The Painted Prayerbook

Image: Whether Awake or Asleep © Jan Richardson

Reading from the Epistles, Year A, Proper 28/Ordinary 33/Pentecost +23: 1 Thessalonians 5.1-11

For God has destined us not for wrath but for obtaining
salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us,
so that whether we are awake or asleep we may live with him.
– 1 Thessalonians 5.9-10

How would it be for us to become so awake to God that we know God even in our sleeping: the sleeping we do in the rhythm of daily life, and the final sleep that will carry us beyond this life? What would it be like to live completely present to the hope that makes a home in our grief (to pick up on Paul’s words last week from 1 Thessalonians 4.13-18), the hope that draws us beyond death? How might it be to live so aware of God’s love for us that it becomes our light, our heartbeat, our breathing to the end of our days—and the beginning?

How will we stay awake to this hope, this love, this God who lives with us in every moment?

Whether Awake or Asleep
A Blessing

This is the blessing
that writes itself
in your sleeping.

This is the blessing
that inscribes itself
in your waking.

This is the blessing
that twines through
your heart
with every beat,
that lays itself
across your brow
in every moment,
that breathes with you
in every breath

so that even
in your resting
you know
and even
in your slumber
you are aware
and even
in your dreaming
your heart keeps time
with the voice that calls
to you

awake
awake
awake.

– Jan Richardson

For reflections on the Gospel reading for this week, visit Blessing the Talents and Parabolic Curves.

An Advent Journey…

ILLUMINATED 2014 — Registration now open!
Are you hungry for an experience that invites you into Advent without stressing your schedule? This online retreat is not about adding one more thing to your holidays. 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, anywhere you are. Begins November 30. For info and registration, visit ILLUMINATED 2014. Group & congregational rates available.

Using Jan’s artwork…
To use the image “Whether Awake or Asleep,” 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.

Image: Show Me Your Glory  © Jan Richardson

Reading from the Hebrew Scriptures, Year A, Proper 24/Ordinary 29/Pentecost +19: Exodus 33.12-23

Moses said, “Show me your glory, I pray.”
…And the Lord [said]…While my glory passes by I will put you
in a cleft of the rock, and I will cover you with my hand until
I have passed by; then I will take away my hand, and you
shall see my back; but my face shall not be seen.”
– Exodus 33.18, 21-23

What tugs most at my imagination in this story is not the vision of glory that God gives to Moses but rather the place where God hides him. To enable Moses to abide the seeing, God places him in a cleft of the rock. Cleft: a space made by cleaving. Standing with Moses, watching God’s brilliant back fade into the distance, it is easy to feel the resonance of both senses of that paradoxical word cleave: how it can mean to cling as well as to rend.

We know that cleft, that cleaving, in our own selves. We know what it is like to feel hollow and torn in those times when it seems like God is walking away from us, the aching distance increasing with every step. It is in that same inexplicable moment that God reveals God’s own self to us, dissolving the distance, becoming bound to us all over again.

How will we abide what God reveals to us—and what God chooses to conceal? What helps us persist in turning toward God even when God hides God’s face from us? Where do you find the clefts in your own life—those places that break your heart open even as you become whole? What do you see and know of God there?

In the Cleaving
A Blessing

Believe me,
I know how
this blessing looks:
like it is
leaving you,
like it is
walking away
while you stand there,
feeling the press
of every sharp edge,
every jagged corner
in this fearsome hollow
that holds you.

I know how hard it is
to abide this blessing
when some part of it
remains always hidden
from view
even as it sees you
from every angle,
inhabits your
entire being,
calls you
by your name.

I know the anguish
of vision that comes
in such fragments,
the terrible wonder
of glory that arrives
only in glimpses.

So I am not here
to make excuses
for this blessing,
for how it turns
its face from us
when we need
to see it most.

But I want to believe
it will always
find its way to us
when we are in the place
made by cleaving—
the space left
by what is torn apart
even as it is joined
in the fierce union
that comes only
in the fissure.

I want to be unafraid
to turn toward
this blessing
that binds itself to us
even in the rending;
this blessing
that unhinges us
even as it
makes us whole.

—Jan Richardson

2017 update: This blessing appears in Jan’s latest book, The Cure for Sorrow: A Book of Blessings for Times of Grief.

For a reflection on this week’s gospel reading, click the image or title below.

Taxing Questions

Looking ahead…

ILLUMINATED 2014 coming soon! I am excited about the all-new online retreat I’ll offer for Advent. Intertwining reflection, art, music, and community, ILLUMINATED 2014 will be a great way to journey toward Christmas from anywhere you are, in the way that fits you best. The retreat will begin on November 30, and I would love for you to join us. Registration and more info coming soon. Group & congregational rates available.

Using Jan’s artwork…
To use the image “Show Me Your Glory,” 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.

Image: The Welcome Table © Jan Richardson

Just a few days ago, I set out on a road trip that will carry me across many miles over the coming weeks. I have found that traveling seems to be some of the medicine my grieving soul most needs at this point, so I have packed up my laptop and art supplies and am giving myself to the road. Although I know some of the geographic locations I am bound for, I know the highway will hold a few mysteries. This is part of its appeal.

One of the most compelling things about taking to the road is that it will bring me to the tables of friends and family. Mealtimes are among the times I miss Gary most. Even as I am grateful for memories of countless meals we shared in the communion of our daily life, his empty space at the table is too stark and raw just now. So when I receive invitations to be with friends and family—like the one from my sister, who has said, on more than one occasion, Come to Toronto, we’ll feed you—I am drawn to go.

In this long and sorrowing season, I am thankful for the solace of other tables, for those spaces of welcome where there is always room for me. With World Communion Sunday coming up this week, I have those inviting tables especially on my mind and wanted to share with you this image I created some years ago. It’s called The Welcome Table and was commissioned by Saint Luke’s United Methodist Church in Orlando, Florida, where I once served as a pastor. Over the course of two years, this large piece of art (about 4 x 6 feet) took shape on the small dining table in the cozy studio apartment where I lived before Gary and I were married. As I created this image over those years, I thought of so many tables I have savored. Those memories are embedded in this image of Christ sharing the table with his friends: a table where, as you can see, there is always a space to welcome one more.

World Communion Sunday reminds us that Christ calls us to a table where the welcome is wide. He offers us a space with bread and wine in abundance to give solace to our sorrow and to stir our joy. Even as Christ invites us to this table, he does not mean for us to linger here forever. He gives us sustenance in order to send us forth, carrying a space of welcome within us, called to offer it to those we meet: one more, and one more, and one more…

A couple of years ago, I wrote a blessing for World Communion Sunday. I called it “And the Table Will Be Wide,” and I posted it with another table image that I titled The Best Supper. I would love to share this blessing and artwork with you; you can find them by clicking the image or title below. As we draw near to World Communion Sunday, may you find welcome and solace at the table, and may you receive the sustenance and joy of the Christ who sends us into a hungering world.

And the Table Will Be Wide

For a reflection on the Gospel reading for this Sunday, click the image or title below.

Violence in the Vineyard

For a blessing for the Feast of Saint Francis (coming up on October 4), click the image or title below.

Blessing the Animals

Looking ahead…

ILLUMINATED 2014 coming soon! I am looking forward to offering an all-new online retreat for Advent. Intertwining reflection, art, music, and community, ILLUMINATED 2014 will be a great way to journey through Advent from anywhere you are, in the way that fits you best. The retreat will begin on November 30, and I would love for you to join us. Registration and more info coming soon. Group & congregational rates available.

Using Jan’s artwork…
To use the image “The Welcome Table,” 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.

Image: In the Emptying © Jan Richardson

Reading from the Epistles, Year A, Proper 21/Ordinary 26/Pentecost +16: Philippians 2.1-13

Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though
he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God
as something to be exploited, but emptied himself.
– Philippians 2.5-7a

The hollowing began the moment Gary died. In the weeks that followed, it came as a physical sensation: in the center of my chest, an emptying nearly tangible, a hollowing out of the heart and of the life I had known.

Last week I visited with a friend of mine whose husband died a year and a half before Gary. We spoke of the hollowing. We talked about how there is nothing that will ever fix the emptiness. And we spoke, too, of how the emptiness can become a space that, in one of the mysteries of grief, leaves us more and more open to the receiving of joy.

The hollowing happens. Life will empty us out, whether we will it or not. Yet Paul reminds us this week that we belong to the Christ who freely chose to empty himself: who gave himself completely in a way that, paradoxically, did not diminish him but helped to reveal the fullness of who he was, and is. Encompassed by the Christ who enfolds our emptiness in his own, we become free to choose how we will respond to the emptying. In the emptying that naturally happens in life, as well as in the emptying Christ asks us to seek out and embrace, how will we allow the hollowing to open our hearts to the world we are called to serve in joy and in love?

This is a blessing I wrote during a Lenten season in which part of this passage from Philippians was among the lectionary readings. As you attend to the empty spaces—in your life and in the world—may those spaces open wide to the joy that comes.

Blessing That Becomes Empty
As It Goes

This blessing
keeps nothing
for itself.
You can find it
by following the path
of what it has let go,
of what it has learned
it can live without.

Say this blessing out loud
a few times
and you will hear
the hollow places
within it,
how it echoes
in a way
that gives your voice
back to you
as if you had never
heard it before.

Yet this blessing
would not be mistaken
for any other,
as if,
in its emptying,
it had lost
what makes it
most itself.

It simply desires
to have room enough
to welcome
what comes.

Today,
it’s you.

So come and sit
in this place
made holy
by its hollows.
You think you have
too much to do,
too little time,
too great a weight
of responsibility
that none but you
can carry.

I tell you,
lay it down.
Just for a moment,
if that’s what you
can manage at first.
Five minutes.
Lift up your voice—
in laughter,
in weeping,
it does not matter—
and let it ring against
these spacious walls.

Do this
until you can hear
the spaces within
your own breathing.
Do this
until you can feel
the hollow in your heart
where something
is letting go,
where something
is making way.

For a reflection on this week’s Gospel reading, click the image or link below.

Where God Grows

Looking ahead…

If you’re planning for World Communion Sunday (October 5), I invite you to visit the post below, which includes my blessing in celebration of the day.

And the Table Will Be Wide

Using Jan’s artwork…
To use the image “In the Emptying,” 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.

Image: The Burning Bush © Jan Richardson

Reading from the Hebrew Scriptures, Year A, Proper 17/Ordinary 22/Pentecost +12: Exodus 3.1-15

God called to him out of the bush,
“Moses, Moses!”
And he said, “Here I am.”
—Exodus 3.4

I have recently returned home from Minnesota, where I was on retreat at Saint John’s Abbey with wondrous folks from my community of Saint Brigid of Kildare Monastery. At Compline (night prayer) on the opening night of our retreat, we heard these words from the Prologue to the Rule of St. Benedict:

What, dear brothers and sisters, is more delightful than this voice of the Lord calling to us?

Delightful is probably not the first word that comes to Moses’ mind on the day that he hears God calling to him from a bush that blazes but is not consumed. Maybe terrifying, Moses thinks. Maybe overwhelming. Moses hides his face, but he does not leave. He does not turn away from the one who speaks to him and knows his name.

Nearly every story in the scriptures seems, in one way or another, to ask us: Will we open our eyes, our ears? What will we do with what we see, with what we hear? How will we bear the terrible delight of the blessing that blazes before us, that burns within us?

Blessing at the Burning Bush

You will have to decide
if you want this—
want the blessing
that comes to you
on an ordinary day
when you are minding
your own path,
bent on the task before you
that you have done
a hundred times,
a thousand.

You will have to choose
for yourself
whether you will attend
to the signs,
whether you will open your eyes
to the searing light, the heat,
whether you will open
your ears, your heart
to the voice
that knows your name,
that tells you this place
where you stand—
this ground so familiar
and therefore unregarded—
is, in fact,
holy.

You will have to discern
whether you have
defenses enough
to rebuff the call,
excuses sufficient
to withstand the pull
of what blazes before you;
whether you will
hide your face,
will turn away
back toward—
what, exactly?

No path from here
could ever be
ordinary again,
could ever become
unstrange to you
whose seeing
has been scorched
beyond all salving.

You will know your path
not by how it shines
before you
but by how it burns
within you,
leaving you whole
as you go from here
blazing with
your inarticulate,
your inescapable
yes.

—Jan Richardson

For reflections on the Gospel reading, click the image or title below.

Blessing in the Shape of a Cross

Using Jan’s artwork…
To use the image “The Burning Bush,” 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.