“The Lord is my portion,” says my soul,
“therefore I will hope in God.”
—Lamentations 3.24

From a lectionary reading for Holy Saturday: Lamentations 3.1-9, 19-24

Reflection for Saturday, April 7 (Holy Saturday/Day 40 of Lent)

I’m so taken with the way that, like those who composed the book of Psalms, the author of Lamentations—which tradition held to be the prophet Jeremiah—is able to hold seemingly conflicting emotions at once. Today’s reading consists primarily of—well, you can tell from the title of the book—a lamentation, stunning and suffocating in the way it describes the author’s sense of affliction and imprisonment. God has driven and brought me into darkness without any light, he wails; against me alone God turns a hand, again and again, all day long….God has made me sit in darkness like the dead of long ago. God has walled me about so that I cannot escape.

Though afflicted by destruction, the author of the lament cannot manage to sustain his despair for long. But this I call to mind, he cries out as the lament turns just before its end; and therefore I have hope: The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, God’s mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning.

Though composed as a lament for the destruction of the Temple and the city of Jerusalem in 586 BCE, one can well imagine why these words came to be associated with Christ in the tomb. Christ, who referred to himself as the Temple, now brought to death and seeming destruction; Christ in the darkness without any light.

In another lectionary passage for Holy Saturday, we read of how, after Joseph of Arimathea places Jesus’ body in the tomb and rolls a stone across the entrance, “Mary Magdalene and the other Mary were there, sitting opposite the tomb” (Matthew 27.61). I wonder if these words from Lamentations came to them in their waiting. In the darkness, in their sorrow, with no evident cause for rejoicing, did they, like the author of Lamentations, yet find cause for hope?

On this day—this last, final day of Lent—it may be tempting to skip ahead to what awaits us on Sunday, without giving Holy Saturday its due. We know the rest of the story. Yet how might it be to linger with these words of lamentation, as if we did not know? What if we sat ourselves down with the women opposite the tomb, and listened to their grief and longing, and waited with them? When times of darkness come in our own lives, and we don’t know the rest of the story, how does what God has done for us in the past give us cause to hope for what God will yet do?

Therefore I Will Hope
A Blessing for Holy Saturday

I have no cause
to linger beside
this place of death

no reason
to keep vigil
where life has left

and yet I cannot go,
cannot bring myself
to cleave myself
from here

can only pray
that this waiting
might yet be a blessing
and this grieving
yet a blessing
and this stone
yet a blessing
and this silence
yet a blessing
still.

P.S. For previous reflections for Holy Saturday, click the images or titles below.

Holy Saturday: The Art of Enduring

Holy Saturday: A Day Between

[To use the image "Therefore I Will Hope," please visit this page at janrichardsonimages.com. Your use of janrichardsonimages.com helps make the ministry of The Painted Prayerbook possible. Thank you!]

They took the body of Jesus and wrapped it with the spices in linen cloths, according to the burial custom of the Jews.
—John 19.40

From a lectionary reading for Good Friday: John 18.1-19.42

Reflection for Friday, April 6 (Good Friday/Day 39 of Lent)

Years earlier, when an angel had appeared in a sheep pasture proclaiming good news of great joy, the angel had told the shepherds of a Savior, a Messiah, a Lord whom they would find as a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger. Now, on this day, the Savior is wrapped in a spiced shroud of linen cloths, a scented winding sheet to hold him as he lies in the tomb. It’s tempting to draw a stark contrast between the emotions of those who held Christ at his birth and those who held him at his death; though joy must have prevailed at the beginning of his life and fear and grief at the end, surely, among those who saw and knew him best, celebration and sorrow were mixed on each occasion. Yet as at the beginning, so at the end: those who love Christ enfold him, tend him, bless him.

Song of the Winding Sheet
A Blessing for Good Friday

We never
would have wished it
to come to this
yet we call
these moments holy
as we hold you

Holy the tending
holy the winding
holy the leaving
as in the living

Holy the silence
holy the stillness
holy the turning
and returning to earth.

Blessed is the one
who came
in the name

blessed is the one
who laid
himself down

blessed is the one
emptied for us

blessed is the one
wearing the shroud.

Holy the waiting
holy the grieving
holy the shadows
and gathering night

Holy the darkness
holy the hours
holy the hope
turning toward light.

P.S. For previous reflections on Good Friday, click the images or titles below.

Good Friday: What Abides

Good Friday: In Which We Get Nailed

For a video slideshow that intertwines my series of images on the Seven Last Words of Christ with Gary’s exquisite song “This Crown of Thorns”:

Listening at the Cross

[To use the image "According to the Burial Custom," please visit this page at janrichardsonimages.com. To use the "Listening at the Cross" video, please visit this page. Your use of janrichardsonimages.com helps make the ministry of The Painted Prayerbook possible. Thank you!]

In the same way he took the cup also, after supper, saying,
“This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this,
as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.”
—1 Corinthians 11.25

From a lectionary reading for Holy Thursday/Maundy Thursday:
1 Corinthians 11.23-26

Reflection for Thursday, April 5 (Holy Thursday/Day 38 of Lent)

On a windy spring day long past, my friend Kary and I hurry through the streets of an art festival in downtown Atlanta. I am hosting a Communion service that evening, and we are searching in hopes of finding a potter who has a chalice that we can use. It’s nearly time for the festival to shut down when Kary and I, empty-handed, head down the last street. There, near the end of the street, we find a potter who has begun to pack up his booth. But among the pieces he still has out are several lovely earthenware chalices. I select one, and we leave the festival joyful and relieved, carrying the beautiful cup—the first chalice I would own—and its matching paten.

It has been a long time since I’ve thought of that spring day and the grail quest it held. But that’s what the table invites us to do: to remember, to gather around the cup of memory and the bread of celebration, to enter again into the stories—and the Story—that they hold. In today’s scripture reading, Paul’s telling of the story of the Last Supper is elegant in its utter simplicity. And heartbreaking. And brimming with hope.

In the years and centuries to follow this meal, the Christian tradition will spill vast quantities of ink over the meaning and doctrine of what takes place on this night. Yet Paul’s story, received from Christ and passed along to us, lays bare the essence of the gift: This is my body, Christ says with the bread in his hands, that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me. Cradling the cup, Christ tells his table companions, This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.

Given. Poured out. For us.

This day, this Holy Thursday, beckons us to return to the table, to gather around the bread that has been offered to us, the cup that has been poured out for us. Yet this day will also send us out: away from the table and into the world, in search of those who hunger and thirst for what Christ gives: to us, through us. This is the real grail quest: to discern what to do with what we have been given, and then to do this. What path will the bread and the cup—and the One who offers them—impel you to take?

Blessing the Bread,
the Cup

Let us bless the bread
that gives itself to us
with its terrible weight,
its infinite grace.

Let us bless the cup
poured out for us
with a love that drenches,
that makes us anew.

Let us gather
around these gifts
simply given
and deeply blessed.

And then let us go
bearing the bread,
carrying the cup,
laying the table
within a hungering world.

P.S. For previous reflections on Holy Thursday, click the images or titles below.

Holy Thursday: Take a Blessing

Holy Thursday: Feet and Food

[To use the image "In the Cup of the New Covenant," please visit this page at janrichardsonimages.com. Your use of janrichardsonimages.com helps make the ministry of The Painted Prayerbook possible. Thank you!]

Let all who seek you rejoice and be glad in you. Let those who love your salvation say evermore, “God is great!”
—Psalm 70.4

From a lectionary reading for Wednesday of Holy Week: Psalm 70

Reflection for Wednesday, April 4 (Day 37 of Lent)

In her book Traveling Mercies, Anne Lamott writes that the two best prayers she knows are “Help me, help me, help me” and “Thank you, thank you, thank you.” I think of Lamott’s prayers as I linger with Psalm 70, a tiny jewel of a psalm whose five brief verses offer a spare bit of elaboration upon that basic cry for help and declaration of gratitude.

“Be pleased, O God, to deliver me,” the psalmist pleads as the psalm begins. “O Lord, make haste to help me!” These same words (in the Douay-Rheims version of this verse, which renders the first part as “O God, come to my assistance”) open every office of the Liturgy of the Hours, with the exception of Vigils; for nearly two millennia, this constant reminder of humanity’s need for help has been embedded in the prayers that carry monastic folk through the day and night. The psalmist continues in this vein, imploring God to bring “shame and confusion” to those who seek to harm him, and entreating God to hurry. “You are my help and my deliverer,” the psalmist cries out as the psalm closes; “O Lord, do not delay!”

Help me, help me, help me.

Tucked into this tiny psalm, amidst the psalmist’s pleas for aid, a single verse counsels joy in the presence of panic: “Let all who seek you rejoice and be glad in you,” the psalmist sings. “Let those who love your salvation say evermore, ‘God is great!’”

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

For some of us, asking for help—from God, from another person—can be tremendously difficult. It may rarely occur to us that God created other people so that we don’t have to do everything by ourselves. Yet as the psalmist reminds us, knowing what we need and asking for appropriate help is part of what it means to belong to God—and to one another. And as the psalmist also reminds us in verse 4, seeking the help of God (which so often comes through others) is a pathway to gladness; drawing near to the God who takes delight in delivering us is a road to rejoicing.

And so I am here to ask you: What help do you need this day? How would it be to ask for it? What gladness and gratitude might be waiting for you there?

Blessing that Waits
to Come to Your Aid

When I have become
so reliant on myself
that I cannot see
the need that gnaws
so deep
in my soul,

open my eyes,
open my heart,
open my mouth
to cry out
for the help
that you do not ration,
the deliverance
that you delight to offer
in glad and
generous measure.

[To use the image "Rejoice and Be Glad," please visit this page at janrichardsonimages.com. Your use of janrichardsonimages.com helps make the ministry of The Painted Prayerbook possible. Thank you!]

Be to me a rock of refuge, a strong fortress, to save me,
for you are my rock and my fortress.
—Psalm 71.3

From a lectionary reading for Tuesday of Holy Week: Psalm 71.1-14

Reflection for Tuesday, April 3 (Day 36 of Lent)

Pondering this passage and this image, I keep thinking of Skellig Michael. A small, peaked rock of an island off the coast of Ireland, Skellig Michael was home to a small community of monks in the Middle Ages. According to legend, the monastery was founded by Saint Fionan in the sixth century. In a stark landscape that afforded few level surfaces, the monks managed to build six stone cells (living quarters) constructed in the “beehive” style distinctive to Celtic monasteries, along with two oratories (places for prayer) and a tiny hermitage on a peak whose location would have made getting there an arduous pilgrimage in itself. It’s thought that a monastic community remained on the island until the twelfth or thirteenth century.

The monks of Skellig Michael devoted themselves to a way of life in which they embodied the words of the psalmist who, in today’s reading, proclaims, “My mouth is filled with your praise, and with your glory all day long” (v. 8). I imagine that on that craggy rock where they kept a rhythm of personal and communal prayer throughout the day and night, the monks felt a particular connection with this psalm and its imagery of the rock of refuge that the psalmist finds in God. Like the desert fathers and mothers of the early church who served as models and sources of inspiration for these monks, the brothers surely must have found that their home on Skellig Michael was not a place of escape from spiritual struggle but a space where they could both wrestle with God and rest in the God who delivered them and provided shelter and strength for their souls.

On this Lenten day, where do you find the solid ground that God provides? How do you seek the refuge, solace, and shelter that God offers you—not as a perpetual escape from the world but as a place of safety where you can receive the strength and sustenance that will enable you to engage the world in the ways God needs you to engage it?

Blessing of Refuge

That I may flee to you
not to escape forever
from the world
that you have created,
the world that you
call beloved

but that in your refuge
I will find
your presence
to strengthen me
your courage
to sustain me
your grace
to encompass me
as I go
where you would
have me go.

[To use the image "Rock of Refuge," please visit this page at janrichardsonimages.com. Your use of janrichardsonimages.com helps make the ministry of The Painted Prayerbook possible. Thank you!]

He will not grow faint or be crushed until he has established justice in the earth; and the coastlands wait for his teaching.
—Isaiah 42.4

From a lectionary reading for Monday of Holy Week: Isaiah 42.1-9

Reflection for Monday, April 2 (Day 35 of Lent)

Today is one of those days that remind me how much the path through Lent resembles the path through Advent. Waiting, preparation, anticipation; the invitation to live both in the now and the not yet; the call to recognize God in the present even as we yearn for a time when God will appear in fullness and bring healing to all creation: these themes that draw us into the season of Christ’s birth draw us also into this season in which we enter into the story of his death and resurrection.

And here, in this passage from Isaiah that contains the first Servant Song, these themes are at full play. The God who fashioned all things—”who created the heavens and stretched them out,” this passage tells us, “who spread out the earth and what comes from it, who gives breath to the people upon it and spirit to those who walk in it”—draws our vision toward a time when creation will be restored, when the servant will bring justice upon the earth, and even the coastlands will wait for his teaching. This passage, stunning in its beauty and in the way it evokes a hope that pervades the entire earth, puts me in mind of Paul’s words in Romans 8.22-25, where he writes of how the whole creation groans in labor pains, crying out for redemption.

For now, we wait. With hope. With longing. With a patience that is not passive but that enables us to perceive where God may be calling us to act for the healing of the world. “See, the former things have come to pass,” today’s passage from Isaiah tells us at its close, “and new things I now declare; before they spring forth, I tell you of them.” On this Holy Monday, what new thing do you yearn for? What will you do to help prepare a way for it to appear upon the earth?

Blessing for Holy Monday

May the path
that Christ walks
to bring justice
upon the earth,
to bring light
to those who sit
in darkness,
to bring out those
who live in bondage,
to bring new things
to all creation:

may this path
run through our life.
May we be
the road Christ takes.

[To use the image "The Coastlands Wait for His Teaching," please visit this page at janrichardsonimages.com. Your use of janrichardsonimages.com helps make the ministry of The Painted Prayerbook possible. Thank you!]

They went to a place called Gethsemane;
and he said to his disciples, “Sit here while I pray.”
—Mark 14.32

From a lectionary reading for Palm/Passion Sunday: Mark 14.1-15.47

Reflection for Passion Sunday (April 1)

[For this week's reflection for the Liturgy of the Palms, see Day 30: Blessed Is the One.]

In story and in myth, gardens often present themselves as idyllic. Yet as the scriptures lead us through the gardens of Eden, the Song of Songs, Gethsemane, and beyond, we find they are complicated places. Against the backdrop of the cycles of growth, decay, and rebirth, a garden eventually exposes everything: the difficult dance of union and separation, our sharpest desires, our capacity for betrayal, and the possibility of new life.

The garden as a place of life and death becomes especially evident on this night that Jesus and his disciples make their final visit. Jesus exhorts them to stay with him as he prays. Soon he finds them asleep. Repeatedly. In Matthew and Mark, he wakes them three times. Luke’s Gospel, in a gracious move that mentions their slumber only once, states that the disciples sleep “because of grief.”

The disciples’ slumber suggests they weren’t fully aware of what was going on in the garden—or that they couldn’t face it. It strikes close to home, this desire to insulate ourselves from what we do not want to face.

Some years ago, as I struggled through a period of fatigue, I spoke about it with my spiritual director over the course of several months. When she asked me what it felt like, I described a layer of gauze, thin, but always present between me and the world. One day she asked me what I thought my tiredness was trying to tell me. I didn’t know, but I took the question with me, and not long after, while going about my normal routine one morning, the answer surfaced. I immediately felt a shift in my energy. The fatigue didn’t vanish entirely in that moment—a mild dose of thyroid medication, exercise, focused work on the issue that had sapped my energy, and the healing passage of time would get me farther down that road—but my waking had begun. The gauze had fallen away, and with that gesture came an intimation of resurrection.

I remembered this recently when I saw a new painting by my friend Chuck Hoffman. On the canvas, Christ wakes up with gauzy burial cloths wrapped loosely around his head and arms. He screams with the shock of coming to life.

It’s no wonder the disciples sleep. It is hard work sometimes to remain present with Christ, to stay awake to him, to God’s longing for us, to the demands of resurrection. Something in us knows that to stay awake will mean traveling through the terrain of grief as well as joy. The possibility of transformed lives asks something of us. It propels us into a landscape beyond what is familiar and challenges us to allow Christ into the hollows of the grave-spaces within us, the places that are dead or dying. There is grief in this, sometimes, and the desire to go numb may be strong. But even in our weariness, in our numbness, in our most resistant and dead places, there is something that remains wakeful, open, alert. The bride in the Song of Songs tells it this way: “I slept, but my heart was awake. Listen! My beloved is knocking’” (5.2a).

Blessing for Staying Awake

Even in slumber
even in dreaming
even in sorrow
even in pain

awake, awake,
awake my soul
to the one who keeps vigil
at all times with you.

This reflection is adapted from Garden of Hollows: Entering the Mysteries of Lent & Easter © Jan L. Richardson.

[To use the image "Gethsemane," please visit this page at janrichardsonimages.com. Your use of janrichardsonimages.com helps make the ministry of The Painted Prayerbook possible. Thank you!]

She has done what she could;
she has anointed my body beforehand for its burial.
—Mark 14.8

From a lectionary reading for Passion/Palm Sunday: Mark 14.1-15.47

Reflection for Saturday, March 31 (Day 34 of Lent)

She comes to the table. She comes from beyond the boundaries. She comes as if she belongs. She comes as if her whole life has been distilled into this one gesture that she offers: lifting, breaking, pouring. She comes with no words, yet with her entire being she proclaims a message both prophetic and priestly as she ministers to Jesus just days before his death.

Several nights ago, at a Lenten service at my home church of Trinity United Methodist Church in Gainesville, Florida, I preached about this woman who offers her extravagant gift to Christ. As we reflected on this story, I shared with the congregation about what a significant companion and teacher this woman has been for me, particularly in my ministry as an artist in the church. We in the church often think of acts of beauty and grace as somehow separate from—and less important than—acts of justice and caring for others. Like Jesus’ dining companions that day, we tend to think of what is creative and artful as a luxury, as tangential, as wasteful.

Yet this woman’s graceful gesture—and Jesus’ grateful receiving of it—dispels such a notion. This story impresses upon us how beauty and justice are not separate from one another but are each part of our response to the Christ who offers himself to us with extravagant love and grace, and who calls us to offer bread and beauty from the same hand.

I’ll post a link to the sermon once it’s on Trinity’s website. In the meantime, I want to share with you a question (inspired by Macrina Wiederkehr’s reflection on this story in her book Seasons of Your Heart) that I shared with the folks at Trinity as we reflected on this woman’s lavish gift that ministered to Jesus’ deepest need:

What are you willing to waste on Jesus?

Blessing of Balm

When we see
the body of Christ
still broken in this world,
may we meet it
with lavish grace
and pour ourselves out
with extravagant love.

[To use the image "Anointed," please visit this page at janrichardsonimages.com. Your use of janrichardsonimages.com helps make the ministry of The Painted Prayerbook possible. Thank you!]

Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself.
—Philippians 2.5-7a

From a lectionary reading for Palm/Passion Sunday: Philippians 2.5-11

Reflection for Friday, March 30 (Day 33 of Lent)

Blessing that Becomes Empty
As It Goes

This blessing
keeps nothing
for itself.
You can find it
by following the path
of what it has let go,
of what it has learned
it can live without.

Say this blessing out loud
a few times
and you will hear
the hollow places
within it,
how it echoes
in a way
that gives your voice
back to you
as if you had never
heard it before.

Yet this blessing
would not be mistaken
for any other,
as if,
in its emptying,
it had lost
what makes it
most itself.

It simply desires
to have room enough
to welcome
what comes.

Today,
it’s you.

So come and sit
in this place
made holy
by its hollows.
You think you have
too much to do,
too little time,
too great a weight
of responsibility
that none but you
can carry.

I tell you,
lay it down.
Just for a moment,
if that’s what you
can manage at first.
Five minutes.
Lift up your voice—
in laughter,
in weeping,
it does not matter—
and let it ring against
these spacious walls.

Do this
until you can hear
the spaces within
your own breathing.
Do this
until you can feel
the hollow in your heart
where something
is letting go,
where something
is making way.

[To use the image "Emptied," please visit this page at janrichardsonimages.com. Your use of janrichardsonimages.com helps make the ministry of The Painted Prayerbook possible. Thank you!]

I have passed out of mind like one who is dead;
I have become like a broken vessel.
—Psalm 31.12

From a lectionary reading for Palm/Passion Sunday: Psalm 31.9-16

Reflection for Thursday, March 29 (Day 32 of Lent)

In her book Everyday Sacred, Sue Bender tells of seeing a beautiful Japanese tea bowl that had been broken and put back together again. “The image of that bowl,” she writes, “made a lasting impression. Instead of trying to hide the flaws, the cracks were emphasized—filled with silver. The bowl was even more precious after it had been mended.”

For this Lenten day, I offer you this blessing:

Blessing for a Broken Vessel

Do not despair.
You hold the memory
of what it was
to be whole.

It lives deep
in your bones.
It abides
in your heart
that has been torn
and mended
a hundred times.
It persists
in your lungs
that know the mystery
of what it means
to be full,
to be empty,
to be full again.

I am not asking you
to give up your grip
on the shards you clasp
so close to you

but to wonder
what it would be like
for those jagged edges
to meet each other
in some new pattern
that you have never imagined,
that you have never dared
to dream.

[To use the image "Like a Broken Vessel," please visit this page at janrichardsonimages.com. Your use of janrichardsonimages.com helps make the ministry of The Painted Prayerbook possible. Thank you!]