Archive for June, 2008

A Place for the Prophet

June 23, 2008


A Place for the Prophet © Jan L. Richardson

Reading from the Gospels, Year A, Proper 8/Ordinary 13/Pentecost +2: Matthew 10.40-42

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 welcoming 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?”

Hospitality is on Jesus Christ’s mind in this week’s Gospel lection, Matthew 10.40-42. In this passage we find Jesus continuing his instructions to the disciples as he prepares to send them into the towns to “heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse lepers, and cast out demons” (Matthew 10.8). He tells them, “Whoever welcomes you welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me. Whoever welcomes a prophet in the name of a prophet will receive a prophet’s reward….”

I find myself thinking that it’s one thing to welcome a prostitute or a prime minister, as the longtime monk had learned to do. But a prophet?

As guests go, prophets are not the easiest folks to have around. In their role as the mouthpiece of God, they tend to come out with things that can make a host uncomfortable. The Hebrew prophets, after all, weren’t so much foretellers as forth-tellers: they perceived the present injustice among their people with uncommon clarity, and they addressed it with uncommon candor. “Thou art the man,” Nathan says to David (2 Samuel 12.7). “The dogs shall eat Jezebel within the bounds of Jezreel,” Elijah says of Ahab’s wife (1 Kings 21.23). “Do not pray for the welfare of this people,” God says to Jeremiah. “Although they fast, I do not hear their cry, and although they offer burnt-offering and grain-offering, I do not accept them; but by the sword, by famine, and by pestilence I consume them” (Jeremiah 14.11, 12). Famine and destruction, devastation and woe: the prophets were pretty intense fellows. Even in their hopeful moments, which produced some of the most amazing and sustaining poetry of the Bible, they still confront their hearers with words that make it hard to relax around them.

It’s not always easy to welcome those who remind us what it is we’re supposed to be in this world, who call us to live as the people God created us to be, who ask so much of us. It can sometimes be a tiresome, “Jesus Christ, is it you again?” kind of prospect.

But I think of a woman who extended this kind of hospitality to a traveling prophet. Her name, like that of so many women, went unrecorded; history recalls her simply as the Shunammite woman. Having befriended the prophet Elisha and recognizing him as a holy man, she convinces her husband that they should provide a space for him. I love the homely, hospitable details that the story in 2 Kings 4.8-37 provides. “Let us make a small roof chamber with walls,” says the woman of Shunem, “and put there for him a bed, a table, a chair, and a lamp, so that whenever he comes to us, he can go in there” (2 Kings 4.10).

Elisha recognizes the gift, and after a time, he wants to know how he can repay the woman for her hospitality. “What is to be done for you?” the prophet asks. And thus begins a tale of birth, and death, and the raising of the dead, a story that echoes in Jesus’ sending of the disciples to do the same kind of work.

I think of the Shunammite woman as I ponder Jesus’ words about how those who welcome a prophet in the name of a prophet will receive a prophet’s reward. Which at first doesn’t hold a lot of appeal, given the usual “rewards” bestowed upon prophets. For their efforts, they are dangerously prone to imprisonment. Beheading. Crucifixion. Slaughter by various methods. But in the land of Shunem, a woman welcomed a prophet with a room, a bed, a table, a chair, a lamp. Looking for no reward, the woman provided a sacred space for a holy man. And within the space of her own self, an unexpected child began to grow.

It’s a strange economy, this kind of hospitality. We can’t know what we will set in motion when we offer some space to the ones whom Jesus tells us to welcome. We offer a cup of cold water, or a place to rest, or an extra room, or a corner of our heart; we cede some precious territory to one who comes with a word from God; we open ourselves to remembering who it is God put us here to be, and all of a sudden, we’re carrying something we never expected to carry. Maybe it’s not a literal child, as it was for the Shunammite woman. But this kind of hospitality always makes room for new life to take root in us and to come through us in ways that we can’t predict. That’s part of the strange economy, the curious ecosystem of hospitality: open a space to the holy stranger, and God creates a sacred space within our own selves. An extra room in our own souls. A place for God to grow.

What’s hospitality like for you these days? How do you make room for those who challenge you to remember who God created you to be? What kind of holy space might God be wanting to create in your life? In you?

Blessings to you as you discern where to extend a welcome, and where to receive one.

[To use the “A Place for the Prophet” image, please visit this page at janrichardsonimages.com. Your use of janrichardsonimages.com helps make the ministry of The Painted Prayerbook possible. Thank you!]

Posted in art, Gospel of Matthew, lectionary, monastic stuff, Ordinary Time | 1 Comment »

Out of the Dark

June 17, 2008


© Jan L. Richardson ◊The Painted Prayerbook◊

In 1941, a young Jewish woman named Etty Hillesum began to keep a journal. Hitler’s armies had invaded her homeland of The Netherlands nine months before she took up her pen. As the Nazi forces wielded increasing control over nearly every aspect of her life and the life of her community, Etty continued to write, filling a series of eight exercise books over the next nineteen months. “If I have one duty in these times,” she observed, “it is to bear witness.”

Etty bore witness not only to what was happening in the world around her but also in the world within her—the one place the Nazis could not invade. Amid the mounting terrors that the Nazis were inflicting, Etty documented and reflected on the dailiness of her life. She wrote of the complexities of her relationships with family and friends, her work as a Russian tutor, her passionate appetite for reading (among her favorites were the works of the poet Rilke as well as the Gospels). She wrote of her hungers, her longings, her prayers. Her diaries weren’t a form of escapism; rather, they convey her conviction that the exterior and interior worlds are not separate from one another. Etty believed that doing one’s inner work is crucial to the thriving of a society. She wrote that if we refuse to look into our own shadows, if we resist going into the dark places within ourselves and our world, our shadows eventually spill out in hatred and violence—as her own homeland was experiencing.

Etty recognized both her capacity for hatred and the need to let it go. On a February day, she notes the martyrdom of a young man; she comments on how he had played the mandolin, and had a wife and child. She runs into a friend and talks with him about the martyred man. Her friend asks, “What is it in human beings that makes them want to destroy others?” Etty’s response reminds him that they, too—the two of them—are among the human beings of whom he speaks. “I see no other solution,” she tells him, “I really see no other solution than to turn inwards and to root out all the rottenness there.”

Etty wrote with a sense of her own frailty—she describes occasions of anxiety, illness, and depression—as well as a keen understanding of the brokenness around her. In the midst of this, Etty evinces a stubborn willingness to enter the darkness and its mysteries. There she finds the presence of God and the riches of her own soul.

One spring morning she wrote,

I went to bed early last night and from my bed I stared out through the large open window. And it was once more as if life with all its mysteries was close to me, as if I could touch it. I had the feeling that I was resting against the naked breast of life, and could feel her gentle and regular heartbeat. I felt safe and protected. And I thought: how strange. It is wartime. There are concentration camps. I can say of so many of the houses I pass: here the son has been thrown into prison, there the father has been taken hostage, and an 18-year-old boy in that house over there has been sentenced to death. And these streets and houses are all so close to my own. I know how very nervous people are, I know about the mounting human suffering. I know the persecution and oppression and despotism and the impotent fury and the terrible sadism. I know it all.

And yet—at unguarded moments, when left to myself, I suddenly lie against the naked breast of life and her arms round me are so gentle and so protective and my own heartbeat is difficult to describe: so slow and so regular and so soft, almost muffled, but so constant as if it would never stop.

That is also my attitude to life and I believe that neither war nor any other senseless human atrocity will ever be able to change it.

In 1942, Etty Hillesum was sent to the labor camp at Westerbork, where she held a position that enabled her to travel back and forth to Amsterdam. Her position offered the possibility of escape, and on one occasion, friends tried to kidnap her to prevent her return to Westerbork. Etty resisted, believing she was called to remain with those who were suffering. At Westerbork she continued to tend her inner terrain, acknowledging both the beauty and the struggle that she found. In one of her letters from the camp, she wrote,

When I think of the faces of that squad of armed, green-uniformed guards—my God, those faces! I looked at them, each in turn, from behind the safety of a window, and I have never been so frightened of anything in my life as I was of those faces. I sank to my knees with the words that preside over human life: And God made man after his likeness [Genesis 1.27]. That passage spent a difficult morning with me.

On September 7, 1943, Etty was put on a train to Auschwitz, along with her mother, father, and one of her brothers. None of them returned.

Etty flung a postcard from the train as they left Westerbork; a farmer found it and put it in the mail. On the postcard Etty had written, “We left the camp singing.”

Etty has been constant with me as I’ve pondered this week’s gospel lection, Matthew 10.24-39. Her words and her life have provided both commentary and challenge as I’ve prayed with Jesus’ words about shadows and darkness. With her own life she continues to teach me about how everything that is hidden eventually becomes revealed, about how we are called to proclaim in light what God tells us in the darkness. She persists in telling me what it means not to fear those who can kill the body but not the soul, and how we find our lives by losing them.

With her eloquent, raw, searing, haunting words, Etty reminds us that the shadows may hold fear and terror, but beneath that, deeper than that, more enduring than that, they contain the presence of God, who dwells in darkness as well as in light. She bears witness to the God who is shrouded in mystery yet longs to be known by us and to know us in all our brokenness and our beauty.

So how do we sort through what lies in the shadows of our own souls, our society, our world? How do we listen for the voice of God in the darkness and receive the revelations that Christ has for us there? How do we bring to light what we find in the shadows? Who or what helps us navigate the connections between the inner and outer realms? How does God call us to bear witness to, to “tell in the light,” what we find there?

Blessings to you in darkness and in daylight.

[Quotations from Etty: The Letters and Diaries of Etty HIllesum, 1941-43. Edited by Klaas A. D. Smelik, 2002.]

Posted in art, books, Gospel of Matthew, lectionary, Ordinary Time, writing | 4 Comments »

Mapping the Mysteries

June 11, 2008


Mapping the Mysteries © Jan L. Richardson

Reading from the Gospels:
Year A, Proper 6/Ordinary 11/Pentecost +5: Matthew 9.35-10.8 (9-23)
Year B, Proper 9/Ordinary 14/Pentecost +5: Mark 6.1-13
Year C, Proper 9/Ordinary 14/ Pentecost + 7: Luke 10.1-11, 16-20

Early in my ministry, I traveled to Alaska with a mission team from my church. During a free day, we did some exploring that included a stop at the Anchorage Museum of History and Art. As I wandered through the rooms, I found myself in an exhibit titled A World of Maps. These maps were unlike any I had ever seen. Artists from across the United States had taken the familiar forms of cartography, stretching and pushing and translating them into a fascinating library of landscapes. There were altered maps, painted maps, collaged maps. There were maps in the form of sculpture, of books, of pottery. There was a map that unfolded like a scroll, a map in the form of a diptych, a woven map. More than describing the geography of the physical world, these maps charted worlds of imagination, fantastical realms, the terrain of the soul and spirit. The maps told stories of things seen and unseen, and they challenged ideas about borders and boundaries. They embodied the lure and the hazards of exploring worlds unknown—and the worlds we think we know.

This week marks fifteen years that I have been in ministry. Yesterday, as part of my reflecting on this past decade and a half, I pulled out the catalog from that Alaskan exhibit and spent some time revisiting the maps I had encountered so early in my vocation. Looking back, I wonder if part of my fascination with those maps lay in my awareness, even then, of what an uncharted path I was on. I entered ordained ministry with a sense that at some point God would open a door that would take me off the beaten path. I had a gut sense, some hunches, a sense of longing about the ways the path might take shape, but no real idea of how it would unfold.

In this week’s gospel lection, Jesus gives the disciples the closest thing they ever get to a map for their ministry. Telling the twelve to go and proclaim the good news that “The kingdom of heaven has come near,” Jesus provides a rough—not to mention sobering—chart of the landscape they will venture into. He tells them of the hazards the terrain will likely pose, what towns and people to avoid, and how to navigate occasions of hospitality and resistance and hatred. And he gives them the authority to do the work he has called them to do: to chart a path that will be marked by healing and restoration.

So early in their ministries, the disciples could know little of what the territory ahead would actually look like or where it would take them. I wonder—as they looked back after Jesus’ death and resurrection, what kind of map might they have drawn to describe the paths they had walked with him? Reading the landscape with the eye of a cartographer, what marks might they have made to trace their travels? What would those contours and patterns have looked like—the places where, with the authority given to them, they cured the sick, raised the dead, cleansed the lepers, and cast out demons? Or where they shared meals together, or fed those who hungered, or listened to Jesus teach and challenge and encourage and stretch them? Or where they watched him die, and witnessed him alive again? How would they map all the terrain they crossed in the spaces of their own souls?

In Katharine Harmon’s wondrous book You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination, she includes an essay by Stephen S. Hall entitled “I, Mercator.” Hall writes,

I like to say that I never travel without a map, but then none of us do. We all travel with many maps, neatly folded and tucked away in the glove compartment of memory—some of them communal and universal, like our autonomic familiarity with seasonal constellations and the shape of continents, and some as particular as the local roads we have each traipsed. As we navigate on the trip that Dante called “our life’s way,” we are all creating our private maps. Like Mercator, we are not discovering entirely new worlds; rather, we are laying a new set of lines down on a known but changing world, arranging and rearranging metaphysical rhumbs that we associate with successful navigation. To each, her or his private meridians. To each, a unique projection. I, Mercator, and you, too.

This week’s collage is a map I made as I reflected on these past fifteen years in ministry. As with most maps, I can chart the landscape only in retrospect; I recognize the roads because I have traveled them, often making them up as I went along. Making this collaged map, I had certain kinds of landmarks on my mind, but I fashioned it with the awareness that I could have charted the landscape any number of ways. I could have marked the locations where pivotal conversations occurred, where I witnessed healing, where I encountered birth or death. I could have charted the places of peril, of heartbreak, of unexpected wonders. I could have marked the spots where the territory seemed to take me in circles, or was barren, or graced me with splendors. The map might have noted the underground streams, the secret passages, the wellsprings of sustenance, the paths not taken.

And it might tell of those sites where the convoluted terrain finally opened up and spilled me out into a plain where I knew more deeply who I was, what I was called to do, what Christ was giving me authority to do.

Still making the map as I go, I pray for a measure of the imagination of those artists whose work I saw in Anchorage, who pushed and stretched the traditional forms, who ventured beyond the customary boundaries, who dared to look deeper into their landscape, and deeper still. More than that, I pray for the imagination of the one who looked out into the terrain of a world “harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd,” a world broken by illness and injustice, a world bent by pain and hunger. I pray for the imagination of Christ, who dared to look into this world and to ask those who traveled with him, “Want to make a new map?”

So what’s your map look like? How would you chart the terrain of your last fifteen years, fifteen months, fifteen days? What landmarks would you note? What stories would your map tell? What are the maps beneath the map of your life—the hidden landscapes, the secret stories that shape the lay of your land? Are there tools you need in order to do some new mapping—to revisit and rethink and redraw the territory you thought you knew, or to change the course ahead?

Many blessings and traveling mercies as you continue to chart your way.

[To use this artwork, please visit this page at janrichardsonimages.com.]

Posted in art, books, Gospel of Mark, Gospel of Matthew, lectionary, mystery, Ordinary Time | 2 Comments »

Stories and Circles

June 7, 2008


Stories and Circles © Jan L. Richardson

Reading from the Gospels, Year A, Proper 5/Ordinary 10/Pentecost +4: Matthew 9.9-13, 18-26
(Year B, Proper 8/Ordinary 13/Pentecost +4: Mark 5.21-43)

Okay, so can I just say that there are some weeks when the creative process kicks me up one side and down the other? This has been one of those weeks.

It has to do with circles.

For many days I have been pondering this week’s gospel lection. I love this passage, which Matthew, Mark, and Luke each include in some fashion in their gospels. I particularly love it for the way it intertwines the story of the healing of the long-bleeding woman who reaches out to Jesus with the story of a young girl, the daughter of a leader of the synagogue (or “ruler,” in Matthew’s version), whom Jesus is on his way to heal.

The story of the woman occurs in the middle of the story of the young girl. It’s possible to read the woman’s tale as something of an interruption of the girl’s, but there is such resonance between them that it makes a lot more sense to read them as the intertwined stories they are. A number of folks have written about the connections between these stories, teasing out the details of the literary structure and Jesus’ work of healing and restoration in both cases. These commentators have noted the detail that Matthew omits but that Mark and Luke include in their tellings: The girl, they say, is about twelve years old—the same number of years that the woman has been bleeding. It’s a detail that further underscores the links between these stories.

Pondering this passage in the context of lectio divina, I have found myself reflecting in particular about how the story of the woman is contained within the story of the girl. The girl’s story holds the woman’s story, not only in terms of literary structure, but also in the mysterious way that happens in the realm of story. Their healing is bound together.

A couple of months ago, I began doing some focused work with a gifted listener. In our first meeting I told her I wasn’t in the midst of a crisis, and I didn’t sense there was anything huge that was waiting to be unearthed. I was there, I said, because I needed to tell some stories. I’m at a point in my life where I’ve accumulated a few. Some of them are particularly present with me these days, and I’m curious to look more closely at how they connect, what they hold, and what they have to tell me as I discern the path ahead. In talking with this listener, I have found myself deeply aware of how each story I tell her contains another story, and another. Stories that may have happened years apart in chronological time are near neighbors in the space of the soul. The stories of the girl I was contain the stories of the woman. And the stories of the woman hold the stories of the girl.

In her book Writing for Your Life, Deena Metzger offers this quote about stories:

Stories move in circles. They don’t move in straight lines. So it helps if you listen in circles. There are stories inside stories and stories between stories, and finding your way through them is as easy and as hard as finding your way home. And part of the finding is the getting lost. And when you’re lost, you start to look around and listen. (A Traveling Jewish Theatre, Coming from a Great Distance)

Moving in circles in a mindful fashion makes for great soul-work but not for easy blog entries. Though I’m not a terribly linear person at any time, I do value being able to achieve some coherence, which has been elusive this week both in my artwork and in my writing. The deeper a text connects with my story, the more challenging it sometimes is to articulate the connection. Sitting at my drafting table and wrestling with the collage, sitting at my computer and wrestling with the words, I have felt a little lost. But I’m pausing in the circling, finally, to offer some scraps from the path, along with a few questions that I’ve brought with me:

How do your stories move in circles? What are the stories that are most present to you? How do the stories of your past and present contain one another? How do those stories pull you into the path ahead? Is there anyone who hears your stories, someone who helps you look around and listen?

A blessing on your circling.

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

Posted in art, Gospel of Matthew, lectionary, Ordinary Time, writing | 6 Comments »