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Lent 5: Into the Seed

March 24, 2009

Image: Into the Seed © Jan Richardson

Reading from the Gospels, Lent 5, Year B: John 12.20-33

So do you remember that kerfuffle back in the 90s when Mattel brought out a new Barbie doll called Teen Speak Barbie? The Barbies were programmed to say what the company considered typical adolescent girl phrases. Some of the dolls were heard to utter, “Math class is tough!” A protest ensued, and Mattel excised that phrase. The story still circulates, with the troublesome phrase often (mis)quoted as “Math is hard!”

At this point in the Lenten journey, I find myself getting in touch with my Inner Barbie. Call her Ecclesiastical Barbie, perhaps, or Exegetical Barbie. (Ooooh, can’t you see her now, complete with the Barbie Dream Church and Deacon Ken?) These days, when someone pulls the string on my Inner Barbie, she’s likely to say, “Lent is tough!” or “These lections are hard!”

The scripture passages that this season presents to us are intense, dense, and complex. They are laden with metaphor and meaning, swirl with constellations of symbols and images, and shimmer with vivid emotion and crucial teaching. These texts challenge us to look with honesty at our lives, they confront us with our attachments, and—in a phrase I recently encountered—they urge us to sit with our own mirrors.

Lent is not for sissies.

In these past few weeks, we have traveled with Jesus into the wilderness, listened to his challenge to discern between the things of heaven and the things of earth, witnessed his outraged and outrageous cleansing of the temple, and overheard him liken himself to the serpent that Moses raised in the wilderness. Now he comes along, in this week’s gospel reading, speaking of grain and dying, losing one’s life and keeping it, hating and loving. We hear a thundering voice from heaven speaking of glory, and Jesus talking of being raised up from the earth.

The import of these Lenten texts is all the more intense for the surety of Jesus’ violent death that looms ahead. As we walk with Jesus through these weeks, we know what we are walking toward. And so his words carry extra weight, and we bend closer to capture them, as we do with someone we know is not long for this world—but who is already beginning to see things we cannot see, and speaking a language we do not yet understand.

Unlike others loosing the tethers that have held them to this life, however, Jesus retains a passionate interest in this world. Despite any impression he may give to the contrary (“those who hate their life in this world will keep it,” he says this week), Jesus does not perceive this world, this life, merely as a prelude to heaven or as a stockyard for weeding out the blessed from the damned. He seeks, rather, to train our eyes to perceive the kingdom of heaven tucked into the midst of this very world.

Teaching us to see the kingdom requires symbol, myth, metaphor, story. It requires the visual poetry that Jesus repeatedly uses as he turns to the things of earth to describe the things of heaven: yeast, seeds, dirt, water, fish, lilies of the field, birds of the air. Again and again he employs the ephemeral as he seeks to explain what is eternal. His doing so both comforts and unsettles; taking what is familiar to us, he turns it on its head, and us as well. How will we ever come to understand such a language?

We may feel daunted at this point in the season. I do. So suffused with meaning and messages, not to mention impending murder, these passages can overwhelm with their density and intensity and with their challenge to us to hold their paradoxes and untangle their meanings. Their lines somehow intertwine with the stuff of my days, drawing me deeper into the questions they pose about what my life is really about. There is so much to discern, to sort through, to sift.

In the midst of feeling daunted, I find myself thinking of the mystic poet who asked, “What is the cure for love? More love.” The formula holds true elsewhere. The cure for mystery? More mystery. The cure for paradox? More paradox. Last week’s readings from Numbers and the gospel of John reminded us that the cure for snakebite lay in looking upon a serpent. And in such a way this season beckons us to consider that we find our cure not by shrinking from what besets and befuddles and daunts us but by looking deeper into those very places, and finding the treasure that God has placed within them.

Go into the things you shrink from, Jesus tells his hearers—and us—in this passage. Go into the questions, the mysteries, the paradoxes, the seeming contradictions. Go into the Lenten dying that is not dying after all. We work so very hard at letting go, sometimes, trying to train ourselves to release our grip on all that is not God. But what if it is not about giving up but giving in? Falling into dirt, as Jesus says here. Going where grain is supposed to go. Following the spiral within the seed that takes us deeper into the dark but also—finally, fruitfully—out of it.

The lectionary interrupts this passage before its end; Jesus’ conversation with the crowd actually extends to verse 36. After Jesus finishes his discourse, here’s what John tells us Jesus did: he hid from them. And perhaps that’s what Jesus means for us to do at this point on the Lenten path: to hide. To not be set on figuring everything out but rather to let at least some part of ourselves, for some space of time, withdraw. To cease from wrestling with the questions and mysteries and simply rest with them and give in to them. To secret our souls like a seed in the earth. To see what grows.

How is it with your soul at this point on the Lenten path? As you work with these texts, how are these texts working on you? What questions have they stirred for you in these days? How do you respond to the mysteries and paradoxes they hold? Can you rest with those questions and mysteries? What do you need?

May you fall into, rest into, a place that will tend and nourish you in these days. Blessings.

Resources for the Season: Looking toward Lent

P.S. Happy Eve of the Feast of the Annunciation! Falling on March 25, this feast celebrates the radical yes that Mary said to Gabriel when the angel beckoned her to become the mother of Christ. For some of my artwork and reflections on the Annunciation, visit Getting the Message and The Hour of Matins: Annunciation.

[To use the image “Into the Seed,” 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 John, lectionary, Lent, mystery | 18 Comments »

Lent 4: The Serpent in the Text

March 15, 2009

Image: The Serpent in the Text © Jan Richardson

Reading from the Gospels, Lent 4, Year B: John 3.14-21

One evening a bunch of years ago, I found myself in a New Zealand coffeehouse with some friends I was traveling with. We were there with a friend whose presence in New Zealand had occasioned our trip, plus that friend’s flatmates. It was a wonderfully funky coffeehouse, and as we settled into the couches and chairs with cups in hand, I commented, “Hey, it’s just like Friends!” One of my companions commented that she’d recently read that one of the indicators of contemporary culture was the rising frequency with which we compared our lives to television shows. And this was the 90’s; so-called reality TV, with its further blurring between life onscreen and off, had barely made its appearance.

The comment didn’t cause me to stop watching Friends, but it did set me to noticing the referents I use when I tell something of my life, or hear others use in telling about theirs. Ever since that New Zealand coffeehouse evening, I’ve found myself watchful of what we hook our stories onto, and how we locate ourselves within our cultural landscape.

So I could hardly get past the way that Jesus does this from the opening sentence of the gospel lection for next Sunday. The passage begins in the midst of Jesus’ nighttime conversation with Nicodemus. “And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness,” Jesus says to Nicodemus, “so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him might have eternal life.”

Jesus, like a serpent in the wilderness? Hunh?

That’s quite the referent that Jesus inserts into their chat, a potent image that he brings into a conversation already drenched with symbolism and metaphor. Jesus and Nicodemus have been talking, after all, about being born again, with its attendant imagery of birthing, water, womb, spirit, and wind.

Being a good Pharisee, however, Nicodemus would have known the snaky reference. It comes from Numbers 21.4-9, which serves as the lection from the Hebrew Scriptures for Sunday. Frankly, it’s a right bizarre tale, and steeped in a few layers of magical lore. In it, we find the people of Israel in the wilderness. They have been delivered from their captivity. And they are complaining. “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt,” they cry to Moses, “to die in the wilderness? For there is no food and no water, and we detest this miserable food.”

On a similar occasion in the book of Exodus, God hears the complaints of the people and rains down manna upon them.

This time, God sends fiery serpents. Or, depending on the translation of the Hebrew word seraphim, God sends poisonous serpents. Or winged serpents.

Whatever they are, they aren’t good.

And the serpents bite the people.

And many of the people die.

And the people are very, very sorry.

They come to Moses, full of remorse for being grumbly, and they beg him to pray to God to take the serpents away. Moses prays. In a curious move, God does not take the serpents away. Instead God sends a strange remedy. God tells Moses to make a fiery serpent—or a poisonous serpent, or a winged serpent; whatever it is, Moses makes one out of bronze. As God has told Moses, whenever a serpent bit someone, that person could look at the bronze serpent and live.

Did I mention it’s a strange tale? It’s a little tempting to wade a bit further into the mythological waters that gave rise to this piece of the story. For now, however, let’s just say that part of its point is this: the people are saved by seeing. When the fiery/poisonous/winged serpents come among them, those who succumb to snakebite know where to turn their attention, and thereby live.

In his conversation with Nicodemus, Jesus accrues this meaning to himself. Look on me and live, he says. Turn your gaze, your attention, your focus to me, and you will be saved by the hand of the God who sent me, not for the punishment of the world but for the utter love of it.

The imagery that Jesus offers Nicodemus could hardly be more potent in our own time. Amid the perils of the present, amid the terrors and dangers, God in the main chooses not to remove the hazards from us but continues to provide a remedy for us. In the person of Jesus, God put on flesh and came not only to walk among the dangers with us but also to help make a way through them.

Jesus’ words in this passage prompt me to ponder, where am I turning my attention these days? How do I seek to do what Jesus invited Nicodemus to do: to turn my attention, to turn my gaze toward him—not merely to escape punishment, but as my response to the love that impelled God to send us Christ?

Those questions alone would be enough to carry me through the rest of Lent, a season designed to help us discern what we’re giving our attention to. Yet Jesus’ reference to the snaky tale in Numbers prompts me to ponder, too, where I’m turning not only my attention but also my imagination these days. The presence of the serpent in the text beckons us to attend to the mythic matrix out of which the story of Jesus arises.

If we know Jesus only from reading the New Testament, we’re missing entire layers of meaning. The early hearers of the Jesus story—those who were familiar with the Hebrew scriptures—encountered and understood him in the context of the symbols, images, and metaphors upon which he drew. As we find in next Sunday’s text, those images can take us down some strange paths, to be sure. But they tug at and feed our imagination in crucial ways, telling us what words alone cannot convey.

The metaphors, images, and symbols that slither through our sacred texts beckon us also to consider what we steep our imaginations in—not only within the scriptures but also beyond them. In a culture in which our conversational referents tend to fit within a fairly narrow patch of common ground that’s dominated largely by television and other electronic media, how do we feed our imaginations—and our souls—with the things that will bring richness and depth?

I’m not going to give up the occasional episode of Friends, or the other shows that provide a break for a brain that spends probably way too much time pondering and processing and thinking about stuff. In these Lenten days, though, I’m going to give some thought to where I’m turning my attention and imagination, and to how Jesus calls me not only to turn them toward him, but also to the widespread wonders in which he can be found.

Where are you turning your gaze these days? What are you steeping your imagination in? What are you giving your eyeballs, your mind, your soul to? Stories, images, metaphors, poetry, art: what is the culture that you are creating and participating in, or long to be? How does this help you encounter the incarnate presence of the God who came solely for love of you?

A blessing upon your eyes this week, that you will find wonders along the way.

[To use the image “The Serpent in the Text,” 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

Posted in art, Gospel of John, lectionary, Lent | 6 Comments »

Coming Attractions

March 15, 2009

We have a richness of special days coming up this week, so I wanted to give a quick nod to them and offer some resources for their contemplation and celebration.

March 17, of course, marks the Feast of St. Patrick, patron saint of Ireland. For my reflection from last year, visit Feast of Saint Patrick.

blog-nativity1

March 19 gives us the Feast of Saint Joseph, the remarkable man who listened to angels and took both Mary and Jesus into his care. Joseph has made a number of appearances in my artwork; I invite you to stop by and see him at The Advent Hours and The Advent and Christmas Series.

blog2008-autumnal-equinox

This year, the vernal equinox (also called the spring equinox—in the Northern Hemisphere—or the March equinox) falls on March 20. I posted a reflection on the autumnal equinox here last year; the sentiments apply in springtime as well. Just turn the image upside down for the vernal version!

May you have a festive week!

Posted in Celtic, Lent, monastic stuff, sacred time | Leave a Comment »

Lent 3: The Temple in His Bones

March 11, 2009

Image: The Temple in His Bones © Jan Richardson

Reading from the Gospels, Lent 3, Year B: John 2.13-22

On my first afternoon in Rome a few years ago, I climbed on the back of my friend Eric’s motorcycle and set off with him to begin my acquaintance with the Eternal City. A few minutes down the road, he told me to close my eyes. When we came to a stop and I opened them, my field of vision was filled with one of the most impressive sights in a city of impressive sights: the Pantheon. Built in the second century AD, the Pantheon replaced the original Pantheon that Marcus Agrippa constructed fewer than three decades before the birth of Christ. A temple dedicated to “all the gods” (hence its name), the Pantheon became a church in the seventh century when Pope Boniface IV consecrated it as the Church of Santa Maria ad Martyres. It’s said that at the moment of the consecration, all the spirits inhabiting the former temple escaped through the oculus—the hole in the Pantheon’s remarkable dome that leaves it perpetually open to the heavens.

As churches go, it’s hard to top the Pantheon for its physical beauty and power. It was perhaps risky to see it on my first day, so high did it set the bar for the rest of my trip. Yet Rome, of course, brims with delights for the eyes, and the next two weeks offered plenty of stunning visual fare. Amid the calculated grandeur, I found that it was the details that charmed me: the intricate pattern of a Cosmatesque marble floor, the shimmer of light on a centuries-old mosaic, the inscribed marble fragments that had been unearthed and plastered to the walls. It was staggering to contemplate the countless hours and years that went into the construction of these spaces, or to fathom the vast wells of talent and skill that generations of architects, artisans, and laborers lavished upon them.

The Roman churches that most linger in my memory are those that possessed a clear congruence between the physical environment and its purpose—those places of worship that were not primarily tourist destinations but true sanctuaries. I felt this congruence keenly, for instance, in the Church of Santa Maria in Trastevere. The space intrigued me from my first moments in it, on the first evening of my trip. I would return several times, learning along the way that one of the many ways the church serves the surrounding Trastevere neighborhood is as a place of prayer for the Community of Sant’Egidio, a lay movement of people who work for reconciliation, peace, solidarity with the poor, and hospitality to pilgrims.

On the day that Jesus sweeps into the temple, it’s this kind of congruence that is pressing on his mind. We don’t know precisely what has him so riled up; after all, particularly with Passover drawing near, there are transactions that need to take place in the temple. As Jesus enters, he sees those who are attending to the business involved in the necessary ritual sacrifices, but he seems to feel it has become simply that: a business. Commercial transaction has overtaken divine interaction. Time for a clearing out, a return to congruence between form and function, to the integrity of the purpose for which the temple was created: to serve as a place of meeting between God and God’s people.

To those who challenge his turning over of the temple, Jesus makes a remarkable claim: that he himself is the temple. “Destroy this temple,” he says to them, “and in three days I will raise it up.” His claim stuns his listeners, who know that the sacred space in which they are standing—the Second Temple, which was in the midst of a massive renovation and expansion started by Herod the Great—has been under construction for forty-six years. John clues us in on the secret that the disciples will later recall: “He was speaking of the temple of his body.”

This scene underscores a particular concern that John carries throughout his gospel: to present Jesus as one who takes into himself, into his own body and being, the purpose of the temple. Richard B. Hays writes that in making the link between Jesus’ body and the temple, this passage provides “a key for much that follows” in John’s gospel. “Jesus now takes over the Temple’s function,” Hays observes, “as a place of mediation between God and human beings.” Hays goes on to point out how Jesus’ sometimes enigmatic sayings about himself in John’s gospel—for instance, “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me, and let the one who believes in me drink” and “I am the light of the world”—are references to religious festivals whose symbolism Jesus takes into himself.

Perhaps, then, it all comes down to architecture. The decades of work that have gone into the physical place of worship, the skill of the artisans, the labors of the workers; the role of the temple as a locus of sacrifice, of celebration, of identity as a community; the power and beauty of the holy place: Jesus says, I am this. Jesus carries the temple in his bones. Within the space of his own body that will die, that will rise, that he will offer to us, a living liturgy unfolds.

We will yet see the ways that Jesus uses his body to evoke and provoke, how he will offer his body with all its significations and possibilities as a habitation, a place of meeting, a site of worship. Calling his disciples, at the Last Supper, to abide in him; opening his body on the cross; re-forming his flesh in the resurrection; offering his wounds to Thomas like a portal, a passageway: Jesus presents a body that is radically physical yet also wildly multivalent in its meanings.

The wonder and the mystery of this gospel lection, and of Jesus’ life, lie not only in how he gives his body as a sacred space but also in how he calls us to be his body in this world. Christ’s deep desire, so evident on that day in the temple, is that we pursue the congruence he embodied in himself: that as his body, as his living temple in the world, we take on the forms that will most clearly welcome and mediate his presence. In our bodies, in our lives, in our communities; by our hospitality, by our witness, by our life of prayer: Christ calls us to be a place of meeting between God and God’s people, a living sanctuary for the healing of the world.

The season of Lent beckons us to consider, are there things we need to clear out in order to have the congruence to which Christ invites us? Who helps you recognize what you need to let go of in order to be more present to the God who seeks a sanctuary in you? How is it with your body—your own flesh in which Christ dwells, and the community with which you seek to be the body of Christ in the world? What kind of community do you long for—do you have that? What would it take to find or create it?

In these Lenten days, may we be a place of hospitality to all that is holy. Blessings.

[Richard B. Hays quote from his chapter “The canonical matrix of the gospels” in The Cambridge Companion to the Gospels, ed. Stephen C. Barton.]

Resources for the Season: Looking toward Lent

[To use the image “The Temple in His Bones,” 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 John, lectionary, Lent, medieval | 13 Comments »

Lent 2: In Which We Set Our Minds Somewhere

March 3, 2009

Finding the FocusImage: Finding the Focus © Jan Richardson

Gospel reading for Lent 2, Year B: Mark 8.31-38

This past weekend, those of us connected with Saint Brigid of Kildare Monastery experienced a first in our history: a community-wide conversation. Given that we extend from California to the Dominican Republic, the conversation took place by phone. I’ve written previously here that Saint Brigid’s draws from both Benedictine and Methodist traditions. Our community thus has ancient roots, while at the same time being a new expression of monasticism within a Protestant context. This combination of ancient and new makes for a rich mix as we continue both to explore our heritage and also to discern the shape that our community will take as we grow. Our weekend conversation was part of that ongoing discernment, and though we didn’t come away with many answers, some of the necessary questions came into clearer focus.

Being part of the Saint Brigid’s community involves following the Rule of Saint Benedict, the way of life that the founder of the Benedictine order laid out for his followers in sixth-century Italy. The Rule is elegant in the way that it seeks to order a community for the purpose of growing in its love of God. Though it embodies austerities that seem strange to many of us today (as a mild example, the Rule forbids a monk to “exchange letters, blessed tokens or small gifts of any kind, with his parents or anyone else, or with a fellow monk”), and which modern-day Benedictine communities interpret with contemporary sensibilities, the Rule offers a path notable for its wise marriage of discipline and grace. As many have noted, Benedict possessed keen insight into the workings of the human heart. The way of life that he established, and which has endured for more than a millennium and a half, recognizes and addresses our tendencies toward chaos, and it sets out a path that calls us to move through all that would deter us from God.

The recent Saint Brigid’s conversation and our ongoing study of the Rule have been present with me as I’ve pondered this Sunday’s gospel lection. In his response to Jesus’ teaching about his forthcoming suffering, death, and resurrection, Peter embodies the very qualities that Benedict recognized in those around him and sought to address in his Rule. Peter longs for divine things, yet he grapples with human things. And understandably so: this is hard and harsh teaching that Jesus is engaged in as he speaks of what is to come. How can Peter, who just moments ago declared Jesus to be the Messiah, think of letting go of Jesus, now that he knows who he is? So Peter rebukes Jesus, and Jesus rebukes him right back, calling him Satan and chastising him for setting his mind on human things rather than divine things. One might wonder whether the intense energy that Jesus puts into his response indicates that he is not merely upbraiding Peter but also reminding himself where his own focus must lie.

The Rule of Benedict intrigues me for the way that it addresses the tension that surfaces in Peter and in all who seek to follow God: how do we integrate the realities of our human lives—including our fears and shortcomings—with our desire for the divine? Benedict knew that the members of a community, even a community seeking complete devotion to God, could not spend all their time engaged in prayer and other divine things to the exclusion of everyday, human activities. And so with his Rule he crafted a path that continues to inspire Benedictines to order our lives in a way that both frees us to focus our attention on divine things and also to notice the presence of God in the midst of the human things to which we must give our attention.

Some of the portions of the Rule that are the most telling about Benedictine spirituality are those that have to do with daily life and its physical aspects in the monastery. In the chapter that describes the qualities of the cellarer (the one who takes care of the monastery’s supplies, including food and drink), Benedict writes that the cellarer “will regard all utensils and goods of the monastery as sacred vessels of the altar, aware that nothing is to be neglected.” In the chapter “The Tools and Goods of the Monastery,” Benedict makes clear that the monastery should entrust its possessions only to those members in whom the abbot has confidence. All are to take part in kitchen service, for, as Benedict says, “the brothers should serve one another.” In arising for their prayers, the community members “will quietly encourage each other, for the sleepy like to make excuses.” The rhythm of daily labor and rest is built around the Liturgy of the Hours, which Benedict calls the “Work of God.”

Time and again, Benedict links the tasks of the monastery—the details of daily living that keep us from dissolving into smelly heaps—with our divine work in the world. How would our relationship with our own possessions shift if we understood them as “sacred vessels of the altar”? How might the mundane aspects of our work serve not as a distraction from God but as a window onto the Divine who is present with us in every moment? How would it be to build the rhythm of our life around prayer, instead of the other way around?

Not all are called into a Benedictine way of life—and that’s one of the things that Benedict is very clear about. Yet Christ calls each of us to a path that enables us to find and follow the presence of the holy in the midst of being human, not in spite of being human. The God who became incarnate and wore flesh beckons us to go into the deeps of our humanity, to meet the God who dwells there, and to reckon with all that would keep us from relationship with that God.

Perhaps this is what Jesus means when he talks, in this same passage, about saving our lives and losing them. Following Jesus and denying ourselves doesn’t mean giving up our humanness; rather, it means learning to see what it is within our humanity that hinders us from God, and letting that go. It means not clinging to our human desires at the expense of seeking to know God’s desires for our human lives. It means finding the path that will best enable us, in all the particularities and peculiarities of our lives, to find that intersection—that crossing, that cross that Christ invites us to take up—where the human and the divine meet in fullness.

Where is that intersection for you? Have you found a way, a path, a practice that frees you to find the divine in the particularities of human living? What is your mind set on these days? How does the season of Lent invite you to refocus and reorient yourself amid the ongoing competition between human things and divine things? Who can help you in this?

May this season free you to focus on the divine in the details of your daily life. Blessings.

[Quotes from the Rule of Benedict are taken from The Rule of St. Benedict in English, ed. Timothy Fry, OSB (Collegeville: The Liturgical Press, 1981).]

Resources for the Season: Looking toward Lent

[To use the image “Finding the Focus,” 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 Mark, lectionary, medieval, monastic stuff | 5 Comments »

Lent 1: A River Runs through Him

February 27, 2009

A River Runs through HimImage: A River Runs through Him © Jan Richardson

Reading from the Gospels, Lent 1, Year B: Mark 1.9-15

Well, it doesn’t get much more basic, does it? A man. A wilderness. A few wild beasts for company. And, in Matthew and Luke’s telling of it, no food.

Forty days.

Jesus has just been baptized, just been Holy-Spirit-descended-upon, just been named Son and Beloved. One might think he is now raring to begin his ministry (or what have the past three decades been for?). Instead he goes in the opposite direction. Into the wild. He disappears into the desert as his Jordan-drenched flesh goes dry.

I wonder if, as he settled into that landscape, Jesus thought of those who preceded him in the wilderness. I wonder if he went through the list in his head, remembering his forebears who entered into those betwixt places, the spaces that lay between where they had been and where they were going, between the life they had known and the life they could barely envision. Every morning when he woke up, did he utter a liminal litany?

Hagar
cast into the wilderness with her young son

Jacob
on the run from his brother

Moses and Miriam and Aaron
and all the children of Israel
wandering but delivered from their bondage

Elijah
fleeing for his life from queen Jezebel

Jesus was in good company. The wilderness may be a place of solitude, but it is at the same time a mythic place, imprinted by all who have inhabited it for a little or a longer while. It breathes with the memories of those who found themselves there by accident or intent, who fled there for safety or who entered it in search of what they could not find elsewhere.

In his desert sojourn, did Jesus ever wish for the wellspring that the angel revealed to Hagar in the wilderness, when her son was on the point of death? Did he pray for a vision, a dream like Jacob’s to direct and sustain him? Did he start hungering for the manna that nourished the Israelites in their journey? (And did those wild beasts that Mark mentions start looking tasty to him?)

Did the question that came to Elijah (traveling for forty days and forty nights in the strength of the angel-borne food) come also to him:

What are you doing here?

That’s the question that the desert gives us, isn’t it? What are we doing here? Not just: what are you doing here in this physical place, but also: what are you doing here in this life?

Sometimes it takes going into the wilderness, of body or of soul, to find the answer to this question. Traveling toward where the familiar contours of our lives disappear. Leaving the landmarks behind, the people and patterns and possessions that orient us.

That’s where Jesus goes. Surfacing from the waters of his baptism, he doesn’t fling himself into his ministry, doesn’t take up his work among the community that will meet him with both belief and betrayal. He first goes into the place where everything is stripped away, and he confronts the basic questions about who he is and what he is doing.

We don’t know precisely what it is that Jesus learns there, what he comes to know about himself in that Forty Day Place. We do know that when Satan shows up, Jesus is ready. What Mark hints at in his version, Matthew and Luke describe more fully: Jesus meets the chaos of his tempter with clarity. The baptismal waters may have evaporated from his skin, but not from his soul. A river of knowing runs through him. He is drenched with discernment.

Beloved. Son.

This is what he knows.

When Jesus leaves the wilderness, he takes this clarity with him as a treasure of the desert, a sign of the sustenance that always comes to those who survive that landscape. Baptized in the Spirit, named by the Creator, attended by the angels, Jesus walks out of the desert and into the life that has been prepared for him. He is an initiate, ready, going in the company of all who know what it means to walk through the wilderness and find the gifts God hides there. Perhaps he carries their names on his lips as he crosses back into the community, prepared to proclaim the good news; perhaps those names pound in him like a heartbeat, or rush in his ears like the sound of an ancient river:

Hagar, Jacob, Moses, Miriam, Aaron, Elijah…

So what are you doing here? At the outset of the Lenten journey, why are you where you are? What do you need from the Forty Day Place that this season offers? Is there a wilderness you need to enter—with your body or with your soul or with both—in order to gain clarity at this point in your life? What might that look like? Whose stories could you draw on, lean on, take heart from, as you contemplate this?

As you travel into this Lenten landscape, may you find what you most need, may you receive the gift you never expected, may you find strength in those who have journeyed there before you, and may angels attend your way. Blessings.

[For last year’s reflection on Matthew’s version of this story, visit Discernment and Dessert in the Desert.]

[To use the image “A River Runs through Him,” 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

 

Posted in art, Gospel of Mark, lectionary, Lent | 4 Comments »

The Artful Ashes

February 22, 2009

blog-2009-ash-wednesday-2Image: 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

When I received the invitation to do the artwork for Peter Storey’s book Listening at Golgotha, a series of reflections on the Seven Last Words of Jesus (featured in Friday’s post), it came as a lovely bit of synchronicity. His editor, who had been the editor for my first book, wasn’t aware that Peter and I were acquainted, having crossed paths on a few occasions when he was visiting the U.S. from his native South Africa. The catch was that the artwork had to be in black and white. With my having worked primarily in paper collage, black and white was not exactly my first language, artistically speaking. I so wanted to work on Peter’s book that I told the editor yes. Then I set about to figure out what kind of black and white medium I could manage.

I tried doing collages in black and white, but made little headway. After several other experiments, I picked up a piece of charcoal. And fell in love.

Beginning to work with charcoal was like learning a new language, with the delights and challenges that come in such a process of discovery. Most of my early sketches were a mess. I could sense that a style was stirring, but in the beginning stages it appeared so raw and unformed that I began to despair of having anything ready in time for Peter’s book.

On the verge of calling the editor to do an embarrassing backing-out dance (an awkward jig that I try hard to avoid), I instead called my artist friend Peg to ask if she could either collaborate with me or counsel me on the project. Peg told me to bring her all the sketches I’d done: the good, the bad, and the ugly. To my eye they were mostly bad and ugly. But Peg took the smudgy, ashy papers, spread them out, and pondered them. In a fashion that struck me as being something like lectio divina, she followed their tangled lines until she began to perceive something that had the beginnings of coherence and form. Moving through what I had perceived as chaos, Peg showed me what she saw, and she offered suggestions on how to pursue and develop the path that had been obscure to me. Not only did this help make it possible to complete the project, but it also began to open creative doors within and beyond me in ways I never would have imagined.

In large part, what I came to love about working in charcoal was the dramatic contrast it offered to my colorful, often intricate collage work. Where collage involves a process of accumulation and addition as the papers are layered together, charcoal invites me to an opposite experience. When I do a charcoal drawing, my goal is to find the fewest number of lines necessary to convey the scene. It is a medium of subtraction, involving little more than a piece of blank paper, a stick of charcoal, and an eraser to smudge and then smooth away all that is extraneous. What remains on the page—the dark, ashen lines—is spare, stark, sufficient.

For every artist, one of the most crucial habits to develop is staying open to what shows up. In the process of cultivating a unique vision, with all the consuming focus that involves, we have to learn, at the same time, how to keep an eye open for the creative surprises and invitations that can lead us to new pathways or deepen existing ones. If I stay too attached to a favorite medium or familiar technique, I risk shutting myself off to possibilities that can take me to whole new places in my work and in my own soul.

Taking up a new medium, entering a different way of working, diving or tiptoeing into a new approach: all this can be complex, unsettling, disorienting, discombobulating. Launching into the unknown and untried confronts us with what is undeveloped within us. It compels us to see where we are not adept, where we lack skill, where we possess little gracefulness. Yet what may seem like inadequacy—as I felt in my early attempts with charcoal—becomes fantastic fodder for the creative process, and for life. Allowing ourselves to be present to the messiness provides an amazing way to sort through what is essential and to clear a path through the chaos. To borrow the words of the writer of the Psalm 51, the psalm for Ash Wednesday, it creates a clean heart within us.

Ash Wednesday beckons us to cross over the threshold into a season that’s all about working through the chaos to discover what is essential. The ashes that lead us into this season remind us where we have come from. They beckon us to consider what is most basic to us, what is elemental, what survives after all that is extraneous is burned away. With its images of ashes and wilderness, Lent challenges us to reflect on what we have filled our lives with, and to see if there are habits, practices, possessions, and ways of being that have accumulated, encroached, invaded, accreted, layer upon layer, becoming a pattern of chaos that threatens to insulate us and dull us to the presence of God.

Each of the scripture texts for this day invites us to ponder the practices that we have given ourselves to, and the practices to which God calls us, both individually and in community. The prophet, the psalmist, the apostle, and Jesus himself all urge us, in these readings, to pay attention to the rhythms of our lives so that we may discern which rhythms draw us closer to God and which ones pull us away.

Where do these sacred texts find you as we cross into the season of Lent? What is the state of your heart? What has taken up residence there over the past weeks, months, years? Are there habits and ways of being that you are so invested in, so attached to, that it has become difficult to discern new directions in which God might be inviting you to move? Who can help you ponder the patterns present in your life—the good, the bad, the ugly—and help you see where new life is stirring, and where a new path might be opening? What are the most basic, elemental, crucial things in your life, and how might God be challenging you to give your attention to them in this season?

The gospel for Ash Wednesday tells us that where our treasure is, there our hearts will be also. On this day, and throughout the coming days, may we see clearly where our treasure lies, and have hearts clear and open enough to recognize the surprising forms that such treasure can take. On this day of ashes, blessings to you.

[For last year’s reflection on Ash Wednesday, visit Ash Wednesday, Almost.]

[To use the “Ash Wednesday” image, please visit this page at janrichardsonimages.com. Your use of the Jan Richardson Images site helps make the ministry of The Painted Prayerbook possible. Thank you!]

Posted in art, books, Gospel of Mark, lectionary, Lent, sacred time | 9 Comments »

Looking toward Lent

February 20, 2009

blog-sevenlastwordsframed31

As Ash Wednesday approaches, I thought this would be a good time to do a bit of housekeeping here at The Painted Prayerbook. I have a few artful Lenten offerings I want to let you know about, along with some related news.

ORIGINAL ART: The artwork above is a series of charcoals that I did several years ago for Peter Storey’s book Listening at Golgotha, which offers a collection of reflections on the Seven Last Words of Jesus. The original artwork is available for sale (as an intact series), beautifully matted and framed. Great for a church, chapel, or other space for devotion/worship, especially during Lent and Holy Week. For more information, visit The Seven Last Words Series. [Update: I’m delighted that this series was acquired by Duke Divinity School, where it is permanently installed.]

MORE ORIGINAL ART: I have a few of the original pieces from The Hours of Mary Magdalene available. For details, visit The Hours of Mary Magdalene and click on the individual images.

ART PRINTS: All of the images from The Seven Last Words Series and The Hours of Mary Magdalene are available as prints; check out the Art Prints page on my website. You can also purchase prints of The Lenten Series (illustrations from my book Garden of Hollows) as well as prints of artwork from my books and my blogs.

A LITERARY LENT: Published through my small press, Garden of Hollows: Entering the Mysteries of Lent & Easter offers artwork and reflections on the sacred texts and themes of the coming season. You can read excerpts and order at Wanton Gospeller Press. My book In Wisdom’s Path: Discovering the Sacred in Every Season includes a section for Lent and Easter. Visit the Books page on my website for details on this book that includes my full-color artwork.

IMAGES ONLINE: Thanks so much to everyone who has requested permission to use my artwork. In response to the number of requests, I’m working to create a website that will enable congregations and other communities to download high-resolution files of my images for use in worship and educational settings (bulletin covers, PowerPoint, etc.). The artwork will be available for a per-image fee, or, for an annual subscription, churches can have access to all the images for a whole year. I’m aiming to have this ready sometime this spring, and I look forward to having this new service available as a way to share mutual creative support with worshiping communities and other groups. In the meantime, I am always happy to respond to individual requests. Thank you for being mindful that, like most artwork, the images on my blogs, website, and in my books are under copyright. I am really happy for folks to make use of my artwork, but permission must be sought for use of these images in any format. Details and contact info are available at Copyright Permissions. [Update: images for use in worship and related settings are available at Jan Richardson Images.]

eNEWSLETTER: I send out an occasional e-newsletter. It includes a seasonal reflection, artwork, information about current offerings and upcoming events, and whatever else strikes my creative fancy. I would be delighted to include you in my mailing list if you haven’t already subscribed. You can sign up here.

GRATITUDE: Most of all, thank you for visiting The Painted Prayerbook and for the sustenance and companionship you provide along the way. Your comments, emails, prayers, and presence are all tremendous gifts on my path. Please know that I pray for you and that I carry a heap of gratitude for the ways you help make possible my work in this world.

Many blessings to you in these remaining days of Epiphany!

Posted in art, books, Lent, writing | 3 Comments »

Transfiguration Sunday: Show and (Don’t) Tell

February 15, 2009

Image: Transfiguration © Jan Richardson

Reading from the Gospels, Transfiguration Sunday, Year B:
Mark 9.2-9

One of the greatest challenges in being a writer—or an artist or a preacher, for that matter—is discerning what to reveal and what to conceal. It’s a tricky thing, figuring out how much of our own experience should make its way into our work in an obvious fashion. There’s no well-defined line, though I find that my gut tends to sound the alert when it senses that something I’m reading or viewing or listening to has tilted toward providing Too Much Information.

The TMI syndrome doesn’t simply involve an overabundance of content; sometimes it’s a matter of timing. I read a book some years ago that the author crafted around a profound experience that had taken place not all that long before she began to write about it. I remember wishing she had waited a while. Clearly the act of telling the story was an integral part of how she processed the experience, but it struck me that both she and the story would have benefited from giving herself more time and space before offering that experience to the public. I find myself wondering what the story feels like to her years later, how the experience of sitting with it, pondering it, reading it over time might have honed and deepened her telling of it.

I’ve been thinking about that elusive line between revelation and concealment as I’ve pondered the gospel lection for next Sunday. It seems we’ve only recently tidied up from Christmas and Epiphany, and we’re already approaching Transfiguration Sunday and the threshold of Lent. Next Sunday’s reading beckons us to pause and gather ourselves for a moment in this space between the seasons of Epiphany and Lent, and to give thought to the questions this passage poses. Mark does the transfigurative honors for us this year with his account of this strange journey that Jesus takes with a trio of his disciples.

The transfiguring of Jesus provides a dazzling, dizzying experience for those who have accompanied him up the mountain. One can well understand that Peter, James, and John would desire to find a form for their experience, some kind of container to help them absorb and define what has taken place. We perceive this in Peter’s impulse to construct dwellings for Jesus, Moses, and Elijah. Faced with an event of overwhelming spiritual import, he responds at a physical level: Let me build something.

Peter’s offer is still on his lips when a bright cloud envelops them, a voice from within it speaking words akin to those that came from heaven at the moment of Jesus’ baptism: “This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased; listen to him!” The word for what the cloud does is overshadow, from the Greek word episkiazo. We’ve seen this word before. It appears in the angel Gabriel’s conversation with Mary, when he responds to her question about how it will be possible for her to give birth to the child whom he has asked her to bear. “The Holy Spirit will come upon you,” he tells her, “and the power of the Most High will overshadow you” (Luke 1.35).

In the gospels, the Annunciation is the only occasion besides the Transfiguration that this word appears. The gospel writers’ use of the word draws our attention to the resonance between the story of the Annunciation to Mary and the story of the Transfiguration. Each tale reminds us that we cannot contain or confine God within man-made structures. When God shows up, God often appears in and through people: God goes not for architecture but for anatomy. Or, rather, God makes architecture of our anatomy: God seeks to make of us a dwelling, a habitation for the holy.

This business of being host to the divine is no easy thing, God (literally) knows. So it’s interesting that the soon-to-be-mother Mary and the flat-on-their-faces disciples each receive precisely the same assurance: Do not be afraid. And each goes on their way, carrying something they had not previously known.

In the absence of being able to build physical dwellings, the disciples would have wanted, I suspect, to construct a story about their mountaintop experience: a container of words, at least, that would help them hold and convey what had happened to Jesus and to themselves. Perhaps anticipating this, Jesus enjoins them not to tell what has transpired until after his resurrection. It’s one of the only times that Jesus, a man of action, urges them to wait. This is not for revealing, he tells them; this is for you to carry within you, to ponder, to conceal until the fullness of time.

Perhaps like Mary with the child in her womb.

It was important that Peter, James, and John have that mountaintop experience. It wasn’t important for them to tell the story, not yet; that wasn’t the point of their outing. But the experience would work on them, shape them, and continue to transform and perhaps even transfigure them. The knowledge they carried would alter every future encounter: with Jesus, with their fellow disciples, and with those to whom they ministered.

The story of the Transfiguration calls me to remember that there are times for revealing and times for concealing. There are seasons to tell our story. And there are seasons to hold the story within us so that we can absorb it, reflect on it, and let it (and us) grow into a form that will foster the telling.

As a writer and artist and preacher, I don’t claim to handle that line between revelation and concealment with consistent finesse. But I’ve figured out that one of the core questions in discerning whether to share an experience is this: Whom does the story serve? Does my telling it help you reflect on your life and how God is stirring within it? Or does it merely provide information I think you should know about my own life because I hope it will impress you and induce a response that serves me more than it does you?

How do you discern what and where to share about your life? Whom do your stories serve? Do you have a story of transformation that could help someone else? Is it time to tell it? Is there work that God still needs to do within you so that you can tell the story in the way it needs telling? Whether revealing or concealing, how are you continuing to become a dwelling for the presence of the God who transforms us?

Blessings to you in these threshold days.

[To use the image “Transfiguration,” 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, Epiphany, Gospel of Mark, lectionary, sacred time, writing | 10 Comments »

Eat this Book

February 14, 2009

blog-bookbinding21

During the past couple of weeks, I’ve spent some time in the bookbindery (a.k.a. my dining/kitchen/studio table), working to replenish the supply of books that I’ve published through my small press. With Lent just around the bend, I’ve been particularly focused on shoring up my stock of my book Garden of Hollows: Entering the Mysteries of Lent & Easter. Drawing on the texts and images that the Lenten season gives us, Garden of Hollows invites readers to contemplate their lives in the light—and shadows—of the stories that lead us toward resurrection.

I established Wanton Gospeller Press in order to create small, intimate, artful books of a sort that traditional publishing houses typically can’t offer. Although I’m continuing to work with publishing houses, I’m grateful to have a pathway that enables me to develop my own vision for a book and handle its production from start to finish. I do virtually the whole shebang myself: writing, artwork, design, making the covers, and binding the books. The process is labor intensive, but I enjoy the rhythm and being engaged in each step of bringing a book into the world.

With this round of book making, I’ve added a couple of new, artful elements, including gorgeous endpapers made of mango papers that come from Thailand. The paper is beautiful, translucent, and has mango leaf inclusions, as you can see in a couple of the photos above. I’ve selected a different mango paper for each of my Wanton Gospeller editions; for Garden of Hollows I chose a lovely pale green.

My sweetheart Gary says using mango paper is a good choice, as readers can eat the endpapers if they start feeling peckish along the way. That’s actually a great image for these books, and for the process of lectio divina (sacred reading) that gave rise to them. The Dominican nun who first taught me about lectio sometimes calls it lectio bovina, in respect of the way that this form of reading invites us to chew and chew on a sacred text until we gain the nourishment it has to offer. Garden of Hollows grew from a long process of ruminating on the sacred stories of the coming season. I pray that this book, in turn, offers some of the sustenance that I have found.

I would love to share these Wanton Gospeller Press books with you! For more information and book excerpts, click on Wanton Gospeller Press, where you can order either from Amazon.com or directly from me.

Happy munching!

Posted in art, books, food, lectio divina, lectionary, Lent, writing | 9 Comments »

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