Archive for the ‘books’ Category

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Epiphany 4: In the Realm of the Spirits

January 30, 2009


I Know Who You Are © Jan L. Richardson

Reading from the Gospels, Epiphany 4, Year B: Mark 1.21-28

There once was a time when I didn’t give much thought to what it meant to confront evil and suffering in the realm of the spiritual world. I’m mainline Protestant, after all. Spiritual warfare, as some call it, was something best left to the charismatics and others who dealt in such things.

Then I began to live and work within systems and organizations that have given me cause to think again about the notion that evil can cohere as a force, can organize and inflict itself in discrete ways. In my professional ministry and in my personal ecosystem, the years have afforded plenty of occasions to witness the ways in which chaos that exists in the spiritual world can manifest itself in the physical realm. It’s stunning, how a single individual in spiritual disarray can distribute pain and discord among an entire body of people. And the reverse: how the diffuse chaos that often lurks so easily within a system can erupt in acts of harm against particular individuals.

In this Sunday’s gospel lection, Mark tells a story that provides a vivid example of a person who has become overwhelmed by a force that is contrary to the purposes of God. In describing what harbors within the man whom Jesus encounters, Mark uses the Greek term pneumati akatharto: an unclean spirit. The uncleanness that akatharto (from the word akathartos) denotes has to do not with physical untidiness but rather with how the spirit exists in a state actively antagonistic to God, a state that the spirit has inflicted upon the man. Akathartos is the opposite of katharos (related to our word catharsis): ritually pure, clean.

Intriguing, isn’t it, that this encounter takes place in a synagogue? It underscores what I have seen time and again: that places meant for worship and seeking after God often attract the most chaotic folks. That which is opposed to God is often most drawn to those places devoted to God. Such folks are like this man who, amid the chaos, nonetheless experiences a point of vivid clarity: he—or, rather, the spirit in him—recognizes Jesus. “I know who you are,” he cries out, “the Holy One of God.”

Jesus will say, just a few verses later, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick” (Mark 2.17). It’s one thing, however, to know and seek healing for our sickness, and to minister to others who recognize their own need. More challenging to reckon with are those folks living, often without awareness, in the grip of forces opposed to God who are yet drawn toward the holy. It can take a long time before their deep, underlying hunger for God breaks through and overtakes their desire to inflict chaos in the places of sacredness.

In his healing of the man, Jesus offers a model for how we can reckon with the forces that work against God’s desire for wholeness. Jesus responds to the spirit with the calm authority that receives particular comment in this passage, both by Mark and by those who witness Jesus’ teaching and healing in the synagogue. Jesus addresses the spirit from the core of who he is. He is not exhibiting a display of magic or seeking to dazzle the crowd with a show. Rather, Jesus demonstrates his willingness to confront and call out what is contrary to God. Acting from that fiercely calm and centered place, he releases the man from the force that has tormented him.

The healthy spiritual practices of the Christian tradition give us tools to do the necessary work at the level of spirit. These practices cultivate within us the grounded, centered authority that enabled Christ to confront the unclean spirit, they help keep us clear amid chaos, and they deepen our ability to respond to the ways that disorder becomes manifest in the world. These practices, however, are not enough in themselves. As Jesus points out in the gospels, and as Paul addresses in his letters, it’s possible for us to become puffed up about our own spiritual prowess.

The desert mothers and fathers of the early church recognized this. They had a lively understanding of the ways that spiritual disorder takes form in the physical realm. They sometimes described these forms as demons, who particularly loved to hide out in the very practices that these desert folk sometimes became proud of—extreme fasting, prayer, and the like. This story comes from the desert tradition:

[Amma Theodora] also said that neither asceticism, nor vigils nor any kind of suffering are able to save, only true humility can do that. There was an anchorite who was able to banish the demons; and he asked them, ‘What makes you go away? Is it fasting? ’ They replied, ‘We do not eat or drink.’ ‘Is it vigils? ’ They replied, ‘We do not sleep. ’ ‘Is it separation from the world? ’ ‘We live in the deserts.” ‘What power sends you away then?” They said, ‘Nothing can overcome us, but only humility.’ ‘Do you see how humility is victorious over the demons?’

In my own spiritual practice, I have taken to opening my day by offering the prayer known as St. Patrick’s Breastplate, also called Deer’s Cry (for its association with the legend that St. Patrick prayed it when he and his companions were in peril, and the prayer caused them to take on the appearance of deer and thereby elude their attackers). Though the prayer originated sometime after St. Patrick, it is an old, old prayer of encompassing—what the Celtic folk call a lorica—that in a poetic and profound way calls upon God to protect us from the forces that seek to work against God. I’m particularly fond of the version that Malachi McCormick offers in his book Deer’s Cry. Published by his small press, The Stone Street Press, Deer’s Cry offers Malachi’s translation of the prayer (alongside the Old Irish version), handwritten with his charming calligraphy. I gradually committed the prayer to memory some time ago. I pray it not as some kind of magic charm but rather as a reminder that I go into my day, and into the world, in the encompassing of God, who bids me rely completely on the power of God rather than on my own devices. It’s a prayer that, honestly prayed, cultivates humility, an awareness of how we are entirely dependent upon God. It’s this humility that in turn fosters the type of calm, centered authority by which Jesus acted in confronting the unclean spirit.

This gospel story reminds us not to give more power to the presence of evil than is warranted; obsessing over chaos can breed it. Rather, the story challenges us to confront evil where we find it. The demons—by whatever form or name we know the presence of disorder—fight hardest when we, like Jesus, look them in the face. But this is what depletes evil of its power. It cannot bear being named, challenged, called out.

Where do you personally witness the forces that work against God? What do you think about those forces, and how do you reckon with them? How do you seek God’s protection against them? Are there ways you feel called to confront the presence of chaos? What practices help keep you centered in, and reliant upon, the power of God?

May you go with the encompassing of Christ, who does not abandon us to chaos but instead accompanies in every realm. Blessings.

[Amma Theodora story from The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, translated by Benedicta Ward, SLG.]

[To use the “I Know Who You Are” 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, Epiphany, Gospel of Mark, lectionary, monastic stuff | 4 Comments »

The Hospitality of the Book

January 28, 2009

blog-womananointsjesus
A Woman Anoints Jesus © Jan L. Richardson

Ooohhhh, you really should check out the January 15 episode of Krista Tippett’s Speaking of Faith radio show. Titled “Preserving Words and Worlds,” the episode highlights the remarkable work of the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library (HMML), which is based at Saint John’s Abbey and University in Collegeville, Minnesota. The HMML is committed to preserving manuscript culture, not only through its work in a variety of locations around the world (including places where texts are in peril because of war), but also through its involvement in the creation of The Saint John’s Bible, the first Bible to be written and illustrated by hand in more than five hundred years. You can listen to the show and take in related features by visiting this delicious page.

At the Speaking of Faith blog, the January 15 entry from online editor Trent Gilliss included a link to a short video about the making of The Saint John’s Bible. A reader of the blog left a comment in response, offering the perspective that “the money would be far better spent feeding the hungry and homeless around the world” and that the Benedictines are “being selfish without realizing it.”

Typically I don’t take that kind of bait in cyberspace, but this was a day I felt drawn to respond to that view, which I encounter frequently in the church—the view that art and justice are two different things and that we have to choose between them (with justice being the “right” choice). What follows is a comment that I left in response. I know it’s longish, but it was a good opportunity to remind myself of why I do what I do, and why people of faith should give a damn about art (and justice, though I can’t conceive of those two being separate).

Comment: Deep thanks for your “Words and Worlds” show and for highlighting the remarkable work of the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library. For a number of years I’ve had occasion to travel to Saint John’s, and have followed with particular interest the HMML. I am fascinated by the crucial work it does both in preserving the sacred texts of many cultures and civilizations and also in supporting the creation of a new manuscript for a new time in the form of The Saint John’s Bible.

I was struck by the comment left by the writer who thought the money would be better spent feeding the homeless and hungry. I’m not certain whether the writer was referring to money spent on The Saint John’s Bible or to the work of the HMML in general, or both together, but the comment illuminates a tension that has long pervaded the church regarding art and justice. I am concerned by how frequently we in the church talk about art and justice as two different things that we have to choose between, rather than as being part of the same impulse: our response to a God of grace and creativity who has placed us in a world that is both broken and beautiful.

The Christian tradition and the Bible itself both developed and survived in large measure because of people across the centuries who gave themselves to transmitting the sacred stories in a variety of creative forms, not just in texts but also in other media including drama, music, and liturgy. In particular, the stunning array of visual art created over the centuries not only helped proclaim the gospel to those who could not read it (as well as those who could) but also was understood to be a gift in return to God: a lavish offering, an act of praise in response to the God who has lavished love, grace, and care upon us.

The fact that we live in the 21st century, when hunger, homelessness, and a host of other injustices continue to inflict deep suffering around the world, does not diminish—and is not separate from—our need for beauty and the sustenance and hope it provides. I find myself thinking of the story in Mark 14.3-9, in which, as Jesus sits at table, a woman comes and anoints him with outrageously expensive oil. Mark tells us that some at the table were angry and said, “Why was the ointment wasted in this way? For this ointment could have been sold for more than three hundred denarii, and the money given to the poor.” Jesus, however, receives her lavish act with grace and gratitude. “Let her alone,” he tells those who scold the woman; “why do you trouble her? She has performed a good service for me. For you always have the poor with you, and you can show kindness to them whenever you wish, but you will not always have me. She has done what she could; she has anointed my body beforehand for its burial. Truly I tell you, wherever the good news is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in remembrance of her.”

In saying that we would always have the poor with us, Jesus wasn’t suggesting that we should neglect to work for an end to poverty. Rather, he recognized that lavish acts of generosity, grace, and beauty, such as the woman offered to him, must be part of our response to Christ, alongside our work for justice. Jesus knew that choosing justice at the expense of beauty is just another form of poverty.

I am an ordained minister as well as an artist and writer. I understand my call and my work as a minister to be about feeding people not only in body but also in soul. One kind of feeding cannot long do without the other. I could not work for justice in this world without the creative acts that others have offered across the centuries and in our present time, not only because I could not live without the sustaining hope and beauty they offer, but also because they remind me that God desires us to give lavishly, generously, wantonly from the depths of who we are, and who God has created us to be. Such extravagant acts can seem wasteful. By his response to the anointing woman, however, Jesus reminds us that such gestures of grace bring healing to the body of Christ, and to the whole world.

One of the many gifts of The Saint John’s Bible is that through its related exhibitions, books, prints, cards, and website, not to mention radio and TV shows that have featured it, people are coming into contact with the Bible who might not otherwise encounter it. The Saint John’s Bible also beckons those who think we are oh-so-familiar with the Bible to engage it in a different, deeper, and renewed way. The work of Donald Jackson and his team reminds us that the Bible is not obsolete but rather is a living, dynamic text that invites us to continue not merely to read it but to lavish our attention upon it: to grapple and wrestle with it, to question it, to discern how it still speaks to and challenges us in this time, and to illuminate it, even as it illumines us.

The monks of Saint John’s, and the host of others who participate in the work of the HMML, including the artists, calligraphers, and financial contributors who are making The Saint John’s Bible possible, are offering the world something that is precisely the opposite of selfish. In preserving the sacred texts of the past, in employing ancient methods to offer a sacred text that speaks to us in the present, in drenching us with this audaciously lavish gift, they are offering, in fine Benedictine (and Christian) tradition, a profound act of hospitality.

Amid the brokenness of the world, to which we are called to minister, these folks have given us a rare gift that reminds us that God desires beauty. They bear witness to the fact that recognizing and offering beauty is part of what heals the brokenness. They remind us that God is not yet done with the work of creating, and that God calls us to offer our creative gifts for the healing and feeding of the world.

And that is good news indeed.

Posted in art, books, medieval, monastic stuff | 7 Comments »

Night Passage

August 5, 2008


Night Passage © Jan L. Richardson

Here at The Grünewald Guild, where I’ve finished a week of teaching and am beginning a week of writing, we gather for Matins at 8:30 AM. Matins invites us to a time of creative reflection and prayer before we head off to class or to whatever else will occupy our morning energies. Each Tuesday, which marks the first day of classes, Richard Caemmerer leads the service. Along with his wife Liz, Rich founded the Guild and directed it for twenty-five years until retiring a couple of years ago. Last week he began Matins by showing us a volume of the New Testament that his father-in-law had given him years ago. Printed in the early 1900s, and falling apart, this two-volume set was designed for those who are blind. Rather than using the system of patterned dots that Louis Braille devised, which took some time to gain widespread acceptance, the pages of this New Testament consist of raised letters that spell out each word of the scriptures.

Rich passed around a pile of the pages that have come loose from their binding. As I looked at the first page that came my way, and traced its letters with my fingers, I realized it was the gospel reading for this Sunday, Matthew 14.22-33. When Matins was over, I told Rich about the bit of synchronicity. “Well, then,” he told me, “you must have that page.”

And so I have the page here on my desk that overlooks the river that runs past the Guild. Tracing its letters once again, I’ve been thinking about seeing, and not seeing, and how difficult it sometimes is to learn to see, to recognize what’s before us.

The page with the raised letters describes how the disciples have spent the night on the waves, their boat tossed by the wind. When Jesus comes walking toward them on the water in the early, still-dark morning—“in the fourth watch of the night,” the King James Version more poetically puts it—they do not recognize him. Matthew tells us of the disciples’ terror, how they cry out in their fear, “It is a ghost!” Jesus calls words of assurance, yet they remain uncertain of what they see.

Peter decides to run something of a vision test here, calling out to the ghostly form that if he really is the Lord, “then command me to come to you on the water.” Jesus does. Peter hops out but then begins to falter on the waves. History has laid a great burden on Peter at this point in the story, and perhaps it is this that so weighs him down in the water, rather than the seeming failure of faith that many interpreters have attached to him. When Jesus catches Peter and pulls him into the boat, saying, “You of little faith, why did you doubt?” we have tended to hear these as words of rebuke. As a consequence, we sometimes carry around the cumbersome notion that if we just had enough faith, if we could, by force of will, generate a critical mass of it, a magical measure of it, we could fix whatever is wrong with us. That is a terrible load to carry by ourselves, and it’s not what Jesus intends.

I hear Jesus’ words to Peter as words of encouragement, not of harsh rebuke. His words are gentle and good-natured, acknowledging Peter’s gumption in stepping out of the boat. There is, however, a clear invitation and challenge that Jesus extends to his soggy friend. Jesus recognizes Peter. Every step of the way, on sea and on land, he sees him for who he is: impetuous, impulsive, devoted, good-hearted if not always clear-headed. Jesus wants Peter to be able to see him, to recognize both who he is and who he is calling Peter to become. Jesus knows that Peter’s sight is incomplete, that his vision will falter, that he is still learning to see. But he is learning.

In her book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard writes of reading Marius von Senden’s book Space and Sight. She conveys von Senden’s descriptions of what happened when eye surgeons began to perform the first successful operations to remove cataracts. For many of those who had been born with blindness, the experience was terrifying in the beginning. Their brains had never learned how to process and make sense of the images that now confronted their eyes. Shapes appeared flat, meaningless, fearsome. One young man, raised in what was then called an asylum for the blind, threatened to tear his eyes out. A newly sighted girl walked around for two weeks with her eyes closed.

Gradually, Dillard says, many of them passed through their fright and began to work with what their eyes were trying to tell them. She describes one man who, trying to develop his depth perception, would toss a shoe out in front of himself. He would estimate how far away the shoe was, walk toward it, pick it up, toss it again. Slowly, he began to see.

When Peter got out of the boat, it was his way of tossing a shoe, testing his depth perception there on the waters, feeling his way toward the one whom he was still learning to recognize and to know. Peter faltered but did not fail, and when he returns to the other disciples, he carries a new piece of vision with him. Matthew tells us that when Jesus and Peter get into the boat, the wind ceases, and those in the boat worship Jesus, saying, “Truly you are the Son of God.” For this moment, at least, in this space of calm on a once-contrary sea, they pass through the darkness, and they see.

Where do you recognize the presence of Christ in the midst of your days? How might God be challenging you to deepen your vision and stretch your sight? Is it more challenging for you to recognize the holy in places of chaos or of calm? What are you looking for, and looking at; are you turning your vision toward things that will help you see and know and respond with greater clarity?

By whatever ways it comes to us—by touch and sight and sound and all our senses—may we recognize the presence of the Christ who reaches out for us. Blessings.

[To use the “Night Passage” 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, Gospel of Matthew, lectionary, Ordinary Time | 1 Comment »

Something Old, Something New

July 23, 2008


Something Old, Something New © Jan L. Richardson

While I was at St. John’s University in Minnesota last week, I made a couple of visits to the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library (known in those parts as the HMML). The Benedictine monks of St. John’s founded the HMML to preserve the medieval manuscript heritage of Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, and it’s always a favorite destination for a girl with a blog called The Painted Prayerbook. This summer the HMML is home to a tasty exhibition of original folios from The Saint John’s Bible, the first Bible to be written and illustrated entirely by hand in more than five hundred years. Featuring the Wisdom Books section of The St. John’s Bible, the exhibition marks the completion of five of the planned seven volumes of this contemporary manuscript. By the time that Donald Jackson and his team of scribes and artists complete their lavish, monumental work, the Bible will have absorbed about ten years of their lives.

A group was touring the exhibition during one of my visits to the museum. As I took in the folios, with the gold dancing on their pages, I tuned an ear to the comments that the group’s HMML guide offered. After her presentation, she fielded a number of questions. “Why,” one person asked, “in this age of high-quality printing technology, would someone spend the time to create an entire Bible by hand?” As the guide responded, she spoke about the value of recovering ancient practices of bookmaking as a sacred art, and of the beauty that emerges in fashioning something by hand. She pointed out that contemporary technology has played a significant role in The Saint John’s Bible; a designer used a computer to plan the entire layout of the pages before the team began to lay the first strokes of ink, paint, and gold leaf on the vellum sheets.

It’s a treasure that draws from what is old and what is new.

We hear about such treasures in this week’s gospel lection, Matthew 13.31-33, 44-52. Jesus, who is in a parable-telling mood at this point in the gospel, offers a series of images that describe what the kingdom of heaven is like. He speaks of a mustard seed that grows into a tree, yeast that a woman mixes with flour, a man who discovers treasure hidden in a field, a merchant who finds a pearl of great value, and a net filled with fish. Jesus closes the litany of images by saying, “Therefore every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like the master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.”

The scribe about whom Jesus speaks is a rather different sort of scribe than those who have been laboring over The Saint John’s Bible. Jesus’ scribe is one versed in Mosaic Law, a person who knows and draws from the wealth of the law and also recognizes new treasure when it appears. Yet the scribes of The Saints John’s Bible, and the pages they have created, embody what Jesus’ kingdom-images evoke. Each reminds us of how the holy, which so often seems hidden, emerges when we stretch ourselves into searching for it, seeking it, laboring toward it. The bakerwoman kneading in her kitchen, the man who sells all that he has to buy the field, the merchant who gives up everything to purchase the pearl of great price, the scribe trained for the kingdom of heaven, the householder who brings forth treasure old and new: each of these has given themselves, devoted themselves, to a particular process by which treasure emerges. They know what skills it takes, what vision, what devotion. Each trained in their particular art, they possess in their bones the knowledge that tells them what ingredient to use, what tools old or new to employ, what treasure lies before them.

Offering these images, Jesus recognizes there are things that are worth a long devotion; there is treasure worth giving ourselves to for a decade, a lifetime. Such treasure might not have a usefulness that is obvious, or readily grasped. In a world where technological shortcuts abound (and are useful at times, to be sure)—bread machines, metal detectors, faux pearls, computer printers—something happens when we take the long way around, when we hunt for the holy that often loves to hide in work that takes time, takes the development of skill, takes commitment, takes the long view.

I think of when I was first learning calligraphy a few years ago. There was no getting around the need for practice. Over weeks and months, as I covered page after page with ink, shaky lines steadily grew more sure, and awkwardness began to give way to art.

This type of long laboring and searching reveals something about our own selves. Submitting ourselves to a process of practicing brings secret parts of ourselves to the surface; it draws us out and unhides us, and the holy that dwells within us. “The kingdom of God is among you,” Jesus says in Luke 17.21. Among us, and meant to be uncovered, to become visible, to offer sustenance and grace for the life of the world. Like bread. Trees. Pearls. Pages. Treasure born of what is old and what is new.

What treasure have you found, or long to find, in the hidden places of your life? What searching, what seeking might God be challenging you toward, to uncover what’s been buried? Is there anything in your life that invites you to encounter the holy in a process that takes time, practice, skill, devotion? What of yourself do you find in that, and what do you find of God?

May this week bring a hidden gift your way. Blessings.

[To use the “Something Old, Something New” 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, Gospel of Matthew, lectionary, medieval, monastic stuff, mystery, Ordinary Time, writing | Leave a Comment »

Out of the Dark

June 17, 2008


© Jan L. Richardson ◊The Painted Prayerbook◊

In 1941, a young Jewish woman named Etty Hillesum began to keep a journal. Hitler’s armies had invaded her homeland of The Netherlands nine months before she took up her pen. As the Nazi forces wielded increasing control over nearly every aspect of her life and the life of her community, Etty continued to write, filling a series of eight exercise books over the next nineteen months. “If I have one duty in these times,” she observed, “it is to bear witness.”

Etty bore witness not only to what was happening in the world around her but also in the world within her—the one place the Nazis could not invade. Amid the mounting terrors that the Nazis were inflicting, Etty documented and reflected on the dailiness of her life. She wrote of the complexities of her relationships with family and friends, her work as a Russian tutor, her passionate appetite for reading (among her favorites were the works of the poet Rilke as well as the Gospels). She wrote of her hungers, her longings, her prayers. Her diaries weren’t a form of escapism; rather, they convey her conviction that the exterior and interior worlds are not separate from one another. Etty believed that doing one’s inner work is crucial to the thriving of a society. She wrote that if we refuse to look into our own shadows, if we resist going into the dark places within ourselves and our world, our shadows eventually spill out in hatred and violence—as her own homeland was experiencing.

Etty recognized both her capacity for hatred and the need to let it go. On a February day, she notes the martyrdom of a young man; she comments on how he had played the mandolin, and had a wife and child. She runs into a friend and talks with him about the martyred man. Her friend asks, “What is it in human beings that makes them want to destroy others?” Etty’s response reminds him that they, too—the two of them—are among the human beings of whom he speaks. “I see no other solution,” she tells him, “I really see no other solution than to turn inwards and to root out all the rottenness there.”

Etty wrote with a sense of her own frailty—she describes occasions of anxiety, illness, and depression—as well as a keen understanding of the brokenness around her. In the midst of this, Etty evinces a stubborn willingness to enter the darkness and its mysteries. There she finds the presence of God and the riches of her own soul.

One spring morning she wrote,

I went to bed early last night and from my bed I stared out through the large open window. And it was once more as if life with all its mysteries was close to me, as if I could touch it. I had the feeling that I was resting against the naked breast of life, and could feel her gentle and regular heartbeat. I felt safe and protected. And I thought: how strange. It is wartime. There are concentration camps. I can say of so many of the houses I pass: here the son has been thrown into prison, there the father has been taken hostage, and an 18-year-old boy in that house over there has been sentenced to death. And these streets and houses are all so close to my own. I know how very nervous people are, I know about the mounting human suffering. I know the persecution and oppression and despotism and the impotent fury and the terrible sadism. I know it all.

And yet—at unguarded moments, when left to myself, I suddenly lie against the naked breast of life and her arms round me are so gentle and so protective and my own heartbeat is difficult to describe: so slow and so regular and so soft, almost muffled, but so constant as if it would never stop.

That is also my attitude to life and I believe that neither war nor any other senseless human atrocity will ever be able to change it.

In 1942, Etty Hillesum was sent to the labor camp at Westerbork, where she held a position that enabled her to travel back and forth to Amsterdam. Her position offered the possibility of escape, and on one occasion, friends tried to kidnap her to prevent her return to Westerbork. Etty resisted, believing she was called to remain with those who were suffering. At Westerbork she continued to tend her inner terrain, acknowledging both the beauty and the struggle that she found. In one of her letters from the camp, she wrote,

When I think of the faces of that squad of armed, green-uniformed guards—my God, those faces! I looked at them, each in turn, from behind the safety of a window, and I have never been so frightened of anything in my life as I was of those faces. I sank to my knees with the words that preside over human life: And God made man after his likeness [Genesis 1.27]. That passage spent a difficult morning with me.

On September 7, 1943, Etty was put on a train to Auschwitz, along with her mother, father, and one of her brothers. None of them returned.

Etty flung a postcard from the train as they left Westerbork; a farmer found it and put it in the mail. On the postcard Etty had written, “We left the camp singing.”

Etty has been constant with me as I’ve pondered this week’s gospel lection, Matthew 10.24-39. Her words and her life have provided both commentary and challenge as I’ve prayed with Jesus’ words about shadows and darkness. With her own life she continues to teach me about how everything that is hidden eventually becomes revealed, about how we are called to proclaim in light what God tells us in the darkness. She persists in telling me what it means not to fear those who can kill the body but not the soul, and how we find our lives by losing them.

With her eloquent, raw, searing, haunting words, Etty reminds us that the shadows may hold fear and terror, but beneath that, deeper than that, more enduring than that, they contain the presence of God, who dwells in darkness as well as in light. She bears witness to the God who is shrouded in mystery yet longs to be known by us and to know us in all our brokenness and our beauty.

So how do we sort through what lies in the shadows of our own souls, our society, our world? How do we listen for the voice of God in the darkness and receive the revelations that Christ has for us there? How do we bring to light what we find in the shadows? Who or what helps us navigate the connections between the inner and outer realms? How does God call us to bear witness to, to “tell in the light,” what we find there?

Blessings to you in darkness and in daylight.

[Quotations from Etty: The Letters and Diaries of Etty HIllesum, 1941-43. Edited by Klaas A. D. Smelik, 2002.]

Posted in art, books, Gospel of Matthew, lectionary, Ordinary Time, writing | 4 Comments »

Mapping the Mysteries

June 11, 2008


Mapping the Mysteries © Jan L. Richardson

Reading from the Gospels:
Year A, Proper 6/Ordinary 11/Pentecost +5: Matthew 9.35-10.8 (9-23)
Year B, Proper 9/Ordinary 14/Pentecost +5: Mark 6.1-13
Year C, Proper 9/Ordinary 14/ Pentecost + 7: Luke 10.1-11, 16-20

Early in my ministry, I traveled to Alaska with a mission team from my church. During a free day, we did some exploring that included a stop at the Anchorage Museum of History and Art. As I wandered through the rooms, I found myself in an exhibit titled A World of Maps. These maps were unlike any I had ever seen. Artists from across the United States had taken the familiar forms of cartography, stretching and pushing and translating them into a fascinating library of landscapes. There were altered maps, painted maps, collaged maps. There were maps in the form of sculpture, of books, of pottery. There was a map that unfolded like a scroll, a map in the form of a diptych, a woven map. More than describing the geography of the physical world, these maps charted worlds of imagination, fantastical realms, the terrain of the soul and spirit. The maps told stories of things seen and unseen, and they challenged ideas about borders and boundaries. They embodied the lure and the hazards of exploring worlds unknown—and the worlds we think we know.

This week marks fifteen years that I have been in ministry. Yesterday, as part of my reflecting on this past decade and a half, I pulled out the catalog from that Alaskan exhibit and spent some time revisiting the maps I had encountered so early in my vocation. Looking back, I wonder if part of my fascination with those maps lay in my awareness, even then, of what an uncharted path I was on. I entered ordained ministry with a sense that at some point God would open a door that would take me off the beaten path. I had a gut sense, some hunches, a sense of longing about the ways the path might take shape, but no real idea of how it would unfold.

In this week’s gospel lection, Jesus gives the disciples the closest thing they ever get to a map for their ministry. Telling the twelve to go and proclaim the good news that “The kingdom of heaven has come near,” Jesus provides a rough—not to mention sobering—chart of the landscape they will venture into. He tells them of the hazards the terrain will likely pose, what towns and people to avoid, and how to navigate occasions of hospitality and resistance and hatred. And he gives them the authority to do the work he has called them to do: to chart a path that will be marked by healing and restoration.

So early in their ministries, the disciples could know little of what the territory ahead would actually look like or where it would take them. I wonder—as they looked back after Jesus’ death and resurrection, what kind of map might they have drawn to describe the paths they had walked with him? Reading the landscape with the eye of a cartographer, what marks might they have made to trace their travels? What would those contours and patterns have looked like—the places where, with the authority given to them, they cured the sick, raised the dead, cleansed the lepers, and cast out demons? Or where they shared meals together, or fed those who hungered, or listened to Jesus teach and challenge and encourage and stretch them? Or where they watched him die, and witnessed him alive again? How would they map all the terrain they crossed in the spaces of their own souls?

In Katharine Harmon’s wondrous book You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination, she includes an essay by Stephen S. Hall entitled “I, Mercator.” Hall writes,

I like to say that I never travel without a map, but then none of us do. We all travel with many maps, neatly folded and tucked away in the glove compartment of memory—some of them communal and universal, like our autonomic familiarity with seasonal constellations and the shape of continents, and some as particular as the local roads we have each traipsed. As we navigate on the trip that Dante called “our life’s way,” we are all creating our private maps. Like Mercator, we are not discovering entirely new worlds; rather, we are laying a new set of lines down on a known but changing world, arranging and rearranging metaphysical rhumbs that we associate with successful navigation. To each, her or his private meridians. To each, a unique projection. I, Mercator, and you, too.

This week’s collage is a map I made as I reflected on these past fifteen years in ministry. As with most maps, I can chart the landscape only in retrospect; I recognize the roads because I have traveled them, often making them up as I went along. Making this collaged map, I had certain kinds of landmarks on my mind, but I fashioned it with the awareness that I could have charted the landscape any number of ways. I could have marked the locations where pivotal conversations occurred, where I witnessed healing, where I encountered birth or death. I could have charted the places of peril, of heartbreak, of unexpected wonders. I could have marked the spots where the territory seemed to take me in circles, or was barren, or graced me with splendors. The map might have noted the underground streams, the secret passages, the wellsprings of sustenance, the paths not taken.

And it might tell of those sites where the convoluted terrain finally opened up and spilled me out into a plain where I knew more deeply who I was, what I was called to do, what Christ was giving me authority to do.

Still making the map as I go, I pray for a measure of the imagination of those artists whose work I saw in Anchorage, who pushed and stretched the traditional forms, who ventured beyond the customary boundaries, who dared to look deeper into their landscape, and deeper still. More than that, I pray for the imagination of the one who looked out into the terrain of a world “harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd,” a world broken by illness and injustice, a world bent by pain and hunger. I pray for the imagination of Christ, who dared to look into this world and to ask those who traveled with him, “Want to make a new map?”

So what’s your map look like? How would you chart the terrain of your last fifteen years, fifteen months, fifteen days? What landmarks would you note? What stories would your map tell? What are the maps beneath the map of your life—the hidden landscapes, the secret stories that shape the lay of your land? Are there tools you need in order to do some new mapping—to revisit and rethink and redraw the territory you thought you knew, or to change the course ahead?

Many blessings and traveling mercies as you continue to chart your way.

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

Posted in art, books, Gospel of Mark, Gospel of Matthew, lectionary, mystery, Ordinary Time | 2 Comments »

Trinity Sunday: A Spiral-Shaped God

May 12, 2008


A Spiral-Shaped God © Jan L. Richardson

Some years ago, at a retreat center in Ontario, I led a retreat in which we explored some of the riches that come to us from Celtic Christian traditions. When I saw that our meeting room had a smooth linoleum floor, an idea stirred. After tracking down several rolls of masking tape, I returned to the gathering space and got to work. When I finished a couple hours later, the center of our space held a circle with a triple spiral inside, large enough to use for walking prayer and meditation.

The symbol of the triple spiral is particularly prevalent in Celtic lands, where, in Christian times, it came to signify the Trinity. Evoking the energy, interconnection, and mystery of the triune God, the triple spiral graces such works as the remarkable insular Gospel books of the early medieval period, including the Book of Durrow and the Book of Kells.

On Trinity Sunday, we both celebrate God’s triune nature and also acknowledge the great mystery that it holds. Throughout the centuries, theologians have sought to define just how it is that God, Christ, and the Holy Spirit dwell together and with all of creation. Symbols of the Trinity abound, evidence of our desire to describe a being that comprises a community within itself. Attempts to convey the nature of the Trinity in images have occasionally produced some curious artwork, as in this image from a medieval Book of Hours that depicts three fellows sharing a single crown, and this image, added to a medieval English Psalter, that shows Abraham adoring a three-headed Trinity.

In their commentary on Trinity Sunday, the authors of Handbook of the Christian Year counsel us that rather than approaching this day with an emphasis on “the Trinity as an abstract concept, idea, or doctrine,” and seeking to explain or define it, it rather “seems more in keeping with the character of worship and of the Christian Year to treat Trinity Sunday as a day in which we praise and adore the infinitely complex and unfathomable mystery of God’s being to which we point when we speak of the Holy Trinity.” They go on to write,

Because our celebration of the Easter cycle is based upon the mighty acts of the triune God, and because we are entering upon the Sunday-to-Sunday half of the year when the emphasis is wholeheartedly upon each Sunday as the Lord’s Day, whose celebration is also based upon the mighty acts of the triune God, it is appropriate that we pause on this transitional Sunday to give ourselves over to the adoration and praise of the being—as distinct from the acts—of the triune God.

It is sometimes difficult, of course, to separate the doing of the Trinity from the being of the Trinity, for it is part of the nature of the Trinity to be in action, to work in relationship within itself and in cooperation with creation. This is one of the reasons that the Celtic symbol triple spiral speaks to my imagination: it evokes the God who both exists in a dynamic wholeness within itself yet also reaches out (or is it in?) to embrace us.

Historically, Celtic Christians offered no systematic theology by which they sought to define the nature and work of Trinity, but evidence of their experience of the triune God abounds. Beyond their artistic and symbolic depictions of the Trinity, they left a remarkable body of prayers and poetry that offer us an incarnate experience of the Trinity. In their poems and prayers, Celtic Christians moved from the abstract to the actual; for them, the triune deity was not a theological concept but rather was deeply embedded in daily life. In the Celtic imagination, God, Christ, and Spirit are intertwined with one another and with all of creation.

The Carmina Gadelica, a collection of prayers, poems, and blessings that Alexander Carmichael gathered in the Scottish islands and highlands in the 19th century, offers a feast of examples of this rich relationship with the Trinity, as in this prayer for the baptism of a child:

The little drop of the Father
On thy little forehead, beloved one.

The little drop of the Son
On thy little forehead, beloved one.

The little drop of the Spirit
On thy little forehead, beloved one.

To aid thee from the fays,
To guard thee from the host;

To aid thee from the gnome,
To shield thee from the spectre;

To keep thee for the Three,
To shield thee, to surround thee;

To save thee for the Three,
To fill thee with the graces;

The little drop of the Three
To lave thee with the graces.

With an intent both poetic and practical, this baptismal prayer serves as a graceful commentary on, and response to, the gospel reading for Trinity Sunday. In Matthew 28.16-20, we read the words that are, according to Matthew, Jesus’ final words to his disciples. In this passage that we often call the Great Commission, Jesus tells them to “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you.” Jesus’ words here are about the closest thing we have to an articulation of the Trinity in the scriptures. Jesus never uses the term “Trinity,” and he offers nothing like a doctrine of its nature. His words here, however, perhaps provide doctrine enough: he lets us know that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit exist in an inextricable relationship that propels us to be in relationship with the world, to live in service and to cultivate community. “And remember,” Jesus tells them at the last, “I am with you always, to the end of the age.” I am with you, he says: that being thing again, invariably bound together with the doing of the Trinity, an endless spiral of action and existence in which it dwells, and calls us to dwell as well.

In the Celtic triple spiral, there is a space where the three spirals connect. It is both a place of meeting and of sheer mystery. Its vast, vibrant emptiness reminds me that, in this life, we will never know all the names of God. Even as the Trinity evokes, it conceals. We will never exhaust the images we use to describe the One who holds us and sends us, who enfolds us and impels us in our eternal turning.

This week, as we travel toward Trinity Sunday, I’ll be holding that image of the triple spiral and the community in whose company I walked its path: inward, outward, journeying ever around the mystery at its center. Those walking companions remind me of how we are to be a living sign of the Trinity who dwells in eternal, intertwined relationship within itself and with all creation. As individuals and as communities, we are beckoned to times of spiraling inward, to attend to our own souls. We are propelled, in turn, into times of spiraling outward, to attend to the world beyond us. In all our turnings, the presence of God persists. With you always, Jesus said.

How do you experience the God who exists as a community and invites us to intertwined lives? How does this God become incarnate in the rhythm of your days?

Blessings on your spiral-shaped path.

[To use this 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, Gospel of Matthew, lectionary, mystery, sacred time | 17 Comments »

A Postscript to Pentecost

May 11, 2008

Happy Pentecost to you! On this occasion of Pentecost’s unusual confluence with Mother’s Day, I’ve found myself thinking about the frequency with which Mary, the mother of Jesus, appears front and center in artful depictions of Pentecost. In the first chapter of Acts, the author makes a point of noting that “certain women, including Mary the mother of Jesus,” were among those who gathered in the upper room, devoting themselves to prayer. The text implies her prayerful presence at Pentecost, and artists across the centuries highlighted her among the gathered assembly. Because of her presence and leadership among the disciples, along with her role as the mother of Christ, Mary became known as Queen of the Apostles as well as Mother of the Church.

The artful images of the Pentecostal Mary illuminate an intriguing resonance with the story of the Annunciation. In Luke’s gospel, we read of how the angel Gabriel tells Mary that the Holy Spirit will come upon her, and the power of the Most High will overshadow her. As with the Annunciation, paintings of Pentecost, such as this one in the St Albans Psalter, typically depict a woman open to the Spirit who appears—as so often in Christian iconography—in the form of a dove.

In much the same way that many medieval artists portrayed Mary reading at the Annunciation, they often depicted her in a similar fashion at Pentecost, as in this page from a 15th-century French Book of Hours. Another French Book of Hours depicts Mary kneeling at a prie-dieu as she reads, a motif that often appeared in artwork of the Annunciation.

As a blissfully incurable lover of books, I take great delight in these images of the literary, Pentecostal Mary who remained steeped in the Word throughout her life. These images also challenge me to ponder how I’m opening myself to the God who comes to us as both Word and Spirit. What do they stir in you?

On this day and all the days to come, may the Spirit breathe through the mothers and others who care for the children of the world.

(Artwork: Annunciation to Mary [detail] from The Advent Hours © Jan L. Richardson.)

Posted in art, books, holidays, lectionary, sacred time | Leave a Comment »

Easter Sunday: Out of the Garden

March 22, 2008

Image: Resurrection © Jan Richardson

Reading from the Gospels, Easter Day:
John 20.1-18 or Matthew 28.1-10

John’s telling of the Easter story has long had a powerful hold on my imagination. The encounter between Mary Magdalene and the risen Christ continues to coax me deeper into the mysteries of this day. I have written elsewhere about some of the things that strike me about their garden meeting, including how Mary has to decide whether she will try to cling to what she has known, or whether she will accept Jesus’ invitation to leave the garden and proclaim what she has seen this day.

What I find myself pondering this time around, however, is what happens after Mary Magdalene leaves the garden. For her willingness to let go, to step into her new life, and to proclaim what she has seen, the Magdalene becomes known (at least in some quarters) as the “apostle to the apostles.” There’s a wonderful depiction of her apostolic proclamation among the pages of an illuminated manuscript that’s among my favorites. The St. Albans Psalter belonged to a 12th-century Englishwoman named Christina of Markyate, for whom the psalter may have been originally created. Christina lived as an anchoress, a woman called to prayer and solitude. I wonder what this woman, so devoted to the Word, thought about as she pondered this image of Mary Magdalene, telling the good news of the risen Word. Scholars have pointed out that such a depiction of Mary was, in those days, quite rare.

Centuries after the fact, the Magdalene’s Easter proclamation contributed to the wonderful legend that she moved to France and became a famous preacher. (Here’s my depiction of that legend; I like to think that after this sermon, Mary went for an espresso and a chocolate croissant. France, you know?) This tale of Mary the French evangelist is one in a cycle of Magdalene legends that are short on evidence but long on power and charm. Though lacking in fact, such legends offer insights into the lasting power of Mary Magdalene to stir questions about her role in the life of Jesus and in the formation of the early church.

Whatever may have become of the Magdalene beyond Easter morning, John’s Gospel clearly tells us that it was to her that the risen Christ first revealed himself, and she was the one he called to carry the news that everything had changed.

On the threshold of this Easter morning, what is the good news that the risen Christ calls you to proclaim? Is there anything you need to release, in order to tell what you have seen?

On this day: blessings, blessings.

[To use the image “Resurrection,” 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, Easter, lectionary, medieval, monastic stuff | 1 Comment »

Good Friday: In Which We Get Nailed

March 20, 2008

Good FridayImage: Good Friday © Jan Richardson

Reading from the Gospels, Good Friday: John 18.1-19.42

Several years ago, I did a series of charcoal drawings for Peter Storey’s book Listening at Golgotha, in which he reflects on Jesus’ Seven Last Words from the cross. (View the series here.) Peter is a retired bishop and active leader of the Methodist Church of Southern Africa, and his experiences of working for justice and reconciliation in his home country profoundly shape his understanding of Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection. In Peter’s reflection on Jesus’ third word, “Woman, here is your son…. Here is your mother,” he observes that in giving his mother and his beloved friend John to one another, Jesus “created a community that was to become family to the widow, the orphan, the outcast, and the stranger.” Peter writes of our call to such a community as a “sacred trust,” and he asks, “If we accept, can anybody suffer hunger, homelessness, or need? Would there be any lonely old people? Could there be a single unwanted child? If Jesus has made everyone kin to me, would that not make every war in history a civil war and every casualty a death in my family?”

Peter goes on to write, “From the cross where he is nailed, Jesus nails us to each other.”

The first time I read this sentence, sitting at my drafting table as I contemplated Peter’s manuscript, I cringed. I wanted some other word there besides nailed. I wanted Peter to say that Jesus binds us to each other, or joins us to each other, or some other image less graphic and bloody.

As I continued to sit with the image, I began to realize—Well, yeah, Peter’s right. In our loving, in our call and struggle to be community, we get nailed.

I have listened to the stories of women and men who lived with abuse; I have—like all of us—been drenched with images of terrorism and warfare; I have seen the ways that some people participate in their own wounding because they don’t know how to live otherwise, or because they believe that suffering, by its own nature, is somehow redemptive and should be sought out. Everything I know about the love of God causes me to resist the idea that Christ desires our suffering and that he would perpetuate this culture of violence by willfully inflicting pain upon us.

What Peter claims here, however, is not that Christ desires or wills our wounding. Rather, Peter recognizes and names what happens when we try to be family to one another. Christ doesn’t call us to seek out pain. Pain is not the goal. It does, however, seem to be an inextricable part of loving. When it comes to love, there’s no need to seek out suffering. In the risk of exposing ourselves and opening ourselves to one another, the wounds will open of their own accord.

We call the crucifixion of Jesus the passion, and so it is, for us as well as for him. Each time we stretch out our arms in love to one another, every time we open our hearts, we find the shadow of the cross, but also a glimpse of the open tomb. We are nailed indeed. It is our keenest grief, and our deepest joy.

Pierce, break, tear, rend, nail: the older I get, the longer and more deeply I love, the more I see how the words I used to avoid are part of the vocabulary of the community to which Christ calls us. It is part of the language of hearts that seek to live in relationship with one another, with all the risks and losses and joys that come in loving. Jesus’ final word from the cross, “Into your hands I commend my spirit,” reminds us that every relationship will, at some point, contain a good-bye.

Yet we who know the rest of the story, we who have glimpsed the other side of Good Friday, know that Jesus’ last word from the cross isn’t the final word. There are more words to come, crucial words that Christ will yet add to our vocabulary, our story, our community.

For now, we wait. Together. Nailed to one another.

What words are you noticing, hearing, speaking this day? What is the vocabulary you use to describe your experience of community and of loving?

Blessings to you as we approach Good Friday.

[To use the image “Good Friday,” 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, lectionary, Lent | 7 Comments »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »