Archive for October, 2008

Feast of All Saints: A Gathering of Spirits

October 26, 2008


A Gathering of Spirits © Jan L. Richardson

Ahhhh…it’s the Feast of All Saints, almost. I love this time of year. Here in central Florida we’re just beginning to touch the fringe of Autumn’s cloak. There’s something stirring, a shift in the works, and it doesn’t have to do solely with the weather.

I’m not sure quite when it started, but for many years, the trinity of days from October 31 to November 2, encompassing Halloween, All Saints’ Day, and All Souls’ Day, has been a thin place in the landscape of my year. The ancient Celts, who celebrated the major festival of Samhain around November 1, believed that the veil between worlds became especially permeable at this time. In something of that spirit, I find that these days offer an invitation to ponder the past. Not with a desire to return to it, or to second-guess it, but with a mindfulness of what has gone before, and perhaps to have a brief visit from the ghosts of What Might Have Been.

It’s this kind of impulse that gave rise to the feasts of All Saints and All Souls. Recognizing the ancient habit of looking to the past at this time of year, the church created new ways to remember the dead with practices in which we can still hear the echoes of the ancient celebrations. Each culture that observes these feast days continues to add their own layers of meaning and mystery, as with the Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) celebrations that originated in Mexico (and which, of course, rest on pre-Christian festivities). My own observance of these days usually includes setting aside some time for quiet, for remembering, for prayer, for doing some writing that’s just for me. And good food, of course. And lighting a few flames.

I had a taste of the Feast of All Saints a bit early this year. The theme for the Grünewald Guild’s gala dinner and auction that Gary and I helped with in Washington last weekend was A Gathering of Spirits. The title came from Carrie Newcomer’s song of the same name, which she wrote out of her experiences of teaching at the Guild. I created a piece of artwork for the auction and the cover of the evening’s program—it’s the image you see above—and designed it with the theme, and Carrie’s song, in mind. It shares the same title.

The folks who contributed artwork to the auction each had to write an artist’s statement to accompany our piece. Here’s how mine went:

Before the paint, before the color-drenched layers, it began with a prayer. Penciled words across the white paper: a litany of blessing, a liturgy of thanksgiving for a holy place in the Plain Valley where the worlds of art and faith intertwine. Then the painting, then the cutting, then the layering of papers atop the penciled prayer. With every piece, another prayer; with every layer, another memory of those who have passed through the thin, thin place that is the Guild. Remembering how their presence lingers. A communion of saints, say, to sustain us when the way grows daunting. Or call it this: a gathering of spirits.

What stirs your memories in this season? Who are the folks, living or dead, who linger close in these days? Whom do you gather with? Who or what haunts you? How do your memories help inspire your path ahead?

May this week offer you a thin place and a gathering of good spirits. Blessings.

(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, Celtic, mystery, Ordinary Time, sacred time | 8 Comments »

Crossing the Country, Thinking of Love

October 24, 2008


The Two Commandments © Jan L. Richardson

Reading from the Gospels, Year A, Proper 25/Ordinary 30/Pentecost +19: Matthew 22.34-46

Last week. Thursday. Gary and I are somewhere over the continent, making an arc toward Seattle. We are flying across the country to help with an event for the Grünewald Guild; Gary to perform, me to serve as emcee for the gala dinner and auction that will help raise funds to sustain this remarkable retreat center. This is a bonus trip, an out-of-season treat; I’ve never been to Washington State except in the summer, when I go to teach at the Guild, nor have I seen most of these folks anywhere but on the Guild’s property.

I’ve finished the collage for this post and am ambitious to think that I can write the accompanying reflection en route to Seattle. With my tray table serving as a makeshift desk, I turn to Sunday’s lection once again. Matthew gives us another encounter between Jesus and the Pharisees, with this one containing their question, “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” Quoting from the Hebrew scriptures, Jesus tells them, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments,” Jesus says, “hang all the law and the prophets.”

I pull out some notes that I had jotted down as I prepared for this trip. They are filled with impressions, questions, points of connection between the text of the scripture and the text of my life. There are scripture verses I’ve scribbled down. This passage not only drew from earlier sources but also inspired later scripture writers, so there is a web of texts that link to this one. I’ve written down Deuteronomy 6.5, from which Jesus quotes in responding to the Pharisees. It’s part of the Shema, the prayer that lies at the heart of Jewish life: “Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone,” the ancient prayer begins. And Leviticus 19.18: “You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people,” God compels Moses to tell the people of Israel, “but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord.” There is Mark 12.28-34, a parallel to Matthew’s version, which places Jesus’ questioner in a rather different light. And Luke 10.25-37, where, alone among the synoptic gospels, Jesus uses the question as an occasion to tell the Parable of the Good Samaritan.

Romans 13.8-9 appears among my notes. “Owe no one anything,” Paul urges the church in Rome, “except to love one another; for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law.” Galatians 5.14, in which he writes, “For the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.'” And James 2.8, where the writer refers to love of one’s neighbor as the “royal law.”

Psalm 110.1 made its way into my notes. It’s the piece of poetry that Jesus quotes in the second portion of this week’s lection, where he poses his listeners a question about how David can call the Messiah “Lord,” if the Lord is his son. It seems a bit of an odd turn, a particularly circuitous question that Jesus has devised to stump his listeners. (It works, evidently. “No one was able to give him an answer,” Matthew says in concluding the passage; “nor from that day did anyone dare to ask him any more questions.”)

Looking up from my notes, I hand the gospel passage to Gary, ask him what he thinks. Does this second part of the reading offer a connection with Jesus’ words about love, or is it a distinct passage that happens to be in the same lection but requires a separate treatment? Gary ponders the passage for a bit, then suggests that each portion offers a commentary on the relationship between humans and God. The first part seems straightforward, if sometimes gut-wrenchingly difficult. In the second part, there is a deft subtlety in Jesus’ confounding question. In challenging his hearers to ponder how the Messiah can be both David’s ancestor and heir, Jesus underscores the manner in which he stands both within time and beyond it. He is Love embodied, entering into the fullness of what it means to wear flesh in this world. Yet he reminds us that Love is not bound by time, is not confined to chronology, can take us in seeming circles as we enter deeper and deeper into its mysteries.

I ponder these things, then finally I put my notes away, and my Bible, and my laptop. I am tired in body and in brain. There is time yet to try to work all the scattered notes and questions and thoughts into some sort of coherence. For now, I sit back, speeding over the darkened, unseen landscape below. Jesus’ words persist like a refrain, like a heartbeat, a steady pulse as we pass through another time zone, and another. Arcing across the country, I am traveling with someone I love, traveling toward people I love, all of whom continue to teach me about the mysteries of the simple yet achingly intricate commandment of love, this ancient law that draws us so far beyond ourselves and yet circles us deeply back within.

I close my eyes, resting before the arrival. Waiting. For now, it is enough.

How about you? What challenges and what gifts do you find in Jesus’ words in this passage? Where has love led you? Toward what—or whom—do you feel it drawing you? What sustains you along its path?

Blessings.

[To use the “Two Commandments” 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, mystery, Ordinary Time | Leave a Comment »

Taxing Questions

October 14, 2008


Taxing Questions © Jan L. Richardson

Reading from the Gospels, Year A, Proper 24/Ordinary 29/Pentecost +18: Matthew 22.15-22

I’ll not make too much of the fact that this week’s gospel lection, Matthew’s famous “render unto Caesar” passage, falls during a week that has also included doing the paperwork for my quarterly sales tax payment. The timing is a mild coincidence that could tempt me to rant a bit about how I’d be happier to render unto Caesar if he didn’t it make it so *!@?!# difficult, and didn’t provide so many convoluted disincentives to those who work to be conscientious about our rendering. But, like I said, I’m not gonna rant.

The point of this passage, which also appears in Mark and Luke’s gospels, isn’t really about paying taxes, anyway. Each of these three evangelists makes a point of stating that Jesus’ questioners are seeking to entrap him with their queries. Luke adds a couple of details in his version, noting that the religious leaders sought to “trap him by what he said, so as to hand him over to the jurisdiction and authority of the governor.” Luke goes on to say that Jesus “perceived their craftiness” as they asked him, “Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not?”

I know these questioners. I’ve met them, these folks who have learned the knack of asking questions that aren’t really questions but rather are a litmus test. I think of the friend years ago who, upon learning of my call to ordained ministry, began to barrage me with a series of questions organized around other topics that I (a woman pursuing ordination) must be equally wrong about: What did I think about homosexuality? Fornication? The inerrancy of scripture? Or the member of a church I once served, who walked into my office one morning with bagels and tea; his hospitality proved short lived, as he then set upon me with what amounted to arguments with question marks tacked onto the end.

There’s a kind of violence to this form of encounter in which someone, whether through intention or through an unconscious ingrained pattern, approaches us with an inquisitiveness that harbors a weapon. In these hands, questions transmogrify into snares, cudgels, tools for distancing and defining and diminishing. Thinking they already know the answer, such questioners aren’t really interested in engagement but in finding confirmation of their assumptions and fodder for their prejudices.

With his craftiness detector on, Jesus recognizes a loaded question when he hears it. And he doesn’t exactly choose to turn the other cheek here. He, too, possesses a certain level of cunning; he responds to the question, but he cuts through their assumptions about how he will answer it. Given choices of A or B, Jesus will always come up with an inventive C.

I’m intrigued by his ability to do this—by his capacity to receive every question that every person poses to him, by his ability to recognize when he’s being baited, by his ingenuity in coming up with an unexpected response. Most of all I’m intrigued by the remarkable grounding that helps him to achieve this. This takes an intense clarity, a deep sense of who one is and what one is called to do. Faced with those who approach us with assumptions and ulterior motives, having this kind of clarity and grounding offers some hope of responding as Jesus did. It takes, too, cultivating an imagination that sees beyond limited and limiting choices and the assumptions that underlie them.

Where do we get this kind of grounding, clarity, and imagination? I found myself thinking of one example during a phone conversation last night with the St. Brigid’s community. We were reflecting on the practice of praying the Psalms, using as our starting place Kathleen Norris’s splendid essay on “The Paradox of the Psalms” in her book The Cloister Walk. As we talked about the gifts and challenges of praying the Psalms, I remembered a story that Robert Benson relates at the opening of his book Between the Dreaming and the Coming True. He tells of being in a class with “a man with his well-worn, heavily marked Bible open before him, playing a game of ‘trap the teacher.’ He should have known better,” Benson observes, “than to try to trap this particular teacher. Those who pray the Psalms by heart do not rattle very easily.” Benson continues,

The teacher was finishing up a series of talks on praying the Psalms that she had been giving to a community of about sixty of us. I do not now remember the man’s question. I remember only that it had a ‘Well, that is all very well and good, but the God of Abraham [and, therefore, of judgment and vengeance, one got the feeling] is going to make sure that the good guys get into heaven and the bad guys don’t, no matter what’ edge to it. It was asked in a spirit that was not exactly in keeping with the spirit of our prayer community, which was to be together for two years.

Hazelyn McComas looked at him for a minute and then said softly, and with fire in her eyes, ‘I cannot answer that. But I can say this: We Christians are awfully hard on each other and on ourselves, too. And we seem to be especially that way about things that may not really matter.’

In recounting the rest of McComas’s response, Benson solidifies his depiction of her as a woman who was able to respond in much the same way that Jesus did when posed with a taxing question. Recognizing its intent, she neither dismisses it nor gives in to the assumptions that framed it. She finds another way, a true response that rises from the depths of who she is.

Benson recognizes the life of prayer that provides the deep well from which McComas responds to her questioner. She has, he says, “spent a life seeking for glimpses of and listening for whispers of God within the ancient prayers of the Chosen People.” I love his observation that “Those who pray the Psalms do not rattle very easily.”

It’s one thing to know the surface of the scriptures, and another thing entirely to enter the Bible as a place where God meets God’s people—an approach that runs through Hazelyn McComas’s teaching. Entering the biblical text with the desire to meet God enables us to frame our questions, and to respond to the questions of others, in a dramatically different way. When we travel the scriptural landscape as a pilgrim open to the presence of God in every place, rather than as a tourist who thinks we know everything about a place because we’ve visited it a few times, we cultivate a humility that fosters the kind of clarity and imagination that fueled Jesus’ response to his interrogators.

Jesus, of course, prayed the psalms.

I’m not wanting to turn this into a reflection specifically about praying the psalms, but Matthew’s text got me thinking about Robert Benson’s story, and Hazelyn McComas’s, and about my own story of attraction and resistance toward the psalms, those ancient prayers that have sustained the people of God for millennia and that lie at the heart of the monastic tradition to which I feel so drawn. And all these stories are part of the larger story of my own searching and hungering to meet God in the scriptures and elsewhere, and to sink my roots deep into a landscape that helps me grow into someone who can recognize and ask the questions that matter, and resist the ones that don’t.

So what kinds of questions are you receiving these days, and how do you respond? What questions are you asking, and where are they coming from? Are there ways that you try to box Jesus in, thinking you know how he’s going to act in your life? Are there ways that you allow yourself to be boxed in by others or by your own self? What practices help you meet God, in our sacred texts and elsewhere? How do you cultivate an openness to the surprising, imaginative, unexpected ways that God might be wanting to act in your life? What’s option C?

What are you rendering to God?

In these days, may we be people of remarkable imagination. Blessings.

[To use the “Taxing Questions” 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, The Psalms | 3 Comments »

News from the Studio

October 13, 2008

With Advent just around the corner (this year it begins on November 30), the coming season is on my mind. I am all for not rushing into the next season before this one is done (though Ordinary Time does go on for such a long stretch and I’m about ready for a shift), but I did treat myself to one Christmas CD this weekend (the wondrous La Bela Naissença: Christmas Carols from Provence) to inspire me as I worked on a new print. The print features the twenty-five collages that I created last year for my other blog, The Advent Door. Inspired by the tradition of the Advent calendar, which offers a treat for each day between December 1 and 25, I created a collage and reflection for each of those days.

The new print is available on my web site, either by visiting the main page at janrichardson.com or by going straight to the Color Prints page. With its invitation to cross the thresholds of Advent with a mindfulness that sometimes eludes us in the weeks leading to Christmas, it makes a nifty gift for yourself and others. I’d be delighted for you to stop by and check it out, and also to pay a visit to The Advent Door, where I’ll be painting some new doors as the next season gets rolling.

Until then, may the presence of God linger close to you in these ordinary days.

Posted in art, sacred time | 3 Comments »

Getting Garbed

October 10, 2008


Getting Garbed © Jan L. Richardson

Reading from the Gospels, Year A, Proper 23/Ordinary 28/Pentecost +17: Matthew 22.1-14

I have anxiety dreams. Not frequently, mind, but they do pop up once in a while. And for the past couple of years it’s been the case that when the anxieties floating around my subconscious emerge in a dreamscape, they tend to attach themselves to one activity in particular:

Weddings.

I have anxiety dreams about other people’s weddings. I’m performing the ceremony, and I’m running late. Or I’m in the church, but I can’t get to the sanctuary. Or the ceremony is about to happen, and I realize we haven’t actually planned it. Or I don’t have my robe.

I have anxiety dreams about my own wedding, which, God willing, will take place about this time next year. (Note to those who know us: this does not constitute an announcement! It’s not official; we haven’t set the actual date!) It’s the day of the wedding, and I haven’t sent out the invitations. Or we’ve taken care of every detail except for actually planning the service. Or the wedding starts in five minutes and I haven’t dressed. Or I don’t have a wedding gown.

The anxious landscape of those wedding dreams feels to me a lot like the setting of this Sunday’s gospel lection. In Matthew 22.1-14, we find a wedding banquet that is, by turns, wondrous and terrible. It reminds me, in fact, of the old “That’s good! That’s bad!” shtick. In this case, it would go something like this:

A wedding banquet! That’s good!
No, that’s bad; the invited guests didn’t come!
But the king sent people to look for them! That’s good!
No, that’s bad; they killed them and burned their city!
But then they went into the streets and invited everyone they found! That’s good!
But then the king saw a guy who wasn’t wearing a wedding robe, and he had his attendants throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth!

Oh, that’s bad. Definitely very bad.

It’s a wondrous text. In its high points, it shares similarities with Luke 14.15-24; both passages contain parables of a great wedding banquet to which the invited guests find reasons not to go, and so a wild and wondrous array of last-minute B-list folks wind up enjoying a splendid feast. It’s one of my favorite depictions of the kingdom of God.

It’s a terrible text. In his version of the wedding banquet, Matthew sets the stakes considerably and painfully higher than does Luke. Those who refuse to come suffer violent repercussions. Matthew’s inclusion—and punishment—of the hapless, robeless fellow strikes a particularly curious note that feels like a scene out of one of my wedding anxiety dreams.

The fellow comes to the banquet, after all, but somehow, whether by intention or inadvertence—the text isn’t clear—he misses the line where they were handing out wedding robes. The severe punishment inflicted upon him got me wondering about the significance of the missing wedding garment, and, beyond that, about the symbolism of clothing in scripture, and how it bears on this story.

Given that the Bible doesn’t always provide a wealth of descriptive details, I was surprised and then fascinated as I considered the scriptures with garments in mind. Significant mention is made of clothing from almost the very beginning. When God exiles Adam and Eve from Eden, God does not leave them to their fig leaves; in a charmingly domestic gesture, God “made garments of skins for the man and for his wife, and clothed them” (Gen. 3.21). Exodus tells of the lavish vestments fashioned for Aaron and his sons, clothing that was intertwined with their ordination and service as priests of God. When Ruth, a stranger from another land, seeks security in her new home, she goes by night to her kinsman Boaz, asking of him, “Spread your cloak over your servant” (Ruth 3.9). In Matthew’s gospel, the hem of Jesus’ robe becomes a conduit of healing for a woman who has bled for years (Mt. 9). The father of the prodigal son cries out for his returning child to be garbed in the best robe (Luke 15.22). In John’s version of the crucifixion, the soldiers’ division of Jesus’ clothing and their casting of lots for his tunic is seen as a fulfillment of Psalm 22: “They divided my clothes among themselves, and for my clothing they cast lots” (John 19.24).

The book of Revelation surpasses all others in taking particular note of what people are wearing; their garb is laden with symbolic import, with white robes achieving particular prominence. The visionary John draws our attention to “one like the Son of Man” who is clothed with a long robe and a golden sash (Rev. 1), white robes that will be given to members of the church in Sardis “if you conquer” (Rev. 3), the twenty-four elders surrounding the throne who wear white robes and golden crowns (Rev. 4), martyrs who receive a white robe (Rev. 6), a multitude clad in robes that have been made white by washing them in the blood of the Lamb (Rev. 7), an angel garbed with a cloud (Rev. 10), witnesses who prophesy wearing sackcloth (Rev. 11), a woman clothed with the sun (Rev. 12), seven angels robed in pure, bright linen and golden sashes (Rev. 15), a bride clothed with fine linen that is the righteous deeds of the saints (Rev. 19), and a rider wearing a robe dipped in blood who is followed by armies clad in fine white linen (Rev. 19).

Clothing carries such symbolic weight that, in the scriptures, simply being in relationship with God and doing what God would have us do is spoken of in the vocabulary of textiles. “I put on righteousness,” Job claims in one of his discourses, “and it clothed me; my justice was like a robe and a turban” (Job 29). “I will greatly rejoice in the Lord,” Isaiah exults, “…for he has clothed me with the garments of salvation, he has covered me with the robe of righteousness, as a bridegroom decks himself with a garland, and as a bride adorns herself with her jewels” (Isaiah 61).

From Genesis to Revelation, clothing takes on significance in virtually every case as a sign of God’s providence. Time and again, God cares for God’s people by providing clothing for them. It is a tactile, tangible, textured sign of God’s mercy, care, and love. Perhaps to help make up for giving us such vulnerable skin, God works to ensure that we have something to wear. So important is this that God compels us to participate with God in providing clothing for one another. Covering the naked with a garment is among the list of actions in Ezekiel 18 that make a person righteous. Jesus picks up this theme with particular directness in Matthew 25: “Then the king will say to those at his right hand, ‘Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world…I was naked and you gave me clothing….” And if anyone takes our coat, Jesus tells us, “do not withhold even your shirt” (Luke 6).

So providential is God on this point that Jesus specifically instructs us not to sweat the clothing issue. “And why do you worry about clothing?” he asks. “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field,” Jesus continues, “which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? Therefore do not worry, saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear?’” (Matthew 6.28-31).

So, given how hospitable God is when it comes to garbing us, what’s the deal with the garmentless guy getting booted out into the teeth-gnashing darkness? Where is the good news in this parable?

I’m intrigued by the suggestion, posed by a couple of folks I’ve come across, that we rethink our tendency to assume that the king of this parable is God, who comes off looking supremely grumpy and vindictive in this tale. These exegetes suggest that the king instead symbolizes earthly authorities, and the robeless man thrown into the darkness in fact refers to Jesus. They draw our attention in particular to Isaiah 52.13-53.12, where the prophet describes the suffering servant. In his silence and in his afflictions, the servant indeed bears a resemblance to the wedding guest whom the king commands his attendants to bind and throw into the darkness.

Particularly bearing in mind that Jesus grounded his teachings in the Hebrew Scriptures, it’s an enticing suggestion to ponder. I’m not clear, however, that it explains everything. Jesus is telling the parable to describe the kingdom of heaven, and it seems hard to get around the implication that the king in this kingdom is, well, God.

The text doesn’t provide enough clues for us to be certain whether the wedding guest was missing a robe by intention or by accident. Jesus seems to imply that the guest failed to properly receive the sacred hospitality extended to him, or to receive it fully enough—he deigned to come to the feast, but not to wear the correct attire—and therefore was punished in such a fashion that one wonders if perhaps it would have been best for him not to have come at all.

Given the scriptural witness to God’s bias in favor of garbing the garmentless, it seems fair to interrogate the text and its traditional interpretation. At the very least, we need to read Jesus’ parable in light of the scriptures’ well-established depiction of God as one whose propensity for clothing us extends even to the prodigal.

For my part, in pondering this passage in the realm of lectio divina, all my wonderings have come down to this:

What am I clothing myself in? Or, perhaps more precisely, how am I allowing God to garb me these days?

Am I feeling good because I’ve accepted God’s invitation to show up at the feast, but in truth have neglected to open my arms fully to the wonders before me? Am I harboring some sense of rebelliousness—I’ll come in for the party, but you can’t make me dress right? Given that I think a measure of well-placed rebellion is okay, how do I work to ensure that I’m not directing my rebelliousness toward God and God’s hospitable intentions toward me? And on those occasions when I’m wrestling with God, or needing things to be less intense in my relationship with God, or when I simply need to temporarily set aside a metaphorical holy cloak that’s grown too weighty or wearisome, can I trust that God won’t bind me and send me into the darkness to gnash my teeth? If, in my waking life, I’ve wandered into a landscape that feels like those wedding anxiety dreams—I’m not in the right place, I can’t get there, I’m not ready, I don’t have the right thing to wear—can I rest in the God who gives party clothes to the prodigal and spreads a cloak over the stranger and, in baptism, clothes us with Christ’s own self (Galatians 3)? Can I trust that this same God will provide what I need and will let me linger at the feast?

I think I can do that. How about you?

In her wondrous book Showings, also known as Revelations of Divine Love, the medieval English mystic Julian of Norwich wrote, “Our good Lord is our clothing that, for love, wraps us up and winds us about, embracing us, all beclosing us and hanging about us, for tender love.” In these days, may you know the beclosing clothing of Christ, and extend it to those who cross your path. Blessings.

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

[Julian of Norwich quotation cited by Gail Ramshaw in Treasures Old and New: Images in the Lectionary.]

Posted in art, Gospel of Matthew, lectionary, Ordinary Time | 5 Comments »

Feast of St. Francis

October 4, 2008


Saint Francis © Jan L. Richardson

Happy Feast of St. Francis! As I mentioned on the Feast of St. Clare, the hospitality of Franciscans has been a pivotal gift in my life, and I owe them much for helping to preserve my vocation and to sustain me when I made a flying leap into ministry beyond the local church. In particular, it was my Franciscan friend Brother David who helped to inspire that leap and gave me a place to land. I had met him when I was serving as a pastor. Shortly afterward, he established a Center for Art and Contemplation at the retreat center where he worked and where, thanks to the good graces of the Franciscans and not a few other folks, I would become artist-in-residence for some years.

David and his brothers at San Pedro Center gave flesh to the wonders and challenges of Franciscan life and to the spirit of St. Francis. Born in Italy in the 12th century, Francis gave up the riches of his family in order to embrace a life of radical devotion to God and to God’s creatures. He took as spouse the one whom he called Lady Poverty, and a community began to gather around him; they became known as the friars minor (“lesser brothers”). Their rhythm of life included preaching missions (Francis traveled widely, journeying even to Egypt), periods of fasting and prayer, and service to those who lived on and beyond the margins of the society, notably those living with leprosy. It was during a period of fasting and prayer prior to the Feast of Michaelmas that Francis, secluded on a mountain with Brother Leo, received the stigmata—the wounds of Christ.

We know St. Francis in large part for The Canticle of the Creatures, which he began during a time of intense illness. Of his desire to write the canticle, he said to his brothers, “I wish to compose a new hymn about the Lord’s creatures, of which we make daily use, without which we cannot live, and with which the human race greatly offends its Creator.” His praises include, famously, “Sir Brother Sun” and “Sister Moon and the stars” as well as “Brother Wind,” “Sister Water,” and “Brother Fire.” He counted mortality among God’s familiar and familial creatures; on his deathbed, Francis added verses that included the line, “Praised be You, my Lord, through our Sister Bodily Death, from whom no one living can escape.”

Francis left behind a handful of other writings that testify to his deep and simple love of God. With World Communion Sunday coming up tomorrow, it seems fitting to include this portion from A Letter to the Entire Order, which Francis wrote in 1225-1226:

Let everyone be struck with fear,
let the whole world tremble,
and let the heavens exult
when Christ, the Son of the living God,
is present on the altar in the hands of a priest!
O wonderful loftiness and stupendous dignity!
O sublime humility!
O humble sublimity!
The Lord of the universe,
God and the Son of God,
so humbles Himself
that for our salvation
He hides Himself
under an ordinary piece of bread!
Brothers, look at the humility of God,
and pour out your hearts before Him!
Humble yourselves
that you may be exalted by Him!
Hold back nothing of yourselves for yourselves,
that He Who gives Himself totally to you
may receive you totally!

And in the Earlier Rule that Francis wrote for his community, he pleaded,

Therefore,
let us desire nothing else,
let us want nothing else,
let nothing else please us and cause us delight
except our Creator, Redeemer and Savior,
the only true God,
Who is the fullness of good….

Therefore,
let nothing hinder us,
nothing separate us,
nothing come between us.

On this day of celebration, and all the days to come, may it be so. Happy Feast!

(Quotations from Francis of Assisi: The Saint, ed. by Regis Armstrong, O.F.M. Cap., et al.)

Artwork: detail from “St. Francis” © Jan L. Richardson. To use this image, please visit this page at janrichardsonimages.com. Thank you!

Posted in art, medieval, monastic stuff, Ordinary Time, sacred time | 2 Comments »

The Best Supper

October 3, 2008


The Best Supper © Jan L. Richardson

This Sunday is World Communion Sunday. Established by the Presbyterian Church (USA) in 1936 and originally called World Wide Communion Sunday, this day beckons us to be mindful that when we gather at the table, we celebrate not only with those present but also with sisters and brothers around the world.

The artwork above is a piece called The Best Supper. Inspired by the image of Wisdom’s Feast in Proverbs 9, this piece evokes the myriad meals that have fed me in body and soul. As I created this image, I was visited by memories of so many of the tables where I have found hospitality. Those memories are embedded among the pieces of this collage. Circling the table once again, I capture glimpses of those with whom I shared those sacred meals. I remember how we savored every scrap, how we lingered long after the last bite was consumed.

Table Blessing

To your table
you bid us come.
You have set the places,
you have poured the wine,
and there is always room,
you say,
for one more.

And so we come.
From the streets
and from the alleys
we come.

From the deserts
and from the hills
we come.

From the ravages of poverty
and from the palaces of privilege
we come.

Running,
limping,
carried,
we come.

We are bloodied with our wars,
we are wearied with our wounds,
we carry our dead within us,
and we reckon with their ghosts.

We hold the seeds of healing,
we dream of a new creation,
we know the things
that make for peace,
and we struggle to give them wings.

And yet, to your table
we come.
Hungering for your bread,
we come;
thirsting for your wine,
we come;
singing your song
in every language,
speaking your name
in every tongue,
in conflict and in communion,
in discord and in desire,
we come,
O God of Wisdom,
we come

Prayer © Jan L. Richardson from In Wisdom’s Path: Discovering the Sacred in Every Season.


Update: Thanks to everyone who has requested permission to use this blessing or “The Best Supper” artwork. For worship services and related settings, you are welcome to use the blessing without requesting permission; all that’s needed is to include a line with this info:

© Jan L. Richardson. janrichardson.com

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

Prints of The Best Supper and other images are available by visiting the Art Prints page at janrichardson.com. We have greeting cards, too!

Posted in art, blessings, food, lectionary, Ordinary Time, sacred time | 71 Comments »

Violence in the Vineyard

October 2, 2008


Violence in the Vineyard © Jan L. Richardson

Reading from the Gospels, Year A, Proper 22/Ordinary 27/Pentecost +16: Matthew 21.33-46

For the third week in a row, the gospel lection offers us a vineyard. Jesus saved the most challenging one for last. In the passage for this Sunday, he relates the parable of a vineyard owner who sends servants to collect the produce at harvest time, and of tenants who meet the servants with brutal attacks and murder. The landowner sends a larger party of servants, who meet with the same fate. The landowner sends his son, thinking the tenants will respect him; instead, they throw him out of the vineyard and murder him, thinking they can get his inheritance.

It is a vineyard drenched with violence.

To his listeners, Jesus poses this question: “Now when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?” They respond, “He will put those wretches to a miserable death, and lease the vineyard to other tenants who will give him the produce at the harvest time.”

This passage offers some puzzles, not least of which is the violent setting that Jesus employs to drive home his message about the kingdom of God. He has been pressing his hearers to understand that the kingdom will include many folks whom they don’t expect it to encompass. As we’ll see next week, Jesus is not yet done with that crucial point. He’s turning up the heat, in fact, and the images he is choosing for his parables are becoming increasingly raw and disturbing—a fact not lost on his hearers. This week’s lection poses a challenge with the manner in which Jesus—or his listeners, at least—implies an image of God as one who seeks violent retribution.

Yet this lection offers, too, some tantalizing treats for the exegete. Its imagery, for instance, draws on the Song of the Vineyard in Isaiah 5, in which the prophet sings of an allegorical vineyard much like the one in this week’s parable:

My beloved had a vineyard
on a very fertile hill.
He dug it and cleared it of stones,
and planted it with choice vines;
he built a watchtower in the midst of it,
and hewed out a wine vat in it;
he expected it to yield grapes,
but it yielded wild grapes. (Isa. 5.1b-2, NRSV)

For yielding wild grapes instead of cultivated ones, and for the bloodshed that takes place within its borders, the vineyard is made a wasteland.

In this week’s Matthean passage Jesus draws also on the book of Psalms, quoting from Psalm 118, in which the psalmist offers thanksgiving for receiving deliverance in battle. It is the final psalm in a series called the “Egyptian Hallel,” a group of psalms that formed part of the liturgical celebration at festival times. This is how Jesus quotes it:

The stone that the builders rejected
has become the cornerstone;
this was the Lord’s doing,
and it is amazing in our eyes.

I am intrigued by how the gospels preserve bits of the Hebrew scriptures, and by the texture that this intertextuality brings. It serves as a reminder of the way in which the gospels find their grounding in the scriptures that originated with the Jewish people—the canonical matrix or generative milieu, as Richard B. Hays terms it. It’s particularly good to notice the richness of this inheritance at this point in the calendar: we are in the midst of the High Holy Days of the Jewish year, known as the Days of Awe, a ten-day period that began with Rosh Hashanah (the Jewish New Year) on September 29 at sunset and will conclude with Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement), which begins at sunset October 8.

There is much to sort through among the treasures and challenges in this week’s lection. In contemplating this passage in the space of lectio divina, I have been drawn to remember how practice of lectio invites us to enter a text in much the same way we might ponder a dream, recognizing that each part contains and reveals some piece of our selves. And so what’s surfaced and persisted with me has revolved around this question: What’s going on in the vineyard of my soul?

As often happens, creating this week’s collage was part of what got me to that question, and to the other questions that came in its wake. I initially worked on a design that was dramatic, thinking that something vivid and explosive and sharp would evoke the violence of this parable. As I continued to play with the papers, however, I found myself thinking how often violence begins in small ways. It rarely starts as something explosive; rather, it works to find tiny openings, just enough space to wedge itself into. Violence finds its sustenance and its home in the actions that accumulate over time: impatience, indifference, working beyond our weariness, depleting our internal reserves, relying too much on ourselves, pushing anger underground, making assumptions, giving ground to prejudice, stoking resentments… So many ways we till the soil, inadvertently and otherwise, where violence can take hold.

I don’t think of myself as a violent person, and yet lately there are some heads I’ve felt the impulse to pinch. So it’s a good week to be wrestling with this text, and checking my assumption that I’m not a violent person, and asking myself, How am I cultivating my vineyard these days, and what am I allowing to seep in—even stuff that seems tiny, microscopic, really, but can take root over time?

I’ve found myself thinking again of Etty Hillesum, the brilliant young Jewish woman who was killed in the Holocaust. As I’ve written about elsewhere, Etty persisted in tending her soul as the world was falling apart. She understood that violence doesn’t spring forth fully formed, that it gestates in small acts and individual hearts, and that when we don’t attend to what’s going on inside us, the destructiveness within us accumulates and spills over into the world around us. Shortly after appearing at a Gestapo hall where she and other Jewish people had been summoned for questioning, Etty wrote in her journal,

Something else about this morning: the perception, very strongly borne in, that despite all the suffering and injustice I cannot hate others. All the appalling things that happen are no mysterious threats from afar, but arise from fellow beings very close to us. That makes these happenings more familiar, then, and not so frightening. The terrifying thing is that systems grow too big for men and hold them in a satanic grip, the builders no less than the victims of the system, much as large edifices and spires, created by men’s hands, tower high above us, dominate us, yet may collapse over our heads and bury us.

One of the practices that Etty cultivated in the midst of the Holocaust was a refusal to give in to hatred. She recognized hatred as a form of violence that would not solve the terror that the Nazis were inflicting. “I see no alternative,” she once told a friend, “each of us must turn inwards and destroy in himself all that he thinks he ought to destroy in others.”

66 years ago this week, Etty wrote in her journal, “Ultimately, we have just one moral duty: to reclaim large areas of peace in ourselves, more and more peace, and reflect it toward others. And the more peace there is in us, the more peace there will also be in our troubled world.”

It’s a challenge, this peace thing, especially since it specifically does not mean refusing to see the violence that persists in the world or pretending it isn’t there. It doesn’t mean being spineless, doesn’t mean letting the bullies win, doesn’t mean standing by while others are destroyed. Whatever peace doesn’t mean, I do know it includes seeking it within our own selves, cultivating it in the vineyard of our own souls, recognizing that what grows there is intertwined with what grows in the world beyond our own borders.

So what’s growing in the vineyard of your life? What do you cultivate with intention? How do you pursue peace there? Is there anything you have allowed to seep in, to take root by stealth? What practices help you tend that field?

Yesterday morning, praying the Office of Lauds from the breviary that the St. Brigid’s community uses, I came upon this line in the litany: “Alert us to the peace we can impart to others out of the full store of your blessings.” In the days to come, may we be alert indeed to this peace, and tend it, and lavish it on one another. Blessings.

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

[Richard B. Hays reference from his essay “The canonical matrix of the gospels” in The Cambridge Companion to the Gospels, ed. Stephen C. Barton. Etty Hillesum quotations from Etty: The Letters and Diaries of Etty Hillesum 1941-43, edited by Klaas A. D. Smelik.]

Posted in art, Gospel of Matthew, lectionary, Ordinary Time, sacred time | 8 Comments »