruct the path he has been called to prepare.
As the Baptist strides into the Advent landscape, he reminds us that there is much that connects this season with the season of Lent, with its images of wilderness and its invitation to let go of what hinders us from God. John’s presence, so early in the Advent lectionary, calls us to see that beneath the twinkle lights and trimmings that permeate these pre-Christmas days, there is a terrain more spare and elemental: a landscape in which we learn to turn away from what distracts us so that we can welcome the one for whom we are waiting. This turning is at the heart of John’s message to his hearers: “Repent,” he calls out, “for the kingdom of heaven has come near.”
John’s fiery words, especially those he addresses to the Pharisees and Sadducees, can overwhelm with their sheer force and disturbing forthrightness. Yet there is something that we—that I—need to hear within the fierceness of John’s message. It is difficult to make a way for the one who comes if I am not turned in the right direction. It is hard to perceive the kingdom of heaven if there are obstructions in my path—if I have not, to borrow one of John’s images, sorted out the chaff, to make a space for the one who will enter to do his own clearing away.
Although the Advent path leads us through the desert, deprivation is neither the focus nor the final word of the wilderness. As the honey-eating John knew, the desert offers its own delights. What the wilderness gives us is a path that helps us perceive where our true treasure lies. And does not merely give us a path: empties us enough so that a path is made within us. Through us. Of us. A road for the holy to enter the world. A way for the Christ who comes.
What’s in your way these days? If you were to imagine your life as a path, a road, what would it look like right now? Is there anything cluttering your way? Is there something you need to let go of in order to prepare the way for the Christ who enters the world in this and every season?
Blessings to you in these Advent days. May you find delights even in the desert spaces of this season.
[For a previous reflection on this text, visit Door 9: Making Way.]
P.S. My husband and I are hosting a party this week to celebrate the publication of my new book, In the Sanctuary of Women. If you’re in the Orlando vicinity—or are in need of a Florida getaway in December—please join us! The celebration will be this Friday, December 3, at 8 PM at First United Methodist Church of Winter Park. Visit Sanctuary Celebration for more info.
[To use the image “A Road Runs Through It,” please visit this page at janrichardsonimages.com. Your use of janrichardsonimages.com helps make the ministry of The Advent Door possible. Thank you!]
Where Advent Begins © Jan Richardson
Reading from the Gospels, Advent 1, Year A: Matthew 24.36-44
Those who have been journeying with me for a while know that this has been my most intense year ever. “Wild and wondrous” is the way I have often described this year that has included getting married, moving, completing and launching a new book, and some major trips for work. The year has been so full that it’s only been just recently that my husband and I, who got married in April, have been home long enough and without major deadlines looming that we have begun to do things like buy furniture and unpack the rest of our boxes.
It has been a year of upheaval: leaving the cozy apartment that I had lived in for a dozen years, moving out of the single life I had always known, settling into a new home, learning to navigate the rhythms of this community of two that Gary and I are making. The year has, at times, been unsettling as it has brought deep and welcome changes but also a schedule that has sometimes made it challenging to absorb and live into those changes. And the year has held, too, the sorts of disruptions and upheavals that always lie beyond our control. Gary and I have just returned from the funeral of one of my aunts. The rituals and gatherings that followed her death, with their bittersweet mix of sorrow and celebration, offered a powerful reminder of how this life that we share is so unpredictable and fragile, yet so persistently resilient.
And it is in the midst of all this that Advent begins. Each time that I enter this season, I carry fond desires and imaginings about how this will be the year that I find time to cultivate a space of calm as we travel toward Christmas; perhaps this will be the year that I won’t sit in the worship service on Christmas Eve night and think, Now I’m ready for Advent to begin.
Yet, especially in this wild and wondrous year, I suspect that Advent will unfold in much the same way that it has previously: it will be intense (that word, again) and pass more quickly than I would like, leaving me wishing, on Christmas Eve, that I had somehow managed to find a more contemplative pace. I find myself thinking, though, that perhaps this wish points toward the deeper invitation of Advent. Perhaps the preparation and expectation to which Advent calls us are not to be found solely in the spaces we set aside during this season. Although it’s important to keep working at finding those contemplative openings in these days, I suspect that Advent is what happens in the midst of all this. We find the heart of the season, the invitation of these weeks, amid the life that is unfolding around us, with its wildness and wonders and upheavals and intensities.
We see this in the lectionary, where the season of Advent begins on what seems a profoundly unsettling note. The gospel lection for the first Sunday of Advent is always a passage that, whether taken from Matthew, Mark, or Luke, is known as “the little apocalypse.” Each year the first gospel lection of Advent challenges us to remember that this season is a time not only of remembering the Christ who has already come to us but who, the gospels tell us, will come again, with attendant signs and wonders. Jesus calls his hearers—calls us—in these passages to keep awake, to stay alert, to be ready, for we do not know at what hour he will come.
As with the other little apocalypses, Matthew’s version disturbs and challenges us with its images of the loss and lack of security that come with Christ’s return: “Then two will be in the field; one will be taken and one will be left,” Jesus says in this gospel. “Two women will be grinding meal together; one will be taken and one will be left.” Matthew’s version is distinctive and dramatic for the way that Jesus introduces the language of thievery to describe how he will come: “But understand this,” Jesus says as he exhorts his listeners to keep awake; “if the owner of the house had known in what part of the night the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and would not have let his house be broken into.”
It can be tempting to recoil from the imagery that this opening lection gives us: Christ as burglar, coworkers and companions left bereft, the anxiety of not knowing when or how the Word who became flesh for us will come again. Yet the season of Advent challenges us to resist recoiling and instead to press into the insecurity and unsettledness of this passage—and of our lives. Advent beckons us beyond the certainties that may not serve us—those sureties we have relied on that may have no substance to them after all. Advent is a season to look at what we have fashioned our lives around—beliefs, habits, convictions, prejudices—and to see whether these leave any room for the Christ who is so fond of slipping into our lives in guises we may not readily recognize.
In her book The Vigil: Keeping Watch in the Season of Christ’s Coming—a beautiful reflection on Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany—Wendy M. Wright relates words given to her by a Trappist retreat master, who said, “To be a Christian does not mean knowing all the answers; to be a Christian means being willing to live in the part of the self where the question is born.” With this opening lection, Advent reminds us of this in a fashion that may seem painfully direct but can also be tremendously freeing: it tells us that we do not know everything, cannot know everything, are not responsible for knowing everything. It tells us that, ultimately, we live in mystery.
But it also tells us this: if we stay awake; if we open our eyes in the midst of our life, with all of its wildness and wonders, then we will see: something is coming. Drawing closer. Stealing home.
How will you stay awake in this season? What do you long for the weeks ahead to look like? How might you find God’s response to those longings in the rhythm of your life, in the midst of your days?
Whatever the pace of your life in this season, may wonders attend you.
[To use the image “Where Advent Begins,” please visit this page at janrichardsonimages.com. Your use of janrichardsonimages.com helps make the ministry of The Advent Door possible. Thank you!]
Crossing the Threshold © Jan L. Richardson
‘Tis the season, almost! I have been busy in the studio, eagerly preparing to open The Advent Door. All year I look forward to this journey through the scriptures, stories, and images that this time of year offers us, and to sharing in your company along the way. I’m sure that, as always, these Advent weeks will pass by too quickly, but I pray that we will find moments to savor and to experience the spaciousness of this season.
As we prepare to set out, I have a smorgasbord of other resources for Advent and Christmas that I am pleased 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 $120, you can sign up for an artful year (regularly $165). The site offers lots of images for Advent, Christmas, and beyond. Visit Subscribe to Jan Richardson Images to sign up. This is a great way to support the ministry of The Advent Door.
BOOKS: My new book, In the Sanctuary of Women, was just published last month. I’ve been delighted to hear from folks who are purchasing it as a gift in this season—for themselves as well as for others. Visit my Books page for more info and to order. (Inscribed copies are available by request.) And please stop by the companion website at sanctuaryofwomen.com, whose features include a Guide for Reading Groups as well as a blog. For a book designed to accompany you through the coming weeks, The Luminous Word: Entering the Mysteries of Advent & Christmas offers artwork and reflections on the sacred texts and themes of the 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. For an update on the reprint, click here.
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. Also, all of the images at janrichardsonimages.com are available as prints. (To order prints from that site, go to the desired image and scroll down to “Prints & Products.”)
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, including a Christmas CD from my amazing singer/songwriter husband, Garrison Doles.
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.
As we cross the threshold into Advent, I wish you blessings and peace.
[This image is the first one I created for The Advent Door when I started this blog three years ago. To use the “Crossing the Threshold” image, please visit this page at janrichardsonimages.com. Your use of janrichardsonimages.com helps make the ministry of The Advent Door possible. Thank you!]
Witness of that Light © Jan L. Richardson
Reading from the Gospels, Christmas Day, Years ABC: John 1.1-14
On Christmas Eve during my first year as a pastor (at a church just up the road from Disney World), I stepped into my office during a quick break between the six worship services we were having that evening. I spotted a gift that my senior pastor, Bill Barnes, had left for me. Opening it, I discovered an illuminated edition of The Book of Common Prayer. Containing an early version of the BCP, the volume includes nearly two hundred miniatures taken from a variety of illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages. The book enchanted me and remains one of the coolest gifts I have ever received.
I picked the book up tonight and was enchanted all over again, partly for the memories it evoked, partly for the doorways of history and imagination it opened to me as an artist, and partly for the book itself, its intricate and vivid pages shimmering (even in reproduced form) with gold. It’s the presence of gold that qualifies a manuscript as “illuminated,” and many medieval book artists drenched their pages with this precious metal. Artists, and their patrons who commissioned these books, were drawn to gold both because of its lavish quality and also because it signified the presence of the God who not only gives us light but who also came into this world as light.
Light shimmers through the gospel reading that the lectionary gives us for Christmas Day: the stunning prologue to the gospel of John. Tonight I read the version contained in my luminous Book of Common Prayer—the King James Version, of course. In this passage that I love and have read approximately a zillion times, what struck me tonight, in this version, were these words:
There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. The same came for a witness, to bear witness of the light, that all…through him might believe. He was not that light, but was sent to bear witness of that light.
Most times when I read this passage, I’m focused on John the Evangelist’s powerful description of how Christ came as the Word: the Word that was with God, the Word that was God, the Word that was in the beginning with God, the Word that came as life and light. As a woman with a passion for the Word, and words, and the bonds between them, I never cease to be stunned by the power of this poetic passage and what—and how—it tells us of the One who entwined himself with us as life and flesh and light. Yet tonight, amidst the stunning words about the Word, my eye keeps going back to John—the one whom we call the Baptist, the one who prepared the way—and how, as the King James Version puts it, he came “to bear witness of that light.”
We need darkness, and I often find myself uncomfortable with the ways that we in the Christian tradition perpetuate stereotypes that hold that all that is good is light and bright and white, and all that is evil is dark and black. I’ll say it again: we need darkness. The seed in the ground, the child in the womb, the body and soul in rest and in dreaming: we must have times of shelter from the light in order to grow in the ways God calls us to grow. I love that verse in Isaiah where God says, “I will give you the treasures of darkness and riches hidden in secret places, so that you may know that it is I, the Lord, the God of Israel, who call you by your name” (Isaiah 45.3).
And yet, even as it calls us to honor the gifts of the dark, this season bids us recognize our ancient longing for light, and to celebrate the One who came to us as light. Amidst the shadows—some necessary, some horrendous—God beckons us to look deeper, to look more closely, that we may find the presence of the Christ who shimmers there. And, finding that presence, to bear witness.
How do we, in our own lives, do what John the Baptist was called to do in and with his life? How do we bear witness of that light?
As we cross the threshold into Christmas, here at the end of our Advent pilgrimage, this is a question I’ll be carrying with me, tucked in the traveling bag where all my mysteries go. In the days, weeks, months to come, how will I bear witness to, point toward, open myself to, embody the God who came as life and as light? Are there any shadows that I’ve grown too comfortable with, any places of darkness that God might be wanting to stir around in and shed some light on? Are there any pockets of ignorance or indifference within me that God might be desiring to illuminate? Is there some dark corner of my soul that I’ve been content to leave in shadow, in mystery, where God might be inviting me to kindle even a small flame and wait in stillness to see what reveals itself?
How about you? What question will you carry on the path ahead? What light beckons you as we spiral into the coming season?
Wherever your path takes you, may this Christmas be for you and yours a day of celebration, a day of hope, a day of peace. A luminous day. I am grateful to you for sharing this Advent journey, and I welcome you to join me at The Painted Prayerbook, where I’ll soon return to explore some words and images in the year to come.
May Christ our Light go with you in every season. Merry Christmas!
CHRISTMAS BONUS: To hear a wondrous song from my singer/songwriter sweetheart, inspired by the prologue to John’s gospel, click this link: Garrison Doles-“From the Beginning” (from Garrison’s CD House of Prayer).
[For previous reflections on this passage, please see Tangled Up in You and Door 25: The Book of Beginnings.]
[To use the “Witness of that Light” image, please visit this page at janrichardsonimages.com. Your use of janrichardsonimages.com helps make the ministry of The Advent Door possible. Thank you!]
The Secret Room © Jan L. Richardson
In his book The Art of Pilgrimage, Phil Cousineau writes that in every sacred journey, there is a secret room, a place along the path that gives us a different perspective on the deep mystery of our journey. In describing this hidden room, Cousineau draws on a story that poet Donald Hall tells of friends who purchased an old house in the country. Cousineau writes,
It was a ‘warren of small rooms,’ and once they settled in and began to furnish their new home they realized that the lay of the house made little sense. ‘Peeling off some wallpaper, they found a door that they pried open to reveal a tiny room, sealed off and hidden, goodness knows why: They found no corpses nor stolen goods.’ For Hall, the mystery of poetry to evoke powerful feelings finds its analogy here, in its ability to be sealed away from explanation, this is the place where ‘the unsayable gathers.’
And so it is on the pilgrim’s path. Everywhere you go, there is a secret room. To discover it, you must knock on walls, as the detective does in mystery houses, and listen for the echo that portends the secret passage. You must pull books off shelves to see if the library shelf swings open to reveal the hidden room.
I’ll say it again: Everywhere has a secret room. You must find your own, in a small chapel, a tiny cafe, a quiet park, the home of a new friend, the pew where the morning light strikes the rose window just so.
As a pilgrim you must find it or you will never understand the hidden reasons why you really left home.
A couple of years ago, I shared these words from Hall and Cousineau as I reflected here at The Advent Door on the gospel lection for Christmas Eve. Then, as now, I find myself struck by a seemingly small detail that Luke tucks in near the end of this passage:
But Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart. (Luke 2.19)
Over the previous nine months, Mary has entertained an archangel, said yes to becoming the mother of the Son of God, made the journey to visit Elizabeth, and lifted up a song of hope that has endured across centuries. She has waited with Elizabeth, made the journey back home, and traveled with her husband Joseph to Bethlehem to be included in the registration ordered by Emperor Augustus. She has labored to give birth to her son, enfolded him in strips of cloth, laid him in a manger, and welcomed those who came to marvel at what had come to pass.
Luke tells us that in response to their amazement, Mary treasures these words in her heart. Luke’s description conjures an image of a woman who, amid the tumult of angels and signs and visitors and miracles, holds all these happenings in a place of stillness. Among the memories of nine months of adventures she never could have imagined, Mary embodies a sense of wonder that is quiet and deep and wise.
Mary has found what Hall and Cousineau describe: she has found the place where the unsayable gathers. She has found the secret room.
As we approach Christmas Eve and the end of our Advent journey, it seems a fitting time to pause for a moment and look back on the path we’ve traveled these past few weeks. And I want to ask now, as I asked a couple of years ago: Have you found a secret room for yourself in these Advent days? In your pilgrimage through this season, have you found a space, a moment, a place of wonder or wisdom or sheer respite or deep delight, that helped you discover the purpose of this pilgrimage?
This season has been intense for me, as always: it has been full, it has passed quickly, and I always wish I could make more time to savor and to linger with these days. Yet on this Advent afternoon, as the sky turns toward dusk and I fix myself another cup of tea on what is, for us in Florida, a wonderfully chilly day, I find myself revisiting a few secret rooms that opened to me along this path. I think of a visit with my spiritual director on a weary afternoon a couple of weeks ago, and receiving from her a golden bag of chocolate truffles that she brought back with her from France—that we opened and immediately began to eat. I left that visit lighter in spirit—and not solely because of the truffles (though they were excellent medicine). I think of an afternoon spent with three women whom I love and whom I had not seen in a long time, and how they brought an amazing lunch and filled my home with their conversation and their spirits. I think of a celebration with friends on the Winter Solstice, and of how we gathered outside around fires beneath a dark sky and spoke of the gifts and challenges of darkness and light.
On this Advent afternoon, I am treasuring these things in my heart. (And still savoring the magic bag of truffles.)
Perhaps this will become our tradition here at The Advent Door—as Christmas Eve approaches, to invite the question again: Where have we found a secret room on this pilgrimage toward Christmas? Where and how do we join with Mary in pondering what has taken place? Amidst the unfolding story—the story of the birth of Christ, the story of our own intertwined lives—what do we treasure in our hearts?
In these remaining moments of Advent, may a secret room yet open itself to you and help you remember why you undertook this journey in the first place. Blessings and peace to you.
[For another reflection on this passage, see Where the Foreign Meets the Familiar. For last year’s reflection on Isaiah 9.2-7, the lection from the Hebrew Scriptures for Christmas Eve, please see Longing for Light.]
[To use the “Secret Room” image, please visit this page at janrichardsonimages.com. Your use of janrichardsonimages.com helps make the ministry of The Advent Door possible. Thank you!]
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The elves and I have been busy in my Advent workshop, creating another new video for the season. An Illuminated Joy: A Christmas Book of Hours intertwines artwork from my series The Advent Hours with a wondrous song from my sweetheart, Garrison Doles. (It’s from his Christmas CD The Night of Heaven and Earth.) Think of it as a Christmas card from us to you.
Blessings and peace!
An Illuminated Joy
