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Women’s Christmas Retreat 2020 – A Gift for You

January 3, 2020

Image: Wise Women Also Came © Jan Richardson

Happy New Year and Merry Epiphany, almost! In celebration, these three wise women are stopping by with a gift for you. You might know that some folks celebrate Epiphany (January 6) as Women’s Christmas. Originating in Ireland, where it is known as Nollaig na mBan, Women’s Christmas began as a day when the women set aside time to enjoy a break and celebrate together at the end of the holidays.

It has become a tradition for me to create a new retreat each year that you can download as a PDF and use on Women’s Christmas or whenever you need some time for reflection and regathering. The new retreat is hot off the press and waiting for you! This year’s theme is “What the Light Shines Through,” and it offers an invitation to ponder the work of mending, restoration, and healing—the ways by which the brokenness within us and around us becomes transformed. It includes readings, art, questions, and blessings. You can do the retreat alone or share it with friends. (And it’s not for women only!)

There is no cost for the retreat. It’s my Women’s Christmas gift to you, with gratitude for your presence on my path. To download the retreat, visit this page at my Sanctuary of Women blog:

Women’s Christmas Retreat 2020: What the Light Shines Through

I’d be delighted for you to pass along the gift by sharing the link with others.

I send much gratitude and many blessings for you. Merry Women’s Christmas!

P.S. Our festive Advent discount on annual subscriptions to the Jan Richardson Images site continues through Epiphany Day! An annual subscription enables you to download any images for use in worship during the year. Advent rate: $125 (regularly $165). Extended through January 6. Click Subscribe to sign up.

[To use the Wise Women Also Came image or order it as a print, please visit this page at Jan Richardson Images.]

Posted in blessings, Christmas, Epiphany, sacred time | 1 Comment »

A Door Between Worlds

October 31, 2019

Image: A Gathering of Spirits © Jan Richardson

“Now he is God not of the dead, but of the living;
for to him all of them are alive.”
—Luke 20:38

I have long loved this trinity of days we are moving into: Halloween, All Saints, All Souls. They are a thin place in the turning of the year, a space where a door opens between worlds that often seem terribly far apart. In the wake of Gary’s death, this time of year has become especially tender and hopeful for me. More than ever, I am grateful for these days that invite us to remember that, in the body of Christ, death does not release us from being in relationship with one another.

As we enter into these days, I want to share this blessing with you again. It’s one I wrote shortly before Gary’s death, not knowing how much I would need it for myself, and how soon. But that’s how a blessing works: it moves within time and also beyond it, spiraling around to meet us in the ways we most need.

Wherever these days find you, I pray they will hold deep grace, wondrous solace, and a thin place where heaven and earth meet.

God of the Living
A Blessing

When the wall
between the worlds
is too firm,
too close.

When it seems
all solidity
and sharp edges.

When every morning
you wake as if
flattened against it,
its forbidding presence
fairly pressing the breath
from you
all over again.

Then may you be given
a glimpse
of how weak the wall

and how strong what stirs
on the other side,

breathing with you
and blessing you
still,
forever bound to you
but freeing you
into this living,
into this world
so much wider
than you ever knew.

—Jan Richardson
from The Cure for Sorrow: A Book of Blessings for Times of Grief

Registration now open!
ILLUMINATED 2019
December 1-27

I would love for you to join us for this new online Advent retreat! The Illuminated retreat intertwines writing, art, music, and community, creating spaces of reflection and rest that you can enter into from anywhere you are, in the way that works best for you. With an elegant simplicity, the Illuminated retreat fits easily into the rhythm of your days. Individual, group, and congregational rates are available.

Info & registration: Illuminated Advent Retreat

Using Jan’s artwork
To use the image “A Gathering of Spirits,” please visit this page at janrichardsonimages.com. (This is also available as an art print. After clicking over to the image’s page on the Jan Richardson Images site, just scroll down to the “Purchase as an Art Print” section.) Your use of janrichardsonimages.com helps make the ministry of The Painted Prayerbook possible. Thank you!

Using Jan’s words
For worship services and related settings, you are welcome to use Jan’s blessings or other words from this blog without requesting permission. All that’s needed is to acknowledge the source. Please include this info in a credit line: “© Jan Richardson. janrichardson.com.” For other uses, visit Copyright Permissions.

Posted in art, blessings, Gospel of Luke, mystery, sacred time | 1 Comment »

An Illuminated Advent – 2019

October 22, 2019

ILLUMINATED 2019
An Online Journey into the Heart of Christmas
December 1-27

Friends, I am thrilled to say that registration is now open for the new Illuminated 2019 Advent Retreat! I am so looking forward to sharing the season with others who want to engage the hope and grace that call us toward Christmas. This online retreat will intertwine writing, art, music, and community, creating spaces of reflection and rest that you can enter into from anywhere you are, in the way that works best for you.

Info & registration:
ILLUMINATED ADVENT RETREAT

This online retreat is not about adding one more thing to your holiday schedule! It is about helping you enter deep into this season that shimmers with mystery and possibility. Offering a space of elegant simplicity as you journey toward Christmas, the Illuminated retreat fits easily into the rhythm of your days. I love hearing from people who say this retreat helps them breathe and engage during what can be a chaotic season.

Individual, group, and congregational rates are available. Questions? Be sure to visit our FAQ page for the retreat.

I wish you so many blessings as Advent approaches.

Posted in Advent, art, blessings, Christmas, sacred time | Leave a Comment »

Easter Sunday: Where Resurrection Begins

April 21, 2019

Image: While It Was Still Dark © Jan Richardson

Reading from the Gospels, Easter Sunday:
John 20.1-18 or Luke 24.1-12

John’s Gospel tells us it was still dark when Mary Magdalene arrived at the tomb and found it empty. I love that detail—that Easter began in the shadows, well before sunrise. This is the way resurrection works: it gathers itself in the darkness, beginning in such secrecy and hiddenness that when it happens, it can be difficult for us to recognize it at first.

This seems to be how it was for the Magdalene on that first Easter morning. Perhaps it was because of her tears or the early hour that she mistook Jesus for a gardener, but the truth is that despite the promises Jesus had made about his return, nothing could have prepared Mary to see him standing before her, speaking her name.

With the sound of her name came recognition, and with recognition came a choice: would Mary attempt to hold on to Christ and the life she had known, or would she accept his call to leave the empty tomb and proclaim what she had seen?

We are here because of the choice Mary Magdalene made on that Easter morning. As Easter arrives once again, what threshold will we choose to cross, that we may tell what we have seen?

The Magdalene’s Blessing
For Easter Day

You hardly imagined
standing here,
everything you ever loved
suddenly returned to you,
looking you in the eye
and calling your name.

And now
you do not know
how to abide this hole
in the center
of your chest,
where a door
slams shut
and swings open
at the same time,
turning on the hinge
of your aching
and hopeful heart.

I tell you,
this is not a banishment
from the garden.

This is an invitation,
a choice,
a threshold,
a gate.

This is your life
calling to you
from a place
you could never
have dreamed,
but now that you
have glimpsed its edge,
you cannot imagine
choosing any other way.

So let the tears come
as anointing,
as consecration,
and then
let them go.

Let this blessing
gather itself around you.

Let it give you
what you will need
for this journey.

You will not remember
the words—
they do not matter.

All you need to remember
is how it sounded
when you stood
in the place of death
and heard the living
call your name.

—Jan Richardson
from Circle of Grace: A Book of Blessings for the Seasons

Easter bonus: Some years ago, Gary and I created a video that intertwines my series The Hours of Mary Magdalene (inspired by the life and legends of the Magdalene and by illuminated books of hours from the Middle Ages) with his gorgeous and haunting song “Mary Magdalena,” which appears on his CD House of Prayer. I would love to share it with you this Easter. To view/listen, click the icon below, and it will take you to the video on the Vimeo website.

For previous reflections for Easter Sunday, visit Easter Sunday: This Is Not the End.

Using Jan’s artworkTo use the image “While It Was Still Dark,” please visit this page at janrichardsonimages.com. (This is also available as an art print. After clicking over to the image’s page on the Jan Richardson Images site, just scroll down to the “Purchase as an Art Print” section.) Your use of janrichardsonimages.com helps make the ministry of The Painted Prayerbook possible. Thank you!

Posted in art, blessings, Easter, lectionary, sacred time | 6 Comments »

Holy Saturday: Anticipate Resurrection

April 20, 2019

Image: Anticipate Resurrection © Jan Richardson

Reading from the Gospels, Holy Saturday:
Matthew 27.57-66 or John 19.38-42

On this Holy Saturday—this threshold day, this day betwixt—I am thinking about a visit I had with a friend one Lenten day a few years ago. We had planned to take a walk, but on the day of our walk, it rained. So we sheltered on a friend’s beautiful porch, taking a more stationery pilgrimage as we shared some of the terrain we had each crossed since our last visit. In the time that had passed between that visit and this one, both of our husbands had died, both too young.

As we talked, tea and coffee in hand and the rain drenching the gorgeous spring landscape around us, that porch became for me what Phil Cousineau calls a secret room. In his book The Art of Pilgrimage, Cousineau writes that in every sacred journey, there is a hidden space we must find, a place along the path where we will begin to understand the deep mystery of our pilgrimage. He writes,

Everywhere you go, there is a secret room. To discover it, you must knock on walls, as the detective does in mystery houses, and listen for the echo that portends the secret passage. You must pull books off shelves to see if the library shelf swings open to reveal the hidden room.

I’ll say it again: Everywhere has a secret room. You must find your own, in a small chapel, a tiny café, a quiet park, the home of a new friend, the pew where the morning light strikes the rose window just so.

As a pilgrim you must find it or you will never understand the hidden reasons why you really left home.

As the season of Lent comes to a close, has there been a secret room, a space that prompted a moment of insight or inspiration, of wisdom or connection or delight? Have you had an experience that gave you a window onto your path and helped you see it differently? How did that secret room help you understand why you set out on your journey? What gift did it offer for the road ahead?

Deep peace to you as Easter draws near.

What Abides, What Returns

Anticipate resurrection.
—Terry Tempest Williams

In a season of stunning sun
we have chosen the only day
of rain,
and so we shelter on this porch,
each with a cup in hand
and in our heart a hole
in the precise shape
of our beloved.

I have not come here
to compare notes,
widow-to-widow,
that untimely word
still harsh in my ear

but simply
to sit together
in the stillness
at the edge of that wound,
the sound of our voices
a testament
to what endures,
to the unbearable
somehow borne.

Easter draws near
as we watch the rain.
We know the drama
and the pageantry
that lie ahead,
the commotion that is owed
to such a miracle.

Meanwhile, we go on
quietly raising the dead,
tending them as more
than a memory,
learning to live in
the curious marriage
of absence and presence
that settles into the bones
and the aching
but durable heart.

We know resurrection as something
not merely to be anticipated
but also daily lived
as we reckon with
what abides,
what returns
of the beloved
who cannot be unknown—
who, having passed into us,
will not be so easily shed.

Still, I think of Mary Magdalene
and the secret she carried
when she left
that empty tomb:
how resurrection is
a strange dance
of reunion and release,
how our loving
will always ask of us
a letting go,

yet in the asking
a promise
that what we love
knows how to find us,
even by the path
that will bear us
far away
from here.

—Jan Richardson

For previous reflections for Holy Saturday, visit Holy Saturday: Breathe.

Using Jan’s artwork
To use the image “Anticipate Resurrection,” please visit this page at janrichardsonimages.com. (This is also available as an art print. After clicking over to the image’s page on the Jan Richardson Images site, just scroll down to the “Purchase as an Art Print” section.) Your use of janrichardsonimages.com helps make the ministry of The Painted Prayerbook possible. Thank you!

Posted in art, blessings, Lent, mystery | 3 Comments »

Lent 1: In the Desert of the Beloved

March 9, 2019

Reading from the Gospels, Lent 1, Year C: Luke 4.1–13

How else to enter into the forty-day place that lay ahead of him? How else to cross into the wilderness where he would have no food, no community, nothing that was familiar to him—and, to top it off, would have to wrestle with the devil? How else, but to go into that landscape with the knowledge of his own name: Beloved.

—Jan Richardson, from Lent 1: Beloved Is Where We Begin
The Painted Prayerbook, February 2016

We have traveled through many Lenten seasons here at The Painted Prayerbook; this one will be our twelfth. For our first Sunday in Lent this time around, I wanted to share a blessing from one of those seasons past. I hold you in prayer and gratitude as we cross into whatever terrain these days will hold. May we enter with the name Beloved echoing in our heart.

Beloved Is Where We Begin

If you would enter
into the wilderness,
do not begin
without a blessing.

Do not leave
without hearing
who you are:
Beloved,
named by the One
who has traveled this path
before you.

Do not go
without letting it echo
in your ears,
and if you find
it is hard
to let it into your heart,
do not despair.
That is what
this journey is for.

I cannot promise
this blessing will free you
from danger,
from fear,
from hunger
or thirst,
from the scorching
of sun
or the fall
of the night.

But I can tell you
that on this path
there will be help.

I can tell you
that on this way
there will be rest.

I can tell you
that you will know
the strange graces
that come to our aid
only on a road
such as this,
that fly to meet us
bearing comfort
and strength,
that come alongside us
for no other cause
than to lean themselves
toward our ear
and with their
curious insistence
whisper our name:

Beloved.
Beloved.
Beloved.

—Jan Richardson
from Circle of Grace: A Book of Blessings for the Seasons

For previous reflections for the first Sunday of Lent, including reflections on the related gospel readings:

Lent 1: Where the Breath Begins
First Sunday of Lent: And the Angels Waited
Day 2: Up from the Water
Day 3: Into the Wilderness
Day 4: With the Wild Beasts
Lent 1: A Blessing for the Wilderness
Lent 1: Into the Wilderness
Lent 1: A River Runs through Him
Lent 1: Discernment and Dessert in the Desert

Using Jan’s artwork
To use the image “Desert of the Beloved,” please visit this page at janrichardsonimages.com. (This is also available as an art print. After clicking over to the image’s page on the Jan Richardson Images site, just scroll down to the “Purchase as an Art Print” section.) Your use of janrichardsonimages.com helps make the ministry of The Painted Prayerbook possible. Thank you!

Posted in art, blessings, Gospel of Luke, lectionary, Lent | 5 Comments »

Ash Wednesday: Dreaming in the Dust

March 6, 2019

Image: Ash Wednesday Cross © 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

We are entering the season that begins with a smudge. That smudge is a testimony to what survives. It is a witness to what abides when everything seems lost. It is a sign that what we know and love may, for a time, be reduced to dust, but it does not disappear. We belong to the God who well knows what to do with dust, who sees the dust as a place to dream anew, who creates from it again and again.

—Jan Richardson, from Ash Wednesday: What God Can Do with Dust
The Painted Prayerbook, February 2018

Friends, as we enter into Lent, I want to share this Ash Wednesday blessing again. It’s been six years since I first wrote it, during what would turn out to be my last Lent with Gary. I have found that the question the blessing holds—”Did you not know what the Holy One can do with dust?”—is a good one to ask myself anew each time Ash Wednesday comes around. And I can say now: I know what God can do with dust. And I am learning still.

As this season begins, what blessing do you need to claim from the ashes?

Blessing the Dust
For Ash Wednesday

All those days
you felt like dust,
like dirt,
as if all you had to do
was turn your face
toward the wind
and be scattered
to the four corners

or swept away
by the smallest breath
as insubstantial—

did you not know
what the Holy One
can do with dust?

This is the day
we freely say
we are scorched.

This is the hour
we are marked
by what has made it
through the burning.

This is the moment
we ask for the blessing
that lives within
the ancient ashes,
that makes its home
inside the soil of
this sacred earth.

So let us be marked
not for sorrow.
And let us be marked
not for shame.
Let us be marked
not for false humility
or for thinking
we are less
than we are

but for claiming
what God can do
within the dust,
within the dirt,
within the stuff
of which the world
is made
and the stars that blaze
in our bones
and the galaxies that spiral
inside the smudge
we bear.

—Jan Richardson
from Circle of Grace: A Book of Blessings for the Seasons

Using Jan’s artwork
To use the image “Ash Wednesday Cross,” please visit this page at janrichardsonimages.com. Your use of janrichardsonimages.com helps make the ministry of The Painted Prayerbook possible.

Posted in art, blessings, lectionary, Lent | 8 Comments »

An Illuminated Advent – 2018

October 25, 2018

ILLUMINATED 2018

An Online Journey into the Heart of Christmas

December 1-28

With Advent not far around the corner, I want to let you know that I will be offering a new online retreat for the season! It’s been a few years since I’ve done this, and I am so looking forward to sharing the season with others who want to engage the hope and grace that call us toward Christmas. The Illuminated 2018 retreat will intertwine writing, art, music, and community, creating spaces of reflection and rest that you can enter into from anywhere you are, in the way that works best for you.

Info & registration:
ILLUMINATED ADVENT RETREAT

This online retreat is not about adding one more thing to your holiday schedule! It is about helping you find spaces for reflection that draw you deep into this season that shimmers with mystery and possibility. Offering a space of elegant simplicity as you journey toward Christmas, the Illuminated retreat fits easily into the rhythm of your days.

Individual, group, and congregational rates are available. You can also give the retreat as a gift!

I wish you so many blessings as Advent approaches.

Posted in Advent, art, blessings, Christmas, sacred time | 2 Comments »

Easter 2: Still Breathing

April 4, 2018

Reading from the Gospels, Easter 2: John 20.19-31

The wounds of the risen Christ are not a prison;
they are a passage.

—from Easter 2: Into the Wound
The Painted Prayerbook, March 2008

After Gary died, when people would ask me how I was doing, I would often say, I’m still breathing. It seemed no small miracle that I could keep doing this when my heart was shattered. It seems a miracle still.

So I can just imagine the disciples on the evening of Jesus’ resurrection, gathered together in their bewilderment and sorrow, their own hearts shattered, the breath knocked from them. They did not yet understand the resurrection that had come to meet them in their grief. Then suddenly, John’s Gospel tells us, Jesus was standing among them, showing his brokenhearted friends his own wounds, breathing the Spirit into their ache.

The disciples rejoiced, John tells us in his account of this evening. I can imagine this, too. I can easily conceive the elation that came with the return of breath—the breath of the beloved, the breath in one’s own chest. I can envision the joy that came with the realization that when wounds persist, as they did for Christ in his resurrection, they do not have to be a final word, a mark of failure; they can become a place of meeting, a portal, a passage.

As we enter into this Easter season, how will we allow the wounds of the risen Christ to meet our own wounds? How will we let him breathe into us anew? Where will we let this lead us?

For this second Sunday of Easter, I’ve gathered together a collection of reflections I’ve written on this passage from John’s Gospel across the past decade. As we move through these days, may we breathe deeply in the company of Christ, who breathes in us and with us still.

Easter 2: Blessing of Breathing
Easter 2: Into the Wound
Easter 2: The Secret Room
Easter 2: The Illuminated Wound

Using Jan’s artwork
To use the image “Into the Wound,” please visit this page at janrichardsonimages.com. (This is also available as an art print. After clicking over to the image’s page on the Jan Richardson Images site, just scroll down to the “Purchase as an Art Print” section.) Your use of janrichardsonimages.com helps make the ministry of The Painted Prayerbook possible. Thank you!

Posted in art, blessings, Easter, Gospel of John, lectionary | 1 Comment »

Easter Sunday: This Is Not the End

March 29, 2018

Reading from the Gospels, Easter Sunday, Year B:
John 20.1-18 or Mark 16.1-8

If you are looking
for a blessing,
do not linger
here.

—from Easter Sunday: A Blessing for the Rising
The Painted Prayerbook, March 2016

This is the place we have journeyed toward all these weeks, the destination we have been bound for all these days—more than forty now, if you count the Sundays. I am partial to John’s telling of the story of Easter morning, and of what happens between Mary Magdalene and Jesus here at the garden tomb—how at the sound of her name, Mary’s weeping gives way to seeing, to recognition, to the astounding joy of resurrection.

I would want to linger here, to stay and savor this miracle of reunion and return. But we know that Jesus asks something other of Mary Magdalene. Though this may be a garden, this is not a place to put down roots. It is a place of calling, of consecration, of sending as Jesus urges the Magdalene to go and tell what she has seen.

Mary has to choose whether she wants this calling, this consecration; she has to decide whether she truly wants to be sent from this place. I feel a catch in my own chest in this moment of decision, this threshold that will change everything from here.

This day, this empty tomb: this has been our destination all this time. But we see, with Mary Magdalene, that this is not a place to stop. This is not the end toward which we have been traveling.

This is the beginning.

* * *

For this day of beginning, I have gathered together a collection of reflections I’ve written for Easter Sunday across the past decade. I offer these with deep gratitude to you for traveling this path with me, and with blessings and hope for the road that leads us on from here.

Easter Sunday: While It Was Still Dark
Easter Sunday: A Blessing for the Rising
Easter Sunday: Seen
Easter Sunday: Out of the Garden

I also want to share with you a song that Gary wrote for this day. It’s called “I Am With You Always,” and it’s from a CD he had nearly finished at the time of his death. Particularly on this side of his dying, the song comes as an achingly beautiful reminder that even in the heartrending leave-takings we endure in this life, we are not alone; we are accompanied always. To listen, click the play button in the audio player below. (For my email subscribers: if you don’t see the player below, click here to go to The Painted Prayerbook, where you can view it in this post.)

O my friends. Happy Easter!

Using Jan’s artwork
To use the image “Risen,” please visit this page at janrichardsonimages.com. (This is also available as an art print. After clicking over to the image’s page on the Jan Richardson Images site, just scroll down to the “Purchase as an Art Print” section.) Your use of janrichardsonimages.com helps make the ministry of The Painted Prayerbook possible. Thank you!

Posted in art, blessings, Easter, Gospel of John, lectionary, sacred time | 7 Comments »

The Painted Prayerbook

Archive for the ‘blessings’ Category

Women’s Christmas Retreat 2020 – A Gift for You

A Door Between Worlds

An Illuminated Advent – 2019

Easter Sunday: Where Resurrection Begins

Holy Saturday: Anticipate Resurrection

Lent 1: In the Desert of the Beloved

Ash Wednesday: Dreaming in the Dust

An Illuminated Advent – 2018

Easter 2: Still Breathing

Easter Sunday: This Is Not the End

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