The Painted Prayerbook

Reading from the Gospels, Pentecost +7, Year B (July 15): Mark 6.14-29

Here at the ending of John the Baptist’s life, I find myself thinking back to its beginning. How the angel Gabriel appears to Zechariah to tell him of the longed-for son who will bring joy and gladness. How the joyful John leaps in his mother’s womb when the pregnant Mary comes to visit. How the neighbors rejoice at his birth. How, on the day of her son’s circumcision, Elizabeth declares, “He is to be called John,” to the befuddlement of those who assumed he would be named after his father. How Zechariah, struck mute months earlier when he had expressed his incredulity at Gabriel’s news, reaches for a writing tablet and insists,

His name is John.

It is the name that had accompanied the angel’s stunning news, the name that Gabriel had told Zechariah and Elizabeth to give to their son, the name destined for him. I imagine Zechariah writing it for his neighbors in large letters, scored heavy with emphasis. His wife was not mistaken in the name she gave.

His name is John.

John absorbs the insistent clarity that his parents display in their naming of him. Their strength of purpose passes into him, is borne in his blood, infuses everything that will follow. As he enters the scene as an adult, we see that the one who has been sent to prepare the way, the one who will be known as the Baptist, has himself become like a river whose course is directed not merely by its banks but by an underlying sureness of purpose. John the Waymaker does not waver from the course that is his call.

His name is John.

John had met Jesus when they were in the waters of the womb, had met him again at the waters of the Jordan, had been borne along by the sureness of his call and by the living water he found in his cousin the Christ. At the last, when we meet him in today’s gospel reading, what flows in John’s life is not water but blood, a horrendous libation spilled out at Herod’s feast. I imagine that John goes to his death with the same clarity and steadfastness that marked his birth and his life. That perhaps he heard again the voices of the parents who named him. That before the felling stroke there came an echo of the song that his father, no longer mute, had lifted on the day of John’s naming:

And you, child, will be called the prophet of the Most High;
for you will go before the Lord to prepare his ways,
to give knowledge of salvation to his people
by the forgiveness of their sins.
By the tender mercy of our God,
the dawn from on high will break upon us,
to give light to those who sit in darkness
and in the shadow of death,
to guide our feet into the way of peace. (Luke 1.76-80)

Death does not have the last word in John’s story; blood is not the final legacy of the Baptizer. John had succeeded in making a way for the dawn that his father sang about at his birth. The one who “came as a witness to testify to the light” (John 1.7) had completed his purpose and his call, giving himself with complete abandon. “He himself was not the light,” the Gospel of John points out, yet the Baptist shimmered with steadfast purpose and with the joy that had marked his life from the moment he met Jesus.

His name is John.

The life of John the Baptist was utterly intertwined with the life of Jesus. And yet something about his love of Christ and his singleness of purpose enabled him to remain so much himself. In the fierce and focused rhythm and flow of his living and his dying, the Baptizer beckons us to reckon with what it means to divest ourselves in the service of Christ without becoming diminished, without giving up the self that God created.

His name is John.

And what name is ours? What distinguishes and directs the flow and focus of our lives? What is the purpose we are known for—or that we struggle toward and long for? How do we abandon ourselves to this purpose and to the One who calls us to it, and move ever more deeply into the self that God created us to be?

Blessing

May your life be a river.
May you flow with the purpose
of the One who created
and called you,
who directs your course
and turns you ever
toward home.

May your way shimmer
with the light of Christ
who goes with you
who bears you up
who calls you by name.

May you move
with the grace of the Spirit
who brooded over
the face of the waters
at the beginning
and who will gather you in
at the end.

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

Image: I Will Be Made Well © Jan Richardson

Reading from the Gospels, Pentecost +5, Year B: Mark 5.21-43

There are experiences that seem to come as interruptions, stories that shoulder their way into the story we think we are living. Intent upon my individual tale, face turned toward the destination I am bent upon, I can resent the intrusions, the ways that other stories sometimes press upon, break through, waylay my own.

A woman is bleeding. Exhausted. Spent. For years her life has been draining from her. Twelve years, if we’ll be precise: the exact span of time that the child—the girl, the daughter of Jairus—has been alive. The daughter who now hovers near death, her father pleading with Jesus to come and make her well.

Jesus goes to the girl, and is halted midway by the woman. With one gesture, one desperate reaching out of her hand toward the hem of Jesus’ robe, the bleeding woman breaks into the narrative. She interrupts the tale of healing that the gospel is seeking to tell. With her aching gesture, the woman compels us to see that our stories do not come to us unbroken and discrete, spinning out in tidy and autonomous arcs. The story of the healing of the woman becomes bound with the story of the healing of the girl, their individual stories becoming one story. An interruption becomes an intertwining: a story made more whole by the joining of its parts. A story that is still being pieced together in the living of our own tales, and in the telling of them.

What stories will we allow to break through, to interrupt, to intertwine with our own? What stories are bound with ours, their fragments joining to create a tale more complete than the one we could tell alone? What story do you need to receive or to tell in order to become more whole: to be made well?

The Healing That Comes
A Blessing

I know how long
you have been waiting
for your story to take
a different turn,
how far
you have gone in search
of what will mend you
and make you whole.

I bear no remedy,
no cure,
no miracle
for the easing
of your pain.

But I know
the medicine
that lives in a story
that has been
broken open.

I know
the healing that comes
in ceasing
to hide ourselves away
with fingers clutched
around the fragments
we think are
none but ours.

See how they fit together,
these shards
we have been carrying—
how in their meeting
they make a way
we could not
find alone.

—Jan Richardson

2017 update: This blessing appears in my new book, The Cure for Sorrow.

For a previous reflection on this story, click the image or title below:

Stories and Circles

And for a related blessing for healing, see:

Epiphany 6: What the Light Shines Through

[To use the image “I Will Be Made Well,” please visit this page at janrichardsonimages.com, where you can also order an art print of this image. Your use of janrichardsonimages.com helps make the ministry of The Painted Prayerbook possible. Thank you!]

Reading from the Gospels, Pentecost +4 (June 24), Year B: Mark 4.35-41

Yesterday I performed a wedding in the sweet chapel where Gary and I lead our Wellspring service. The bride and groom, who live out of state, had quickly arranged to have their wedding here in Florida when it became apparent that the bride’s father, who had become quite ill, would not be able to travel for the wedding. Though everyone had hoped he would be walking his daughter down the aisle, he died earlier this week. Two days before the wedding, the family held his funeral.

Peace a friend said to me as I prepared for the bittersweet wedding ceremony.

Peace I said to the beautiful bride as she prepared to walk down the aisle without her father.

Peace said the community that gathered around the couple, acknowledging the loss, celebrating the love that had drawn us there.

Peace we said, unable to stop the storm but choosing to stand within it, to still ourselves, to turn our faces toward the One who speaks peace, who breathes peace, who is peace.

Blessing in the Storm

I cannot claim
to still the storm
that has seized you,
cannot calm
the waves that wash
through your soul,
that break against
your fierce and
aching heart.

But I will wade
into these waters,
will stand with you
in this storm,
will say peace to you
in the waves,
peace to you
in the winds,
peace to you
in every moment
that finds you still
within the storm.

For a previous reflection on this passage, visit Stirring the Sleeping Savior. I also have a new post at Devotion Café.

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

Image: Secret of the Seed © Jan Richardson

Reading from the Gospels, Pentecost +3, Year B: Mark 4.26-34

What showed up in the studio this week was not the seed but the space that waits for the seed, that holds itself in a shimmering emptiness, already loving what it cannot see but aches to enfold. How the green of growing already reaches toward the seed, the gold of harvest even now anticipates the way it will paint itself across the fruit that will be months in coming. How they love this mystery, this space where the seed will grow in secret while the rest of us sleep and rise night and day, our lives encompassing what we cannot see but lean toward in love.

Blessing That Holds
a Nest in Its Branches

The emptiness
that you have been holding
for such a long season now;

that ache in your chest
that goes with you
night and day
in your sleeping,
your rising—

think of this
not as a mere hollow,
the void left from
the life that has leached out
of you.

Think of it like this:
as the space being prepared
for the seed.

Think of it
as your earth that dreams
of the branches
the seed contains.

Think of it
as your heart making ready
to welcome the nest
its branches will hold.

—Jan Richardson

2017 update: “Blessing That Holds a Nest in Its Branches” appears in my new book, The Cure for Sorrow: A Book of Blessings for Times of Grief.

[To use the image “Secret of 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!]