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Feast of Saint Patrick

March 17, 2008

stpatrick.jpg
Saint Patrick: Deer’s Cry © Jan L. Richardson

It seems auspicious that Holy Week this year begins with the feast of St. Patrick. Though his feast falls during Lent by happenstance, Patrick offers a powerful example of someone who, in every season, accepted the challenge that Lent poses us: to stretch beyond the familiar borders of the world we know, and to meet God there.

The story of Patrick is deeply entwined with the story of Ireland, so much so that it was only in recent years that I learned that Patrick’s story didn’t begin there. The boy who would become a saint was born in Britain at the end of the fourth century. As a youth he was kidnapped and taken to Ireland as a slave, where he tended flocks and began to spend his time in prayer. In a work titled “Patrick’s Declaration on the Great Works of God,” also known as the Confessio, Patrick writes that as he prayed among the flocks, “more and more, the love of God and the fear of him grew [in me], and [my] faith was increased and [my] spirit was quickened….” After six years, Patrick escaped from captivity and returned to Britain and to his parents, who, he tells us, “begged me—after all those great tribulations I had been through—that I should go nowhere, nor ever leave them.” Yet Patrick goes on to write,

…it was there, I speak the truth, that ‘I saw a vision of the night’: a man named Victoricus—’like one’ from Ireland—coming with innumerable letters. He gave me one of them and I began to read what was in it: ‘The voice of the Irish.’ And at that very moment as I was reading out the letter’s opening, I thought I heard the voice of those around the wood of Foclut, which is close to the western sea. It was ‘as if they were shouting with one voice’: ‘O holy boy, we beg you to come again and walk among us.’ And I was ‘broken hearted’ and could not read anything more. And at that moment I woke up. Thank God, after many years the Lord granted them what they called out for.

Patrick eventually went back to Ireland, returning as a bishop to the land that had been the place of his bondage. For Patrick and his fifth-century contemporaries, Ireland was the edge of the known world. In returning there, he considered himself to be living out Christ’s call to take the Gospel to the ends of the earth. He writes, “We are [now] witnesses to the fact that the gospel has been preached out to beyond where any man lives.” Though Patrick was not the first Christian to set foot in Ireland, he was among the earliest, and his tireless, wide-ranging ministry was pivotal in the formation and organization of the church in that land.

Like all good saints, Patrick has attracted good legends. One story relates that as he and his companions made their way to Tara to see Loegaire, the High King of Ireland, the king’s men tried to ambush them. Patrick sang a prayer, known as a lorica (”breastplate”—a prayer of encompassing and protection), and he and his companions took on the appearance of deer, thereby eluding their attackers. The prayer, which became known as Patrick’s Breastplate or Deer’s Cry, most likely dates to at least two centuries later. It endures, however, as one of the most beautiful and powerful prayers of the Christian tradition, and it conveys something of the spirit of Patrick that continues to permeate Ireland and the world beyond. The prayer reads, in part,

Christ with me, Christ before me, Christ behind me;
Christ within me, Christ beneath me, Christ above me;
Christ to right of me, Christ to left of me;
Christ in my lying, Christ in my sitting, Christ in my rising…

(This excerpt, along with the quotes from Patrick’s Confessio,
come from Celtic Spirituality, translated and introduced
by Oliver Davies.)

Enter “Deer’s Cry” into your search engine and you’ll find a variety of translations of the entire prayer. My favorite translation is by Malachi McCormick of the Stone Street Press. In a charming edition which, like all his books, is calligraphed, illustrated, and hand-bound by his own Irish self, Malachi offers his English translation alongside the old Irish text. I happened upon Malachi’s Deer’s Cry as a seminary student many moons ago and was immediately taken by his elegant and painstaking work. His wondrous books provided the initial inspiration when I founded Wanton Gospeller Press several years ago, and one of my great delights in the wake of that has come in exchanging correspondence with Malachi. I invite you to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day by visiting Malachi’s site at Stone Street Press, purchasing a copy of Deer’s Cry, and picking up a few other books while you’re at it.

A blessed Feast of St. Patrick to you, and may God encompass you with protection on this and all days.

Bonus round: My sweetheart, Garrison Doles, has an amazing song inspired by the life of St. Patrick. It incorporates the ancient prayer of encompassing known as “St. Patrick’s Breastplate” or “Deer’s Cry.” Click this audio player to hear “Patrick on the Water” (from Gary’s CD House of Prayer).

[To use the “St. Patrick: Deer’s Cry” 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, books, Celtic, Lent, monastic stuff, sacred time, writing | 4 Comments »

Palm Sunday: Where the Way Leads

March 14, 2008

Image: Where the Way Leads © Jan Richardson

At the opening of her book To Dance with God, Gertrud Mueller Nelson tells the story of an afternoon she spent absorbed in a project at her sewing machine. Her daughter Annika, three years old at the time, dug into the basket of scraps that sat at her mother’s feet. Annika pulled out several long, bright strips of discarded fabric, gathered them up, and slipped away. Gertrud writes than when she went to find Annika, “I tracked her whereabouts to the back garden where I found her sitting in the grass with a long pole. She was affixing the scraps to the top of the pole with great sticky wads of tape. ‘I’m making a banner for a procession,’ she said. ‘I need a procession so that God will come down and dance with us.’ With that she solemnly lifted her banner to flutter in the wind and slowly she began to dance.”

This week we celebrate Palm Sunday, remembering the day when the crowds of Jerusalem offered a procession to celebrate the one who came to live, and walk, and work, and dance among us. Matthew gives us the Gospel lection for Palm Sunday this year. Matthew 21.1-11 tells the familiar story of how Jesus sends two disciples ahead to the village to bring back a donkey for Jesus. (An art historical note here: Matthew’s claim that Jesus rode a donkey and a colt, which probably stemmed from a not-entirely-precise reading of the Isaiah prophecy that he quotes, produced some unusual medieval depictions of Jesus riding two animals at the same time. Not saying he couldn’t have done it, but I think he already had enough going on that he would have avoided that particular balancing act.) Matthew goes on to tell of the crowds: they line the road with cloaks and branches, they go ahead of Jesus, they follow after him, they shout Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest heaven! And to those in Jerusalem who ask, “Who is this?” these same crowds say, “This is the prophet Jesus from Nazareth in Galilee.”

It is a scene of jubilation, this procession in honor of the prophet. For those who know the rest of the story, however, there is an eerie note to the cries of the crowd. The way of palms will lead to the way of the passion, a path marked by shouts of accusation and a collective demand for Jesus’ death, a path traced in blood.

Amid the hosannas of the festive crowd, I keep hearing a voice that echoes from the other end of Jesus’ story. It belongs to John the Baptist. It is a lone voice, a ragged, fiery, locust-and-honey-drenched voice, a voice that raised its cry long before the crowds began to do so. Early in his Gospel, Matthew tells us of John, and he turns to the prophet Isaiah for words to describe him:

This is the one of whom the prophet Isaiah spoke when he said,
“The voice of one crying out in the wilderness:
‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.'”
(Matthew 3.3, quoting Isaiah 40.3, NRSV)

John had indeed prepared the way for his kinsman Jesus, whom he recognized long before anyone else, even, as Luke tells us, leaping for joy in the womb when his pregnant mother Elizabeth heard the pregnant Mary’s voice. By the time that Matthew tells of a cloak-and-branch-strewn road, John is gone, dead at Herod’s command. What would the Baptist have thought of where this way, so well prepared, was taking Jesus? A prophet steeped in the stories of his prophetic forebears, John would have been well acquainted with the evils that can be visited upon a prophet. Yet he would have known, too, that evil never has the final word.

In the same Isaiah passage that Matthew quotes to describe John the Baptist, the prophet goes on to say this:

A voice says, “Cry out!”
And I said, “What shall I cry?”
All people are grass,
their constancy is like the flower
of the field.
The grass withers, the flower fades,
when the breath of the Lord
blows upon it;
surely the people are grass.
The grass withers, the flower fades;
but the word of our God will
stand forever. (Isaiah 40.6-8)

The word endures. The Word endures. We who stand among the Palm Sunday crowds know that the Word will soon be beaten, mocked, and killed. We know, too, that that is not the end of the tale.

But we have not yet moved on to that part of the tale. This week’s Gospel lection beckons us to linger alongside the road, to lift our voices in celebration, and to ask ourselves a few questions. I find myself wondering, what is the way that I am preparing for Christ? Am I clearing a path by which he has access to my life? Am I keeping my eyes open to the variety of guises that Christ continues to wear in our world? Taking a cue from Annika, what am I lifting up, that God might come down and dance with me?

On the cusp of Palm Sunday, on the threshold of this Week of Weeks: blessings to you, and a pair of dancing shoes.

[To use the image “Where the Way Leads,” 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, lectio divina, lectionary, Lent, sacred time | 5 Comments »

Unbinding Words, Part 2

March 8, 2008

initial-i.jpgn the Middle Ages, artists depicted the raising of Lazarus with styles that varied but drew upon standard elements. The artists presented the viewer with the entire scene: a commanding Jesus summons forth Lazarus, who appears in some state of enshroudment. A crowd gathers around; typically, at least one of the bystanders holds his or her nose, underscoring practical Martha’s observation: “Lord, already there is a stench because he has been dead four days” (John 11.39). The Limbourg Brothers offer such a depiction in Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry (The Very Rich Hours of the Duke of Berry), which was, as its title suggests, one of the most lavish Books of Hours of the medieval period. You can visit The Raising of Lazarus to see their view of the scene (with an abundance of nose-holding folks).

The Saint John’s Bible, the first Bible to be entirely illuminated and lettered by hand in more than 500 years, presents this scene from a strikingly different perspective. Rather than placing the viewer near the bystanders outside the grave, the illuminator, Donald Jackson, locates the viewer inside the shadowy tomb. We are close enough to smell the death-garbed Lazarus. But we see from a perspective very close to the waking man’s own: our gaze follows his toward the opening of the tomb, where Jesus stands drenched in light.

The shift in perspective beckons us to see that as Jesus calls to Lazarus, he calls also to us. How are you feeling challenged to move this day?

Prayer of Confession

God of compassion,
we acknowledge the times
we have lived too long
with the words that others have put
into our mouths,
with the pain they have written
onto our bodies,
with the terror they have burned
into our hearts,
with the shame they have inscribed
onto our souls.
We know the times we have clung
to sackcloth not of our making,
when we have lived
clothed in weariness,
cloaked with anger,
and enshrouded by sorrow.
We grieve the occasions
when we have lived with alienation
rather than association,
when we have sought isolation
rather than consolation,
when our wounds within
have shut others out.
We confess our fear of the dark
and our uncertainty of the light.

Yet you have placed within us, God,
a longing for survival,
a hunger for your wholeness,
a yearning for your comfort,
and a hope for all our healing.
Bless our mouths
to name our wounds,
that we may not fear them;
our bodies,
that we might cherish them;
our hearts, that we may delight
in their longings,
and our souls, that we may trust
the wisdom of the stories they hold.
Grant us the courage
to be touched by you,
that when our days of weeping
are done,
we may wear your garments of gladness,
see one another in the light
of your love,
and stand together in the power
of your resurrection.
In the name of the risen Christ,
we pray. Amen.

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

Posted in art, Gospel of John, lectio divina, lectionary, Lent, medieval | 2 Comments »

Lent 5: Unbinding Words

March 7, 2008


Unbinding Words © Jan L. Richardson

For the entire season of Lent I have been looking forward to this week, because it gives us John 11.1-45 for our Gospel reading. The raising of Lazarus is a Big Story. It takes place at a pivotal place in John’s narrative. The action has begun to intensify; Jesus has just narrowly escaped stoning, and he will soon make his triumphal, if short-lived, entry into Jerusalem. The primary goal of the story is to display Jesus’ power: to demonstrate, as a friend of mine once observed, that Jesus isn’t much impressed with death.

John conveys his point with a richness of texture and detail that makes this a particularly compelling text with which to do lectio divina. The story is dense with movement and meaning, and it offers an extravagance of entry points for reflection.

I am intrigued by the web of relationships among the participants in this text. There are Mary and Martha, whose story is bound together with the unbinding of their brother, and who foreshadow the presence of women at another tomb that lies not too distant. I am curious about the friendship that these siblings shared with Jesus, how their home in Bethany seems to have been for Jesus a particular place of hospitality, comfort, familiarity, and, as John points out, love.

There is Thomas, seemingly destined to forever carry the title “Doubting Thomas,” who ought to be better known as the one who, in this story, demonstrates his willingness to die with Jesus.

There is Jesus, whose presence in the story is marked by waiting and weeping.

And then there is Lazarus. Though the story hinges largely on him, for most of it he is a passive background figure. We never hear his voice, and it is only at the end of the story that he finally becomes really interesting, when he is faced with the choice of whether or not to come out of the tomb.

This story is one of my favorites, not just because it’s a Big Story but because of the way that so many stories come together within it. This is not just Almighty Jesus at the height of his powers, showing off what he is capable of; this is Jesus reaching into the depths of who he is, pouring himself out on behalf of those with whom he is most intimately in relationship. Jesus enacts Lazarus’ raising, but he does so in the context of a community. Jesus calls Lazarus forth, but he calls upon those around Lazarus—sisters, kinfolk, neighbors—to unbind him and let him go.

Despite my fascination with such details that this story offers, and despite the fact that I’ve been looking forward to it for all of Lent, it’s taken me a long while to get my act together on doing the artwork and writing for this reflection. There are a variety of reasons for this. Perhaps it’s best simply to tell you a small story.

I live and work in a studio apartment that’s about 300 square feet. I have one closet. After living here for nearly a decade, the closet has gotten pretty full. My decision to clean it out this week owed to a couple of factors: I was looking for something that I thought was in it, and I am getting myself situated to begin working full-time on a new book. I suspect many writers would tell you that there is no time when cleaning seems more compelling and, in fact, absolutely essential than when there is a new writing project at hand. As a result, my apartment is the tidiest it’s been in a long time. This periodic impulse derives partly from my resistance to writing, but I’ve learned that it’s also part of the process, kind of like a dog who turns around in circles before finally settling down. I experience a strong connection between my external and internal space. Clearing and cleaning and sorting is a way of wreaking some sort of order amid the chaos that attends the writing process.

I had not done a purge of my wardrobe in many years, and, as a result, I wound up with a startlingly large pile of garments needing to be ushered into their next life. I’m not a clothes horse; I don’t even particularly like shopping for clothes, mostly because most clothing stores around here offer a sea of sameness that induces lethargy and saps my will to Try Things On. Despite this, I had managed to amass a sizable collection of clothes that I hadn’t worn in years. I had had some of them since college. A number of the garments held sentimental attachments for me, and I subjected my sweetheart to stories of my two favorite sweaters, received as gifts in college and worn for years, and to lamentations over a few pairs of Birkenstocks that were worn beyond the point of repair but that I could hardly stand to throw away.

This small story is simply a way of saying that I have spent a fair bit of time this week thinking about what I have clothed myself in, what attachments they have held for me, and what I need to let go of. I anticipate you figured out a while back that I’m not talking just about literal clothes. Sorting through the stacks has provided fertile opportunity to wrestle with deeper matters of the patterns with which I garb myself, and to reckon with layers of habits, practices, and routines, not all of which serve me, or my community, well.

The raising of Lazarus is indeed a Big Story. It unfolds, however, in the context of patterns of relationships, choices, habits, and personalities that influence how each character participates in and responds to Lazarus’ raising. Our own lives are built on these same details. We each garb ourselves in routines and practices that carry us through our relationships, our work, our hungers, our lives. Those routines and practices influence how we receive and respond to God’s call. We may be swathed in layers of habits that may have once fit us, habits we may once have found beautiful, habits we may yet be attached to long past their usefulness but which now insulate and shroud us from the presence of God.

The season of Lent beckons us to reckon with our most entrenched habits as individuals and communities: to sort through them and to recognize that Christ, in all his humanity and all his divinity, has power even over them. This season reminds us that the miraculous and the mundane are intimately intertwined. We are called to wrestle with the very details that shape our lives together, that new life may emerge.

So I ask you some of the questions I have been carrying for myself this week: In your daily living, what patterns are life-giving and help you notice the presence of God? Which habits keep you bound? What helps you hear the voice of Christ who stands at the threshold between death and life? What will help you choose to come forth, and to help someone else do the same? Are there people who can help with the unbinding?

May you find the presence of God in every detail.

[To use the “Unbinding Words” 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 John, lectio divina, lectionary, Lent, writing | 4 Comments »

Lent 4: Here’s Mud in Your Eye

February 27, 2008


Mud In Your Eye © Jan L. Richardson

One evening during my senior year of college, I had dinner with a couple of friends I hadn’t seen since high school. As we caught up over our meal, I shared that I was preparing to go to seminary to become a minister. Upon hearing this, one of my friends immediately launched a series of questions. What did I think of homosexuality? Fornication? The inerrancy of the Bible? It was clear that my friend, who (I had quickly learned) thought the idea of women in ordained ministry was both unscriptural and immoral, wasn’t really interested in a conversation. He was administering these questions not as a way of learning how I was sensing God’s call in my life but rather as a litmus test to see just how far I had strayed from God’s will for me as a woman.

There are questions, like those from my high school friend, that seek to keep us in our place, and there are questions that help us find the place where we belong. Our Gospel lection this week, John 9.1-41, invites us to hear both kinds of questions and to notice the vast difference between them.

John draws us into the story of a man, blind from birth, who has an encounter with Jesus that results in his being able to see. For those who had known the man as a blind beggar, the change in his condition is deeply unsettling. They begin to ask questions, first of one another, then of the man. They take him to the Pharisees, who ask questions of their own. Then they bring in the man’s parents and ask questions of them; they, in turn, direct the questioning back to the man. Lifted from their context, here are the questions they pose:

Is this not the man who used to sit and beg?

Then how were your eyes opened?

Where is he [Jesus]?

How can a man who is a sinner perform such signs?

What do you say about him?

Is this your son, who you say was born blind? How then does he now see?

What did he do to you? How did he open your eyes?

There is a sense of mounting tension in John’s story, a steady escalation of frustration and fury on the part of the questioners each time the man responds. He is telling them nothing they want to hear, nothing that fits into the beliefs and experiences that they carry. The newly-sighted man possesses a remarkable sense of calm, answering in the only way he knows how: from his own experience. “One thing I do know,” he says, “that though I was blind, now I see.”

When the man’s inquisitors press further, he finally asks a question of his own. “I have told you already, and you would not listen. Why do you want to hear it again? Do you also want to become his disciples?” His questions are too much for the questioners. John tells us that they begin to revile the man, finally sending him away with an abrupt, rhetorical question: “You were born entirely in sins, and are you trying to teach us?”

Their questions induce a sense of claustrophobia in me. These questions are not doorways into conversation. These questions are fences, these questions are walls. They are designed to reinforce the boundaries of what these people already know, and to keep their landscape of belief, experience, and knowledge safely contained.

These questioners are arrogant. They are aggravating. It would, therefore, be easy to dismiss them as the bad guys in this story. Reading this text in the context of lectio divina, however, urges me to consider where I find those maddening questioners inside myself. And I feel a measure of compassion for them, because I know the times when, faced with something beyond my own experience, I have scrambled for an illusion of security. I know the times, at least some of them, when I have retrenched the boundaries of my beliefs, when I have been overly defensive of what I think I know, when I have asked a question—of someone else or of myself—that built a wall rather than opening a door.

One of the best practices we can engage in, during Lent or any season, is to ask the questions, of others and ourselves, that expand our vision rather than confining it. Good questions carry something of a ritual within them, a sense of the sacramental: they do for us what the act of washing in the pool of Siloam did for the muddy-eyed man. Good questions rinse our eyes. They help us practice seeing. They widen and deepen our vision. They clarify our perception of what is present in our lives and of what is possible. They remind us, as a friend recently reminded me, that we may not always get answers, but asking a good question makes way for a response.

John wants to make sure that we know that Siloam, the name of the pool in which the man washed his eyes, means Sent. Here I have to make the theological observation: Is this cool or what? We are all being sent. Sometimes we are sent beyond the boundaries of what others find acceptable or comfortable or convenient. Sometimes we are sent beyond the limits of our own vision. Whether or not we know where we are going—and sometimes especially when we think we know where God means for us to go—we are ever needful of learning how to see. Like Jesus with the blind man, God calls us to participate in claiming the vision that God gives us, so that, as Jesus says, God’s works might be revealed in us. In order to know where and how and by whom we are being sent, we need to keep visiting Siloam to do the washing that will keep our eyes clear.

John closes this story with questions that are good eye-clearing questions. Jesus, John tells us, finds the seeing man and asks him, “Do you believe in the Son of Man?” He answers Jesus’ question with a question: “And who is he, sir? Tell me, so that I may believe in him.” His question leads, not to a wall, or to a law, but to worship.

It’s the Pharisees who offer the final line in the long litany of questions that this story contains. Overhearing the exchange between the sighted man and Jesus, they ask, “Surely we are not blind, are we?”

Are we?

How well is your spirit seeing these days? What questions are coming your way in this season? What questions are you offering? Are they doorways or walls? How do they take you deeper into the mystery of Christ? Are there deeper questions beneath your questions? What questions will help keep your eyes clear so that you can see, and be sent?

[To use the “Mud In Your Eye” 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, lectio divina, lectionary, Lent | 4 Comments »

Lent 3: The Way of Water

February 20, 2008


The Way of Water © Jan L. Richardson

If you want to get a feel for how God cares for God’s people, follow the trail of water through the scriptures. Wilderness, exodus, baptism, tempest: whether providing water, saving people from it, immersing them in it, or calming it, God uses water as a vivid sign of providence, deliverance, and grace.

In God’s lexicon of water, wells have a particularly interesting place. Women at wells: more intriguing still. See a woman near a well, something momentous is bound to happen. It often involves a person of the male persuasion, and it augurs a major change in the woman’s life. Genesis gives us a rich quartet of woman-at-the-well stories. The book offers two accounts in which Hagar meets God—or an angel of God—at a well in the wilderness: the first time, in Genesis 16, Hagar has run away, fleeing from the harshness of Sarai. The second time, in Genesis 21, God provides a well to a desperate Hagar and her son Ishmael, who lies near death in a waterless wilderness. Genesis 24 tells of a servant who finds Rebekah, Isaac’s bride-to-be, at a well. Another well serves as a signal of matrimony in Genesis 29, when Jacob meets Rachel at the well where she waters her father’s sheep.

The matrimonial symbolism of wells finds a striking resonance in the Song of Songs, where the bridegroom extols the virtues of the bride’s…um…well, channel is how the NRSV translates it; “a garden fountain, a well of living water, and flowing streams from Lebanon,” the bridegroom gushes (Song 4.15).

Particularly given the intimate, fertile link between women, wells, marriage, and motherhood, one might rightly wonder what the heck Jesus is doing, hanging out by a well with a lone woman, as he does in this week’s Gospel lection, John 4.5-42. It’s a curious thing for a single rabbi to strike up a conversation with a woman he finds at a well. But Jesus is a curious sort of rabbi, and so he wades into an exchange with a Samaritan woman who has come to draw her water at noonday.

Their talk of literal water turns toward a conversation about the living water that Jesus offers. The woman is thirsty, and she asks Jesus for this living water. Perhaps wanting to allay any potential misunderstanding about what he is offering (after all, this woman probably knows the stories about what happens to women and men at wells), Jesus tells her to go and bring her husband. No husband; she’s had five of those, as Jesus well knows; he knows, too, that she is not married to the man she is living with now. Contrary to some interpretations, there is no note of judgment here. Any number of explanations could account for marital multiplicity in a woman of that culture. Whatever her circumstances may be, Jesus’ words here do not signify condemnation; they are a statement of fact that conveys his remarkable insight, his deep knowing of this woman and her life.

The woman recognizes Jesus’ insight as the mark of a prophet, and this prompts her to turn the conversation toward a liturgical matter. She touches on the source of division between the Jewish and Samaritan people: their difference of belief in the location of the proper place to worship God. The Samaritans held that “this mountain,” Mount Gerizim, was the correct place of worship, while the Jews maintained that Jerusalem was the rightful place. There by the well, Jesus assures the woman that a time is coming when such questions will fall away, and all who worship God will worship “in spirit and truth.” Their theological exchange culminates with Jesus’ telling the woman that he is the Messiah of whom she has spoken.

At this point the disciples turn up, astonished that Jesus is talking with this woman (perhaps they, too, know the stories of men and women at wells). Neither Jesus nor the woman is fazed. Here John provides a detail that’s the clincher for me. “Then the woman,” he writes, “left her water jar and went back to the city.”

She left her jar. She left her jar behind, that water-bearing vessel on which she depended for her very life. She abandoned it at the well.

She had become the vessel. Filled with the living water that she found in the midst of her mundane, daily task, the woman goes to spill forth what she has found.

Early in their conversation, this Samaritan woman had made a point of making sure that Jesus knew that this well belonged to her ancestor Jacob. Jacob, who wrestled with God by a river and received a new name. At Jacob’s well, his womanly descendant does her own wrestling with God. She is unnamed, all throughout John’s story, but not unchanged.

The woman departs the well with no husband, no son, no earthly male to hitch her star to. She leaves not with a man but with a message: Come and see. This unmarried, unnamed woman of Samaria becomes an evangelist, a disciple, a witness to the Messiah. She is a vessel of living, liberating, life-giving water.

Where have you heard life-giving words that helped you feel known? What word of good news might God be calling you to embody and to pour forth in this season? Is there a vessel that you need to leave behind in order to follow the way of Christ?

May you find—and offer—a wellspring this day.

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

Posted in art, lectio divina, lectionary, Lent | 5 Comments »

Knock, Knock

February 18, 2008

blog2008-02-15.jpg

Recently, in opening a book that I hadn’t looked at in a few years, I came across this scrap of paper. The book in which I found it is a large one that I keep tucked beside my drafting table, in one of those nooks that I’ve had to carve out as a reader who lives in a small space. I was a little perplexed as to how the scrap got there; normally I don’t use charcoal-laden paper as a bookmark, and I hadn’t opened the book since sometime before I had charcoaled those words in the first place. I think the scrap must have fallen off my drafting table at just the right angle to wedge itself between the pages.

Here in the season of Lent, it was a curious piece to come across, with its stark, ashy letters and its mention of sackcloth. This was an early practice piece from a series I did a couple of years ago. Inspired by medieval illuminated Apocalypses, I created a series of a dozen pieces that incorporated charcoal drawing and lettering. It was the first time I had combined letters with my charcoal work, and it took—well, let’s just say it took a loooooong time to work out the challenges that came in doing the layouts for those pieces. (See the results at The Intimate Apocalypse.)

As I worked on designing the lettering style (typically called a hand) for this series, I went through some old issues of a wondrous magazine called Letter Arts Review. Looking at LAR tends to be a mixed experience for me. It’s a source of inspiration and a way of cultivating my visual vocabulary. At the same time, I don’t think I’ve ever gotten through a whole issue without feeling stabs of envy at the amazing work that others have done.

I’m learning to engage envy as I (try to) engage any other difficult emotion: as a signal, an invitation, a message that there’s something here I need to work on. I find that envy offers a couple possible messages. When I feel envious of the work of others, it might be an invitation to stretch into a new direction in my own work. At the same time, envy may be challenging me to become more clear about my own direction, my sense of creative vision, my own call. In this case, envy over another person’s work beckons me to go deeper into my own work.

The creative process is, of course, a form of practice. Dealing with envy and other challenging emotions that emerge along the path of our practice is, in itself, a form of practice; it’s part of the process of honing our focus and wrestling with what distracts us. If I give it some attention, try to listen to what it has to tell me, envy can deepen my practice; if I ignore it or if I obsess over it, it can sabotage my practice.

There’s a poem by Rumi that I keep returning to as I continue to learn what it means to practice. In Coleman Barks’s version of Rumi’s poem “The Sunrise Ruby” (from The Essential Rumi), the poet writes about how giving ourselves to a daily practice is like knocking on a door:

Keep knocking, and the joy inside
will eventually open a window
and look out to see who’s there.

But here’s the catch: we need to be knocking on our own door, not someone else’s. We can visit other doors, peek across their thresholds for inspiration and guidance, and converse with those who dwell inside. If, however, I’m going to move deeper into the work that I’m here to do—if, as Rumi writes, I’m going to find what dwells on the other side of the door—I need to cultivate the particular practices that will work for me, not for someone else.

How do you discern which door to knock on? What practice or practices help you discover and move deeper into the work that is yours to do?

A blessing upon your knocking.

Posted in art, Lent | 1 Comment »

Lent 2: In Which We Get Goosed

February 13, 2008

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Of Water and Spirit © Jan L. Richardson

This afternoon I headed down to church for the first session of a writing class I’m offering over the next six weeks. Called The Story of You, it invites folks to do some written storytelling about their lives. In this kind of class I operate on the notion that chronology is just one of the ways—and sometimes the least interesting way—to tell our lives. Instead, we’re exploring ways we can write our stories around various themes such as traditions, travels, food, relationships, and other things that we have built our lives around over the course of years.

In preparing for the class, I’ve been doing some noodling on my own life and what I’ve shaped it around. (I’m sure being 40 has something to do with this noodling as well.) I’m aware that, like most folks, there are certain episodes in my life that I might like to revisit, but I’m really clear that I wouldn’t want to go back to any part of it for any length of time. Return to 15, or 25, or even 35? I’m grateful for those times, but, hoo, boy.

I find myself wondering if Nicodemus had something of the same thing on his mind. This week’s Gospel lection, John 3.1-17, invites us to listen in on his nighttime conversation with Jesus. Nicodemus is perplexed to hear Jesus talk about being “born from above.” “How can anyone be born after having grown old?” he asks. “Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born? …How can these things be?”

It’s hard to tell, of course, just how these words sounded on Nicodemus’s lips, but the way I imagine it in my head, his note of incredulity conveys that he’s asking not only how can anyone be born again but why would anyone want to? Having grown old, why on earth would someone desire to go back to the beginning?

This passage reminds me of one of the things that I really like about Jesus: he doesn’t strike people dead for asking questions. I find that quite an endearing quality in a deity. We encounter lots of questions in the season of Lent; the lectionary presents them to us nearly every week, from the prophet Joel who asks, on Ash Wednesday, “Why should it be said among the peoples, ‘Where is their God?'” to Jesus’ own cry on Good Friday, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Many of the Lenten questions are directed specifically toward Jesus, and he receives them and uses them in his ministry. He recognizes that questions are a form of spiritual practice: they remind us that we are in progress, and they invite us to lean into and stretch beyond the limits of what we know. Though Jesus may appear impatient with the questioning Nicodemus, he does not silence him or shut him out.

I suspect that Jesus’ willingness to engage folks in this way had something to do with the fact that he was born to a woman who was willing to ask questions. How can this be? Mary had asked the audacious angel. Gabriel hears her out, and Mary’s question gives way to conception.

For both Mary and Nicodemus in these stories of birth, the answer to How can this be? doesn’t depend on what we can see with our eyeballs or know with our rational minds. It’s a Spirit thing. “The Holy Spirit will come upon you,” the angel tells Mary. “Very truly, I tell you,” says Jesus to Nicodemus, “no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit.”

In responding to Nicodemus’s question, Jesus interrupts our tendency to think that chronology has the final power over our lives. He claims, rather, that there’s something more than linear time, with its physical progression from birth to death, at work in us. There is another way of being that is open to us.

Jesus chooses the image of birth as a way to describe the passageway that he offers to us. His choice of the metaphor of birth offers a dizzying wealth of implications to sort through. In this context, I’m particularly drawn to the fact that such a metaphor implies that there is a process involved in what Jesus is talking about. Birthing involves gestation, and labor, and the beginning of perpetual change. When we are born, we achieve a new state, but not a static one.

Physically, we don’t enter the world as adults (let the laboring women say hallelujah); likewise with spiritual birth. The fact that we don’t start out full-formed in our faith ought to check any impulse to be overly judgmental about where we—and others—are on the journey. I’ve seen parts of this amazing lectionary passage used more as a bludgeon—BELIEVE! BELIEVE! BELIEVE OR BE DAMNED!—than as a doorway of invitation. Seeking to grow up, and to grow deep, we should ever seek out those who are wiser, those who are more practiced in this growing thing than we are, even as we hold the spiritual door open for others. This passage compels us toward humility and hospitality, those twins.

From conception to delivery and beyond, the process of birth is intimate work. A lot of it happens in the dark, figuratively as well as literally. So it seems especially appropriate that Nicodemus and Jesus have this conversation at night. So much easier, sometimes, to talk in the shadowed hours, when the questions that the day has kept at bay can now steal forth, and the people who might judge are not present to see, and in the cloistering dark we can speak of what is intimate and eternal.

“The wind blows where it chooses,” Jesus says to Nicodemus in that nighttime visit, “and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” Perhaps it was this quality of the Spirit that inspired Christian folk in Celtic lands to choose the wild goose as an image of the Holy Spirit. Unpredictable, untamed, the goose flies in formation with its companions, offering strength that makes the arduous journey easier. Like a midwife, or someone who holds our questions in the dark. I thought of that ancient Celtic image as I created the collage for today; it borrows from a quilting pattern called Wild Geese.

So how’s that birthing and growing thing going for you? How do you deal with the sometimes wild unpredictability of the process? In this season of Lent, do you have a practice that helps you reflect on where you are, and where you have been? What questions are visiting you in the dark?

Blessings to you as you live into the birthing. May you have a good goose along the way.

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

Posted in art, lectionary, Lent | 1 Comment »

The Red Circle

February 10, 2008

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© Jan L. Richardson  ◊The Painted Prayerbook◊

During Advent I wrote about how sometimes, when insomnia comes to visit, I’ll try to charm it with a volume of poetry. (“Sleeping with Killian”) It’s not that I find poetry so dull that it bores me to sleep. Rather, there’s something about it that beckons my brain to step off its madly spinning hamster wheel and burrow down for the night. With its rhythms, images, and connections that don’t always depend on logic or linear thought, poetry offers a landscape that often lies closer to the dreaming world than to the waking one.

On a recent night, lying wakeful in the wee hours, I turned to Jane Hirshfield to do the insomnia-charming honors. Revisiting her collection The October Palace, I found myself struck by her poem “A Plenitude,” in which she references a story that Vasari tells in The Lives of the Artists. Vasari relates how Pope Benedict IX, in search of someone to create several paintings for St. Peter’s, dispatched an assistant to collect samples from various artists. The candidates included Giotto di Bondone, the Italian painter who was a harbinger of the Renaissance. Of the visit to Giotto, Vasari tells this:

…having gone one morning to Giotto’s shop while the artist was at work, [the courtier] explained the pope’s intentions and how he wanted to evaluate Giotto’s work, finally asking him for a small sketch to send to His Holiness. Giotto, who was a most courteous man, took a sheet of paper and a brush dipped in red, pressed his arm to his side to make a compass of it, and with a turn of his hand made a circle so even in its shape and outline that it was a marvel to behold. After he had completed the circle, he said with an impudent grin to the courtier: ‘Here’s your drawing.’ The courtier, thinking he was being ridiculed, replied: ‘Am I to have no other drawing than this one?’ ‘It’s more than sufficient,’ answered Giotto. ‘Send it along with the others and you will see whether or not it will be understood.’ (From The Lives of the Artists by Giorgio Vasari, translated by Julia Conway Bondanella and Peter Bondanella. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.)

Giotto got the job.

The image of Giotto’s crimson Ο particularly grabbed me because of a small, abandoned collage that has been lying on my drafting table the past couple of weeks. It began, and finally ended, with a red circle on a gold background. After a long struggle to develop it, I gave up and turned my attention in another direction. A collage artist, however, is reluctant to throw anything away, and I did like that red circle, so I kept it around, hoping it might become the basis for another piece. Now, after reading Hirshfield’s poem and Vasari’s story, I’m thinking maybe I stalled out because I was trying too hard to add to something that was already complete. I’ve become aware that though I’m no Giotto, there’s something very satisfying in the spareness of that circle. It’s sufficient.

Contemplating Hirshfield’s poem, and Vasari’s story, and that red circle, I’ve been reflecting on the amount of time and energy we give to explaining, justifying, or selling who we are. We catalog and calculate our qualities in order to impress others and persuade them to hire us, or love us, or include us in their circle.

There are plenty of situations that call for demonstrations of competence and expertise. Walking into a doctor’s office, a daycare, a church, you want to know that this person is qualified to care for your body, your child, your soul. But in a culture that sometimes pushes us to accumulate credentials and qualifications without developing the character that will sustain our expertise, it can be disarming to encounter someone who bows to simplicity instead of doing backflips to win us over.

One of the clearest glimpses I’ve had of the power of a gesture like Giotto’s came at a gathering of clergy that I attended early in my ministry. The design team had invited a potter to be the artist in residence during our conference and to offer a few words at our opening session. In a room full of clergy who live and minister in a system that has its own complicated culture of credentials and rewards, the potter stood before us, a small piece of pottery cupped in her hands. Gazing into the Ο of her bowl, she began to tell us what she had come to offer. Watching her, listening to her, I had the sense that we were encountering a woman whose life and creative work had worn away the impulse to impress, to prove, to convince. In her years of working with clay, the clay had also worked on her. Shed of pretense, the potter held out to us what she had to give.

It was more than sufficient.

In a culture that bases so much on evaluation and competition, there’s often little room to squeeze around the need to demonstrate and display who we are. Whether we’re selling ourselves for a job, a promotion, a membership, a mate, we live with the pressure to appear polished. That’s not wholly a bad thing. Yet, in the midst of that, is there any place where we might trace a red circle of our own? Is there a gesture, an unadorned offering we can make that arises from the core of who we are? How do we discern where to offer that? Where can we do that with a sense of trust it will be understood? Where might we be called to make that kind of offering, knowing others may not readily understand it, but need it? What support and sustenance will help us do this?

Wishing you a red circle day.

Posted in art, books, Lent | 5 Comments »

Lent 1: Discernment and Dessert in the Desert

February 7, 2008

Discernment in the DesertImage: Discernment in the Desert © Jan Richardson

Reading from the Gospels, Lent 1, Year A: Matthew 4.1-11

One day some years ago, taking a walk with one of my Franciscan friar friends, I asked him, “What’s discernment like for you?” I was in the midst of making some decisions and found myself curious to know how he sorted through the choices in his own life. Being a good Franciscan, David’s response included a couple of stories about St. Francis.

In the first story, St. Francis and Brother Masseo are on a journey and come to a crossroads. Not knowing which path to take, St. Francis tells Brother Masseo to stand at the center of the crossroads and spin himself around. When Masseo finally falls down, Francis and his dizzy brother set off in the direction in which Masseo had landed.

In the second story, Francis is trying to discern whether he should spend all his time in prayer, or whether he should also go out and do some preaching. He senses this is not something he should decide for himself, so he enlists Brother Masseo’s aid once again. He sends Masseo to two trusted souls, St. Clare and Brother Sylvester, to ask them to pray about this question. In prayer, they each discern the same response: Go and preach. When Brother Masseo takes this word back to Francis, he leaps up, saying, “In the name of the Lord, let’s go!”

As someone capable of making the act of discernment a loooooooong and involved process, I have found great companions in both the tales that David shared. The first story may strike us as a bit silly, but it reminds me that on those occasions when there’s no one path that’s obviously the right one to take, it’s often better to set off in some direction if the alternative means staying stuck at the crossroads. God knows how to make use of any path.

The second story reminds me of the importance of turning to those who can help me in times of discernment. Faced with a momentous decision, Francis realized the question was too big for him to find his way through alone. He sought the insight of those who knew both him and God well. When their mutual answer came, Francis trusted it to be the voice of God, and he moved forward without hesitation.

This Sunday’s gospel lection finds Jesus on a journey of discernment. With the waters of baptism still clinging to him, Jesus enters the wilderness, where for forty days and forty nights he fasts and prays. His wilderness experience continues the initiation begun by the ritual of his baptism. Son of God he may be, but here at the outset of his ministry, he needs this liminal space, this in-between place, to deepen his clarity and to prepare him for what lies ahead. In this harsh landscape, bereft of any comforts that might distract him, Jesus comes to a vivid knowing about who he is and what is essential to his ministry. When the devil shows up at the end of his fast, Jesus is so centered and clear that nothing the tempter says can distract or entice him.

The root meaning of the word discernment has to do with sifting and separating. When there’s a lot to sort through, it can be, as Brother Masseo found, a dizzying process. The work of discerning one direction or choice from among many may require that we separate ourselves. Removing ourselves from at least some of our usual routines, for moments or for months, can shift the way that we view our life. It doesn’t often require taking ourselves to a literal wilderness in the manner that Jesus did. But his sojourn there reminds us there is wisdom in knowing when to turn toward a place, a person, or a practice that can help us see what we cannot always see under our own power.

This wisdom lies at the heart of Lent. These days challenge us to take on a practice, or give one up, so that we can look at our lives in a different way. As Jesus knew, going into the barren and uncomfortable places isn’t about proving how holy we are, or how tough, or how brave. It’s about letting God draw us into the place where we don’t know everything, don’t have to know everything, indeed may be emptied of nearly everything we think we know. And thereby we become free to receive the word, the wisdom, the clarity about who we are and what God is calling us to do.

Mercy, I love that the angels come to Jesus, there in that wilderness. I imagine them showing up with armfuls of bread and plenty of wine after the tempter has tucked tail and split. I like to think maybe they looked a little like Masseo and Clare and Sylvester.

So here I am, come to ask you the same question I asked David on that road a bunch of years ago: What’s discernment like for you? When you have a choice to make, when something needs sorting and sifting, what do you do? Is there a place, a person, a practice that helps you see what you need to see? Do you have someone like Clare or Sylvester who listens so well to both you and God that they help you hear God’s longing for you? Are you keeping your eyes open for the sustenance that comes in even the deepest wilderness?

Here’s a poem for your Lenten path.

Desert Prayer

I am not asking you
to take this wilderness from me,
to remove this place of starkness
where I come to know
the wildness within me,
where I learn to call the names
of the ravenous beasts
that pace inside me,
to finger the brambles
that snake through my veins,
to taste the thirst
that tugs at my tongue.

But send me
tough angels,
sweet wine,
strong bread:
just enough.

—Jan Richardson
from In Wisdom’s Path: Discovering the Sacred in Every Season

Blessings to you in all your sorting and sifting. I wish you angel-borne treats in these days.

[To use the image “Discernment in the Desert,” 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, lectionary, Lent, monastic stuff | 10 Comments »

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