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Feast of Saint Patrick

March 17, 2008

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[To use the “St. Patrick: Deer’s Cry” image, please visit this page at janrichardsonimages.com. Your use of janrichardsonimages.com helps make the ministry of The Painted Prayerbook possible. Thank you!]

Posted in art, books, Celtic, Lent, monastic stuff, sacred time, writing | 4 Comments »

The Red Circle

February 10, 2008

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© Jan L. Richardson  ◊The Painted Prayerbook◊

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

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

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

Giotto got the job.

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

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

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

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

It was more than sufficient.

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

Wishing you a red circle day.

Posted in art, books, Lent | 5 Comments »

The Inner Library, Revisited

January 26, 2008

initial-i1.jpgthink it was Michelle Brown who first got me pondering the idea of an inner library, which I wrote about on Wednesday. In her book The Lindisfarne Gospels: Society, Spirituality, and the Scribe, Brown makes mention of a painting that appears in the eighth-century Codex Amiatinus. The earliest surviving copy of a complete Bible in Latin, the Codex Amiatinus contains a thought-provoking painting of Ezra, a priest and scribe of the Israelites.

We find the tale of Ezra in the biblical books of Ezra and Nehemiah and also in the books of 1 and 2 Esdras, which are in the Apocrypha. Ezra lived during the time of the Israelites’ exile in Babylonia and was responsible for leading a group of them back home. This priestly scribe had particular renown for his devotion to the law of Moses. 2 Esdras contains a wonderful exchange in which God calls Ezra to rewrite and restore the law that has been destroyed:

Then I answered and said, ‘Let me speak in your presence, Lord. For I will go, as you have commanded me, and I will reprove the people who are now living; but who will warn those who will be born hereafter? For the world lies in darkness, and its inhabitants are without light. For your law has been burned, and so no one knows the things which have been done or will be done by you. If then I have found favor with you, send the holy spirit into me, and I will write everything that has happened in the world from the beginning, the things that were written in your law, so that people may be able to find the path, and that those who want to live in the last days may do so.’ (2 Esdras 14.19-22, NRSV)

I love how the author of 2 Esdras clearly depicts Ezra’s act of writing as a sacred call. Ezra’s remembrance and restoration of the law of Moses is, like the rebuilding of the Temple, an integral part of the reconstruction of the people of Israel.

It is this sacred scribe who appears among the pages of the Codex Amiatinus, laboring over a page as he sits beside a cabinet filled with holy books. (Take a gander at the Ezra painting here.) As with so much medieval art, there’s a lot happening in this image that our 21st-century eyes may not readily read. Michelle Brown places this bookish portrait of Ezra in the wider context of a Celtic monastic tradition that viewed the contemplation, study, and scribing of the scriptures as a way of drawing closer to God. “The act of copying and transmitting the Gospels,” she writes, “was to glimpse the divine and to place oneself in its apostolic service…. As such these books are portals of prayer, during the acts both of making and studying.” (Brown, 398.)

Brown goes on to write,

In an insightful discussion of the Ezra miniature in Ceolfrith’s Codex Amiatinus, Jennifer O’Reilly has drawn attention to the patristic [referring to the early church fathers] concept of the ‘inner library’ and the necessity for each believer to make him or herself a library of the divine Word, a sacred responsibility which Cummian [a seventh-century Irish bishop-theologian] referred to as ‘entering the Sanctuary of God’ by studying and transmitting Scripture. Books are the vessels from which the believer’s ark, or inner library, is filled. They are enablers of direct, contemporary Christian action, channels of the Spirit, and gateways to revelation, for ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God’ (John 1.1). (Brown, 398-9.)

The painted Ezra invites us to cultivate a sacred inner library not merely for the sake of filling our interior shelves, like homeowners who decorate their dwellings with pretty books they have bought by the yard but which they never intend to read. He challenges us instead to fashion a library whose contents inspire and sustain us to embody the Word of God in this world.

What are the books that circulate in your inner library? Within the Bible and beyond it, what texts have opened you to the presence of the God who lingers in their lines? Where have you found words that helped you to read and to create your own life?

Posted in art, books, lectionary, monastic stuff, writing | 1 Comment »

Epiphany 3: In Which We Visit Our Inner Library

January 23, 2008


The Inner Library © Jan L. Richardson

This week the lectionary leads us to Matthew 4.12-23 for the Gospel reading. It’s a passage that provides a great example of one of the things I find intriguing about how Matthew tells the story of Jesus. Matthew frequently turns to the Hebrew scriptures to interpret and explain who Jesus is. Drawing from the prophets—especially Isaiah—as well as the Psalms, Matthew grounds the story of Jesus in the remarkable landscape of the Hebrew scriptures and offers a vivid portrayal of Christ as the longed-for savior, the enfleshed fulfillment of an ancient hope.

At the outset of this passage, Matthew tells us that Jesus, upon hearing of the arrest of John the Baptist, leaves Nazareth and makes his home “in Capernaum by the sea, in the territory of Zebulun and Naphtali.” Matthew turns, as he loves to do, to Isaiah, explaining Jesus’ move as a fulfillment of Isaiah 9.1-2. Drawing from the prophet’s words, Matthew writes,

Land of Zebulun, land of Naphtali,
on the road by the sea, across the Jordan,
Galilee of the Gentiles—
the people who sat in darkness
have seen a great light,
and for those who sat in the region and shadow of death
light has dawned. (Mt. 4.15-16)

Isaiah’s testimony about the great light that comes to those in darkness—one of the particularly lovely and powerful passages from his book—is among the lectionary readings for Christmas Eve. In quoting from these words, Matthew works to make especially clear that in the birth and life of Jesus, our hopes for light have been fulfilled.

Matthew’s use of the Hebrew scriptures, here and elsewhere, reminds me of something shared by the Dominican nun who first taught me about lectio divina. In talking with our group about praying with the scriptures, Sr. Kathleen cautioned that it’s important to remember that the Hebrew scriptures can stand on their own. Though Christians typically refer to this part of the Bible as the Old Testament, for our Jewish sisters and brothers it is the sole testament, a living and present word that continues to speak to their lives. Oftentimes Christians have treated the Hebrew scriptures as an extraneous appendage, a hefty section that merely makes our Bibles heavier. We have frequently read the Old Testament primarily as a prelude, a prooftext, viewing it solely through the lens of the New Testament and mining it for little else but news of Jesus and some lovely poetry.

I think it’s important to read the Hebrew scriptures with the kind of caveat that Sr. Kathleen offered us. At the same time, she affirmed that in the context of lectio divina, we who read the Hebrew text with Christian eyes may indeed find the presence of Christ there, and if we grow closer to him as a result, then that is a blessing and a gift.

For Christians, it’s possible to read the Hebrew texts both with an understanding of Christ as the embodiment of the ancient hope of which they speak, and also with a respect for the fact that they can also stand on their own as a testimony that is not merely “old” but eternal. Beyond what they reveal about the Messiah, the Hebrew scriptures provide an amazing and crucial context for our history as the people of God who have been on a journey that in some ways hasn’t changed all that much in millennia. The stories, longings, and lamentations that we find in the Old Testament—the kind of material that Matthew continually returns to in his Gospel—are some of the same kinds of stories, longings, and lamentations that we continue to live with. In this living, it’s crucial to engage this text not merely as prelude but rather as a persistently relevant revelation that grounds us in the ancient story of our long wrestling with God.

I find it intriguing, the way that Matthew preserves this ancient and living text. Had the Hebrew scriptures disappeared—God forbid—we still would have had essential fragments of it preserved in his gospel. It’s like having little books within his book, an essential and precious library tucked away within his tale.

The practice of lectio divina invites us to think of our lives as sacred texts that can be read and prayed with in much the same way that we approach a sacred written text such as the Bible. With that understanding, my pondering of this week’s gospel lection has prompted me to wonder about what I’ve preserved in my own interior library. Following Matthew’s lead, what are the texts that help me understand who I am? What words are tucked into the larger story of my life, and how do they influence how I read and live that story? In talking about texts in this context, I’m thinking both of written texts that have impacted me as well as the unwritten texts—the stories, experiences, and understandings through which I interpret my life.

What texts, sacred or otherwise, are preserved in the library of your life? What are the words through which you interpret your story and respond to the world around you? As you move through this world, what experiences and stories do you default to? What are the texts within and beneath the texts, the old and sometimes forgotten stories that influence how you read your present life?

Some of those texts that we carry in our interior library may readily strike us as sacred and life-giving; others may feel burdensome, painful, unlovely to us, and we keep them on the most remote and abandoned shelves. Yet God, that consummate recycler, has a remarkable habit of redemption. Every word of every text we carry, every scrap of every story: God has a place for it, a use for it, a need of it in the ongoing crafting of our tale.

[To use the “Inner Library” 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, lectio divina, lectionary | 2 Comments »

The Painted Prayerbook

January 8, 2008

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Some years ago, while browsing through the savory bookstore at the Washington National Cathedral, I happened upon Roger Wieck’s book Painted Prayers: The Book of Hours in Medieval and Renaissance Art. I was vaguely familiar with Books of Hours, mostly from seeing individual images that had been lifted from them for Christmas cards or book illustrations, but this was my first real introduction to this kind of book. Called the “medieval bestseller,” the Book of Hours was a popular prayerbook that enabled lay people to keep a similar rhythm of prayer as the monks, nuns, and priests who prayed the Liturgy of the Hours—the eight times of prayer that helped them remember the presence of God throughout the day and night.

In the days before the printing press, scribes and illuminators created these exquisite books by hand. They were often lavish creations that employed paints, inks, and dyes crafted from such materials as plants, flowers, and—yes—crushed bugs, as well as costly stones and minerals including lapis lazuli and gold. The contents of the Book of Hours varied. Virtually all of them contained a section of prayers called the Hours of the Virgin (with illuminations of the life of Mary, the mother of Jesus), the Hours of the Cross (with illuminations depicting the events around Jesus’ crucifixion), and the Hours of the Holy Spirit (with an illumination of the descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost).

As a writer and artist who creates books for reflection and prayer, I was enchanted by Wieck’s descriptions of these remarkable prayerbooks and by the wealth of color illustrations that he included. I began to cast about for more information on Books of Hours and, as I discovered the wondrous resources available, was soon thanking my lucky stars that I live in an age where color reproductions in print and on the web are so readily available.

One of the things that particularly struck me about these prayerbooks was how frequently the illuminated artwork (“illuminated” refers to the use of gold in an illustration) had an architectural context: in any given Book of Hours, most of the scenes are framed in a fashion that gives them the appearance of taking place in an arch, a doorway, a window. This kind of framing creates an entrance, a passageway that beckons the reader to cross into the scene being depicted. The passage, however, doesn’t go just one way: this kind of depiction also challenges readers to allow the characters to cross through the frame into their own world, and to ponder how the stories embedded in Books of Hours—stories of biblical characters and saints—might unfold in the reader’s own landscape.

This kind of artwork, with its two-way passage, underscores how the Book of Hours was a threshold book. Usually of a size that was small enough to carry in a pocket or purse, such a book’s owner could open it anywhere and, in that place, open themselves to the presence of God. The book offered a thin place, a sacred, illuminated space where heaven and earth met.

Fittingly, Wieck calls these books “portable cathedrals.”

My fascination with and research into Books of Hours eventually led me to other kinds of illuminated manuscripts that offer their own unique thresholds. Illuminated Psalters, Gospel books, Apocalypses, and other dazzling genres: they each have quickened my imagination and deepened my understanding of how a book can offer a threshold, a thin place, an invitation to go deeper into the mystery of God. For me, the bookly intertwining of words and images is particularly compelling and intriguing, both as a reader/viewer and as an artist/writer.

I share all this because this is the kind of stuff that’s been on my mind as I’ve been redesigning this blog in recent days. I’ve pretty much been lying low, blog-wise, the past couple of weeks, in the wake of the intensity of doing the daily writing and art-making for The Advent Door (I think I’ve nearly recovered!). Doing the Advent blog stirred some ideas and imaginings for what this blog could become.

I loved reflecting on the season’s lectionary readings in a way that intertwined image and words; I especially loved creating the abstract collages and seeing where they took me. One of the main things I envision doing with this newly redesigned/revamped/renamed blog is offering an artful reflection on a lectionary reading for each week, as I did during Advent. More broadly, this blog will be a place where I’ll contemplate the intersections of art and writing and faith, and a few other things besides.

A blog is different from a printed or handcrafted book, but it shares some common ground in the ways that it can invite us into a reflective, contemplative, sacred space. My hope is that, in the spirit of the medieval and Renaissance books that offered places of worship, respite, and challenge on the journey, the artful pages of this blog will invite you to notice some thin places along your own path.

With thankfulness for the generations of artists and scribes whose skills far exceed mine but whose books continue to inspire me and invite me into places of wonder and worship, it seems fitting to call this blog The Painted Prayerbook. Thank you for opening its pages. I look forward to sharing the journey with you.

(Today’s artwork is a [triplicated] detail from an original mixed-media piece titled At Her Prayers: Mary Magdalene with a Book of Hours; it’s part of a series inspired by medieval Books of Hours. To see the series, visit The Hours of Mary Magdalene. For a related series, check out The Advent Hours.)

Posted in art, books, monastic stuff, mystery, writing | 11 Comments »

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