The Painted Prayerbook

Image: Blessing of the Gate
© Jan Richardson

Reading from the Gospels, Easter 4, Year A: John 10.1-10

I know I am not alone in thinking that life has been very threshold-y of late, in beautiful and challenging ways. So this is for you (and for us), for the fourth Sunday of Easter: a blessing with a gate in it. May we be open to the grace that comes to meet us in every crossing, every passage, every place where we are working to come through.

Blessing of the Gate

Press your hand
to this blessing,
here along
the side
where you can feel
its seam.

Follow the seam
and you will find
the hinges
on which
this blessing turns.

Feel how
your fingers
catch on them—
top,
bottom,
the slightest pressure
sending the gate
gliding open
in a glad welcome.

Wait, did I say
press your hand
to this blessing?

What I meant was
press your hand
to your heart.

Rest it over that
place in your chest
that has grown
closed and tight,
where the rust,
with its talent
for making decay
look artful,
has bitten into
what you once
held dear.

Breathe deep.
Press on the knot
and feel how it
begins to give way,
turning upon
the hinge
of your heart.

Notice how it
opens wide
and wider still
as you exhale,

spilling you out
into a realm
where you never dreamed
to go
but cannot now imagine
living this life
without.

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

_____________________

Using Jan’s artwork
To use the image Blessing of the Gate, please visit this page at janrichardsonimages.com.

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 from The Cure for Sorrow: A Book of Blessings for Times of Grief. janrichardson.com.” For other uses, visit Copyright Permissions.

Image: Into the Wound © Jan Richardson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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: That We May Breathe Together © Jan Richardson

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

He breathed on them and said to them,
“Receive the Holy Spirit.”
—John 20:22

You can almost feel it resonating throughout Christendom: a deep, collective breath being taken. In the wake of the intensity of Lent, Holy Week, and Easter—intensity borne of the starkness of this stretch of the liturgical year as well as its immense, nearly overwhelming richness—we need a pause, a shared regathering of ourselves as we begin to absorb what it means that Christ is risen, that death has not had the final word.

Breath is precisely what Jesus comes to give his disciples, his friends who followed him to the end and hardly know what to do now, reeling as they are from all that has occurred and struggling to discern what happens next.

He breathed on them, John tells us in his gospel. More than any words could have done, this breath comes as gift, as grace: Christ’s own breath that bears to them the Spirit that will enable them to keep living, to keep breathing, to proclaim the astonishing news of the risen Christ, and to be his body in this world.

Here on this side of Easter Sunday, what deep breath do you need to take? How will you open yourself to the risen Christ who comes to breathe the Spirit into you?

Blessing of Breathing

That the first breath
will come without fear.

That the second breath
will come without pain.

The third breath:
that it will come without despair.

And the fourth,
without anxiety.

That the fifth breath
will come with no bitterness.

That the sixth breath
will come for joy.

Breath seven:
that it will come for love.

May the eighth breath
come for freedom.

And the ninth,
for delight.

When the tenth breath comes,
may it be for us
to breathe together,
and the next,
and the next,

until our breathing
is as one,
until our breathing
is no more.

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

For a previous reflection for Easter 2, click the image or title below.

Easter 2: Into the Wound

Using Jan’s artwork…
To use the image “That We May Breathe Together,” 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.