The Painted Prayerbook

Image: Palm Sunday © Jan Richardson

Reading from the Gospels, Palm Sunday: Matthew 21.1-11

What is the difference between a sacred procession and a violent mob? The answer lies somewhere between Palm Sunday and Good Friday. As we enter this stretch of the season, we might do well to linger long with this turning of the tale. In this time when it has grown so difficult to discern the truth among the multiplicity of messages and to resist being manipulated by those who do the telling, the ancient story of Christ’s journey to the cross has something to teach us about whose voice we listen to, and what parade we choose to join.

But for today, we turn our ears toward the sound of rejoicing. Today we join our voices with the cries that sing praise to the one who comes in the name of the Lord. And we pray for wisdom, that we may see the Christ who enters again into our midst, and rejoice when we recognize him, and follow in the way that he goes.

I have reflected previously on this passage and invite you to visit Palm Sunday: Where the Way Leads. As we accompany Christ, who draws ever closer to the cross this week, what voices are you listening to? What messages are coming your way—from the media, from friends and family, from the community around you, from your own soul and mind? What are you hearing, and how do you sift and sort it? To whom are you listening these days, and why? Where and how do you choose to lift your own voice?

Blessing of Palms

This blessing
can be heard coming
from a long way off.

This blessing
is making
its steady way
up the road
toward you.

This blessing
blooms in the throats
of women
springs from the hearts
of men
tumbles from the mouths
of children.

This blessing
is stitched into
the seams
of the cloaks
that line the road,
etched into
the branches
that trace the path,
echoes in the
breathing of the willing colt,
the click of the donkey’s hoof
against the stones.

Something is rising
beneath this blessing.
Something will try
to drown it out.

But this blessing
cannot be turned back,
cannot be made
to still its voice,
cannot cease
to sing its praise
of the one who comes
along the way
it makes.

—Jan Richardson

2016 update: “Blessing of Palms” appears in my new book Circle of Grace: A Book of Blessings for the Seasons. You can find the book here.

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

Resources for the season: Looking toward Lent

And blogging daily at Sanctuary of Women during Lent…

Image: Ash Wednesday © Jan Richardson

Readings for Ash Wednesday: Joel 2:1-2, 12-17; Psalm 51:1-17;
2 Corinthians 5:20b – 6:10; Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21

All week the scent of orange blossoms has been coming through the bedroom window. The smell is rooted deep in my memory; I come from generations of citrus growers. I think that even if I had grown up far from the groves whose fragrance infused my childhood, something ancestral in my blood would stir at the scent that has been attending these past days.

Earlier in the week, the scent of orange blossoms was tinged with smoke. There’s a fire blazing to the north of us. It’s just one of more than 60 active wildfires burning around our parched state, but it’s a doozy: about 25 miles north of the Kennedy Space Center, it has scorched around 17,000 acres of land. They’re calling it the Iron Horse Fire, so dubbed by a supervisor at the Florida Division of Forestry who named it after a bar in Ormond Beach that’s especially popular during Bike Week. “The fire is not near the bar,” the Division of Forestry’s website emphasizes. “It is much farther south, but the supervisor figured he would be at the fire instead of the Bike Week events, which started Friday.”

Here on the threshold of Lent, the scent of blossom and blazing offers a vivid point of entry into the coming season; a sort of olfactory invocation for the days ahead. More than any other season of  the liturgical year, Lent draws us into a landscape that is distinctive for the ways that it intertwines extremes and calls our attention to how brokenness and beauty, horror and hope dwell intimately together. We will see this exemplified in next Sunday’s gospel reading, which takes Jesus—and us—into a stark wilderness where Satan comes to visit, but where angels do, too.

Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of this bittersweet season. Ashes are the first sign and symbol of Lent, but they are not the final word. Come Wednesday, we will bear this mark of what has been left behind from the burning, this reminder of the dust and earth from which we rise and to which we will return. Yet even the ash—which in many churches comes from burning the Palm Sunday branches of the previous year—has a memory of its own. Deep within its darkness and dust lies the imprint of green, the memory of life, the awareness of what has gone before and of what may yet be.

Ash Wednesday propels us into a season that inspires us to learn once again that what God creates and graces and blesses may be beset and broken but not destroyed. Life finds its way: ancient memory takes hold, follows the path of the ash, inscribes itself anew, beauty blazing from the wreck and ruin. “We are treated…as dying,” Paul writes in the Ash Wednesday reading from the Epistles, “and see—we are alive; as punished and yet not killed; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing everything.”

And you: here on the threshold of Lent, amid the ashes, what do you possess? As we enter this season that pares our lives down to what is absolutely essential and basic and elemental, what do you hold as most important? Is there anything you need to allow to become ash, that it may be transformed into something new? Beneath what seems dying or destroyed, what life might yet take hold?

Blessing for Ash Wednesday

So let the ashes come
as beginning
and not as end;
the first sign
but not the final.
Let them rest upon you
as invocation and invitation,
and let them take you
the way that ashes know
to go.

May they mark you
with the memory of fire
and of the life
that came before the burning:
the life that rises and returns
and finds its way again.

See what shimmers
amid their darkness,
what endures
within their dust.
See how they draw us
toward the mystery
that will consume
but not destroy,
that will blossom
from the blazing,
that will scorch us
with its joy.

—Jan Richardson

[For previous reflections on Ash Wednesday, please see Upon the Ashes, The Artful Ashes and Ash Wednesday, Almost. To use the “Ash Wednesday” image, please visit this page at janrichardsonimages.com. Your use of janrichardsonimages.com helps make the ministry of The Painted Prayerbook possible. Thank you!]

P.S. I’m posting regular reflections over at my Sanctuary of Women blog during Lent and would be delighted to have your company there as well!

Resources for the season: Looking toward Lent

Jan + Garrison in Iowa

Reading from the Gospels, Transfiguration Sunday, Year A (March 6): Matthew 17.1-9

Gary and I are settling back in after being away recently for a wonderful trip to the Midwest. We seem to be establishing a tradition of leaving Florida in February for colder climes; last year we were in Minnesota in February, and this year it was Iowa, where the temperature actually climbed into the low 60s while we were there! By the time we left, all the snow that you see in this picture had pretty well melted. We were the guests of Iowa Wesleyan College, where I served as this year’s speaker for the Manning Lecture Series and as artist-in-residence for the week. Gary (who also did some concerts around Iowa) and I collaborated on some of the events and greatly enjoyed the time we spent with students, faculty, clergy, and folks from the surrounding community. In the studio, the chapel, the classroom, and the table, we received tremendous hospitality and are grateful to everyone who offered us such a warm welcome.

Our trip capped a great but intense stretch of speaking engagements, which accounts for my absence from The Painted Prayerbook in recent weeks. I have missed you! I am glad for the chance to take some Sabbath time as I settle back in, and am also eager to dive into some creative work that I’ve been itching to get to. I’ll be cooking up some new artwork and reflections here for Lent and look forward to sharing the coming season with you.

As I reenter my life here, absorbing and reflecting on what I received in Iowa,  it seems fitting that this Sunday is the Feast of the Transfiguration. The disciples who went up the mountain with Jesus and down again had to do in a dramatic way what each of us is called to do in our daily lives: to be drawn to those places where we see and know Christ with greater clarity—the mountain, the Midwest—and then to return to the rhythm of our lives, absorbing what we have seen and allowing it to infuse how we perceive and enter into our ordinary days.

As we approach Transfiguration Sunday, how are you navigating that journey in your own life? Where are you letting Christ draw you, that you may glimpse him more clearly? How does this change the way you move through your daily life? Are you open to how Christ might yet surprise and stun you with his appearing?

I have a couple of previous reflections on the Transfiguration and invite you to visit them while I hunker down in my studio and prepare for the coming season. You can click on the images or the titles below to find your way.

In this week, may Christ our Light illumine and transform your daily path. Blessings.

Transfiguration: Back to the Drawing Board

Transfiguration Sunday: Show and (Don’t) Tell