Archive for the ‘Epiphany’ Category

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Transfiguration: Back to the Drawing Board

February 7, 2010

Image: Transfigure © Jan Richardson

Reading from the Gospels, Transfiguration Sunday, Year C:
Luke 9:28-36 (37-43)

I was nearly finished with the collage before it occurred to me that the design perhaps owes as much to the snow I was recently in as it does to next Sunday’s gospel text. Gary and I have returned from Minnesota, and although we (and they) joked about the wisdom of importing Floridians at this time of year, it was a great gift to be in a lovely winter’s landscape and to receive wondrous hospitality as we shared a morning at Hennepin Avenue United Methodist Church (including a worship service that takes place in their art gallery, what a concept) and in events at Wisdom Ways Center for Spirituality and United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities.

At the events, I had occasion to share images of some of my artwork from the past 15+ years. It was the first time I had brought these images together in quite this way, from early work such as Wise Women Also Came (made when I was still using construction paper!) to the more recent collages I’ve created for this blog and The Advent Door. Looking back over this body of work prompted me to do some reflecting on how my style has changed. Although paper collage remains my first love, my technique and my style have both shifted considerably, taking an increasingly abstract turn since I began creating artwork for my blogs more than two years ago.

When it comes to the creative process, I can’t say I have a lot of control. Trying to wield too much control, in fact, is one of the worst things an artist can do (which doesn’t always keep me from trying). I didn’t exactly set out to do abstract work. The technique, which involves painting tissue paper, emerged from creative necessity as I was working on The Welcome Table: the scale was so large (4.5 x 6.5 feet) that I couldn’t snip the characters’ clothes out of magazines; I had to fashion them myself. I can’t explain the ensuing turn toward abstraction, except in part: once the painted papers showed up, that’s the path they took me down. That, and these lectionary texts that take me to places that so often resist traditional depictions. I experience abstract art as being more like poetry in the space that it creates. “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant,” Emily Dickinson wrote. I’m not trying to explain these passages, but to evoke, to invite, to sidle up alongside the texts and offer a doorway into them amidst line and shape and color.

Along the way, what I keep working and hoping to do is to give myself to the mysteries involved in the process of making: to pay attention to what emerges among the papers and to follow where they lead; to keep clearing out a space within myself that leaves enough room for something new to show up; and to avoid growing so attached to a particular style or technique that it becomes overworked and ossified.

In my artful work and elsewhere, the challenges that the disciples encounter in this passage from Luke are my own challenges. Like Peter, John, and James at prayer with Jesus on the mountain, I sometimes struggle to stay awake when it’s easier to be lulled into sleep and to miss the thin places, the meetings of heaven and earth, that open up in the midst of daily life. And when those thin places come—when a burst of inspiration opens a new world, say, or, after hours or months or sometimes years of experimentation, something finally comes together at the drafting table, and both the work and I myself are transformed—it can be tempting to want to set up shop there, to preserve the moment, as Peter longed to do. I recognize his impulse in my own self, his desire to want to linger in the wonder. And why shouldn’t he? Yet the persistent invitation of Jesus is to take what we have seen, what we have found, down into the trenches of everyday life.

It’s not a new message; I’ll wager that the greater percentage of the sermons preached on this text will offer a variation on the theme of navigating the transition from the mountaintop to the flatlands. And yet we need to keep practicing that transition, to keep rehearsing the journey that moves us from being recipients of wonder to becoming people who, transformed and—shall we say it?—transfigured by what we have received, can then offer these wonders to a broken world.

When the disciples come down from the mountain, they still have plenty of struggles ahead. They’ve hardly gotten their feet back on flat land when, Luke tells us, they encounter, and fail to heal, a boy in the grip of what Luke describes as an unclean spirit. In juxtaposing the stories, Luke suggests that the disciples’ own spirits are still struggling between holding on and letting go, are still struggling to leave a space for the wonders that Christ seeks to do within and through them. It will take rehearsing, and practicing, and rehearsing some more. In my own life, cultivating this space is something that, quite literally, I keep going back to the drawing board to learn.

This is a great passage to lead us toward Lent, a season that is all about discerning what it is that we cling to, and what we need to practice letting go of in order for Christ to become more clear in us. But Lent will come around soon enough. In the meantime, where does the story of Peter and John and James connect with your own? How are you navigating the journey that their own feet trace between the mountaintop and the flatlands? What do you find yourself tempted to cling to, and how do you practice letting go of it? Do you have habits and spaces that invite you to cultivate an openness to the new ways that God desires to work in and through you? Where and how do you rehearse the transfiguration that God seeks to bring in your life?

As we move toward Transfiguration Sunday, may we keep awake to the wonders in our midst, let ourselves be transformed by them, and follow the path they open to us. Blessings.

[For an earlier reflection on the Transfiguration, please see Transfiguration Sunday: Show and (Don’t) Tell. To use the image “Transfigure,” please visit this page at janrichardsonimages.com. Your use of janrichardsonimages.com helps make the ministry of The Painted Prayerbook possible. Thank you!]

Update: Speaking of the creative process, the very cool site patheos.com has recently reprinted an interview that Christine Valters Paintner did with me at her also-very-cool Abbey of the Arts, in which she invited me to reflect on my practice as an artist. Here’s the reprint at Patheos: Sacred Artist Interview: Jan Richardson.

Posted in art, Epiphany, Gospel of Luke, lectio divina | 7 Comments »

Epiphany 5: The Wildest Bounty

January 31, 2010


The Willing Catch © Jan L. Richardson

Reading from the Gospels, Epiphany 5, Year C (Feb. 7): Luke 5.1-11

As I write this, I’m winging my way toward Minnesota, where my sweetheart and I will be leading several events over the next few days. With a few generations of Florida blood running through my veins, I’m questioning the sanity of going to Minnesota at this time of year. (“Are you crazy?” one of my Minnesota friends asked upon hearing I was heading his way). The timing of the trip, however, was determined by the sanctoral calendar: one of the events that Gary and I will be leading is a celebration of St. Brigid, whose feast day is February 1. While the prospect of spending several days in below-freezing temperatures has me wishing that Brigid’s day fell in midsummer, I’m thrilled by the opportunity to celebrate her feast in the company of friends, both longtime ones and those yet to be made.

I have long been intrigued by and devoted to this Irish saint who has been beloved in her homeland and beyond for more than a millennia and a half. Born in the middle of the fifth century, Brigid became a formidable leader who helped to shape the landscape of Irish Christianity when it was still relatively new to the island. She traveled widely in her ministry and established a number of monasteries, the most famous one being the double monastery (comprised of women and men) at Cill Dara (“The Church of the Oak”), now known as Kildare.

Brigid was renowned for her hospitality and generosity. In her biography of the saint, Alice Curtayne describes how Brigid found the poor “irresistible” and ministered to them with “a habit of the wildest bounty.” Accounts of Brigid’s life are replete with stories of how, in places of lack, Brigid’s actions help to bring forth abundance, whether of food or drink or healing or justice. In these accounts, Brigid is a worker of wonders; her miracles echo the miracles of Christ and draw upon the same power by which he provided for those in need. She reminds us of the ways that God is so often profligate toward us: how God, out of sheer, inexplicable delight and love for us, provides for us in ways that have the power to stun us.

Though she was known for not turning anyone away (“Every guest is Christ,” Brigid said), Brigid nonetheless brought a spirit of discernment to her generosity: she knew that miracles don’t always look like we expect them to look, and they often require something of us beyond what we had anticipated. The Irish Life of St. Brigid relates that one day, a man with leprosy approaches St. Brigid and says, “For God’s sake, Brigit, give me a cow.” With the air of someone who has perhaps been approached by the man a number of times before, Brigid tells him to leave her alone. He persists. Brigid asks him how it would be if they prayed to God for the removal of the man’s leprosy. “No,” he replies, “I get more this way than if I were clean.” Brigid disagrees with his priorities and insists that he “take a blessing and be cleansed.” The man acquiesces, acknowledging that he is in much pain. Upon receiving his cure, the man vows his devotion to Brigid, pledging to be her servant and woodman.

I’m quite enjoying the fact that in the same week that we are celebrating Brigid’s feast, the lectionary gives us this passage from Luke. Put out into the deep water, Jesus says to Simon, and let down your nets for a catch. Simon tells him what Jesus already likely knows: Master, we have worked all night long but have caught nothing. Yet if you say so, I will let down the nets. And what comes up sends Simon to his knees: net-breaking, boat-sinking abundance. In the place where Simon and his fellow fishermen had already been laboring, in the landscape they thought they knew, in the place where they had come up empty: a stunning catch, lavish beyond measure.

Fish weren’t the only catch of the day; Simon and his companions were hooked. Captivated. Called. And that’s what miracles are meant to do: they meet us at our point of need, but they do not leave us there. They call us to move from being recipients to being participants, to share in the ways that God pours out Godself for the life of the community and the healing of the world.

In this week, Luke’s fish tale and the feast of St. Brigid have me wondering, what do I really believe about the ways that God works in this world? Have I grown fixed in my expectations about what God is up to? Do I have eyes to see the surprising ways in which God moves in the midst of situations whose outcome I think I already know? Is there deep water I need to put my net into—beyond what I can see, beyond what I know, beyond my familiar limits—to bring up an abundance that God has in store? What am I willing to leave behind in order to participate in such a miracle and to pass it along to others? What habits of wildest bounty might God be inviting me to practice?

In these coming days, may you participate and pass along the wildest bounty of God. Blessings!

P.S. As Brigid’s feast day approaches, I invite you to visit a reflection I wrote for her feast day last year:


Feast of St. Brigid: A Habit of the Wildest Bounty

This is a doubly festive week: the Feast of the Presentation, also called Candlemas, falls the day after Brigid’s feast. For an earlier reflection on this feast day, please click below:


Feast of the Presentation/Candlemas

[The image “The Willing Catch” is from the reflection Hooked. 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, Celtic, Epiphany, Gospel of Luke, lectionary, monastic stuff | 4 Comments »

Epiphany 4: Get Real

January 25, 2010


Get Real © Jan L. Richardson

Reading from the Gospels, Epiphany 4, Year C: Luke 4.21-30

In an interview with Terry Gross on her radio program Fresh Air some years ago, author Stephen King talked about how the adulation he encounters among readers sometimes turns so quickly to animosity. Acknowledging that he has become a lightning rod that draws a certain kind of fan psychology, he described how it occasionally happens that, for instance, “they want your autograph, they want to tell you how much they enjoy your stuff, and if you say look, I’d love to sign your books, but I can’t right now, I’m taking my family out to dinner, or I really have to be over here…their reaction is, go to hell, you son of a…. Just like that, it changes.”

Although it’s pretty easy to spot this adulation-animosity dynamic in its more dramatic forms (“We keep files on them,” King says of some of his readers who live at the farther, scarier reaches of this spectrum), I suspect we each carry this tendency within us. There’s something in our human psychology—more pronounced in some folks, to be sure, but present to a degree in us all—that tempts us to either idolize or demonize others. In particular, those who are in the public eye become, as Stephen King put it, lightning rods for this kind of phenomenon. Seeing bits and pieces of the life of another—a politician, a movie star, or even—as we observe in today’s gospel lesson—a preacher, we extrapolate from those pieces, put them together in a picture of who we think that person is, often magnifying certain traits (real or imagined) and ignoring others. In the process, we create a caricature that becomes easy to laud or to vilify.

Such responses are rooted in our illusions, in our projections, in our failure to see another for who they are. And because these perceptions are rooted in such shaky ground, it can become stunningly easy to flip from one pole of emotion to the other, usually in the direction of lambasting the one we once lauded.

We see this in today’s gospel lesson, which continues the story from last week of Jesus’ return to his hometown, where he reads from the scroll of Isaiah—those stunning words of good news to the poor, release to the captives, sight to the blind, and freedom to the oppressed—and proclaims to the gathering that these words have been fulfilled in their hearing. As Luke tells the story, Jesus’ teaching initially inspires awe, and then incredulity at what this hometown boy—“Is not this Joseph’s son?”—is speaking.

Jesus challenges their reaction with two stories. Again, as with last week, we see the power of how Jesus the Word carries the scriptures of his people within himself. The stories that Jesus tells to the gathering in the synagogue are stories of two people—one a widow, one a military commander—to whom God sends aid. God sees these people as they are. God knows their need. God meets their need in a way they don’t anticipate and, in the case of Naaman the commander, initially resists.

The subjects of Jesus’ two stories are also foreigners, strangers, people who live outside the covenant that God has with Israel. In telling these stories, and in observing that “no prophet is accepted in the prophet’s hometown,” Jesus challenges his hearers to remember that God crosses all boundaries and borders, including those that exist only in our own minds and hearts. Jesus challenges the way in which we often construct our beliefs about others and how God works in them: not only do we carry assumptions about those who are foreign to us, we also grow fixed in our understandings of those in our midst whom we think we know well. In both cases, our illusions and presumptions can prevent us from seeing the person who is really there, and can hinder us from receiving the sometimes surprising ways by which God is working in the life of this person, and wanting to work in our own life.

The incarnation and work of Jesus, to which we give particular attention in this season of Epiphany, was God’s way of saying to us, I see you. I see you, I know your need, I so want to be with you in your need that I will come among you in your own flesh, a body meeting your body, to see you, to be seen by you. To know you and to be known.

Some of the most powerful moments in the gospels come on those occasions, fairly rare, when someone recognizes who Jesus is: really sees him, knows him, understands what he’s about, perceives him in a balanced way absent of the extremes of adulation or denigration. Think of Peter, proclaiming, “You are the Christ.” Or the women who anoint Jesus in his final days, perceiving who he is and ministering to him in anticipation of the suffering he will soon endure. Or Mary Magdalene on Easter morning, exclaiming “Rabboni!” after Jesus has called her by name. One gets the sense from such stories that these people recognize Jesus because he has recognized them, has truly seen who they are: without illusion, without projection, without judgment, and with the utter and complete love that calls them to move more deeply into the heart of God and into the person God has created and called them to be.

The other lectionary texts this week speak with such brilliance to the power of what it means to seek and be seen by this God who knows us fully. “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you,” God says to Jeremiah, “and before you were born I consecrated you….” “Upon you I have leaned from my birth,” sings the psalmist; “it was you who took me from my mother’s womb.” “For now we see in a mirror, dimly,” Paul writes in his first letter to the Corinthians, “but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.”

The spiritual practices we find in the Christian tradition are treasures that help us seek this kind of seeing, this kind of knowing, even if partial: they help us to wipe at least a few of the smudges from the mirror. Amid what is strange and what is familiar—both of which can blind us to what is really present—practices of prayer, silence, spiritual direction, fasting, and the like help us strip away the layers of illusion and false perception. What we find through these practices can be uncomfortable and sometimes painful: who wants to have this kind of mirror, even a dim one, held up to ourselves?

And it is, in part, this experience of seeing themselves in Jesus’ mirror that infuriates the crowd in Luke’s story, flips them from amazement to agony, and prompts them to drive Jesus to the nearest cliff, intending to fling him over the side. We do well here to check our own assumptions and to heed the caution that Sarah Dylan Breuer offers in her excellent reflection on this passage: “And whatever we say about this Sunday’s gospel, please let’s not say that it is in any way about the small-mindedness of Jews in Jesus’ day or any other.” (She also suggests that “It can be dangerous to choose a pulpit too close to a cliff.”) The impulse to switch from adulation to assault isn’t reserved to any particular group; instead, it’s frighteningly pervasive.

Yet when we allow ourselves to truly see and be seen—when the Christ in me meets and knows and is known by the Christ in you—there is nothing in the world that compares with that. When we can move past our assumptions, our projections, our impulse to build perceptions on paltry fragments and partial sight; when we can open ourselves to the ways that God comes to us both in the stranger and in the one we think we know so well; when we can recognize and respond to the presence of God in another and, in that reflection, recognize the presence of God in our own selves: well, that’s enough to change the world.

So where is God hiding out for you these days? How do you keep your eyes open to the holy that goes in the guise not only of strangers but also of those who are so familiar to you? Upon what do you build your impressions of others? Are there practices that help you see others and yourself more clearly, that help you move beyond assumptions and illusions and imaginings and to see what and who is really there?

In this Epiphany season, in the strange and in the familiar, may we see and know the presence of the Christ who seeks us. Blessings.

[To use this image, please visit this page at janrichardsonimages.com. Your use of the Jan Richardson Images site helps make the ministry of The Painted Prayerbook possible. Thank you!]

Posted in art, Epiphany, Gospel of Luke, lectionary | 2 Comments »

Epiphany 2: Marriage and Miracles

January 12, 2010


When He Surprised Us with Wine © Jan L. Richardson

Reading from the Gospels, Epiphany 2, Year C (January 17): John 2.1-11

“So how are your wedding plans coming along?”

It’s a question I’ve been getting a lot as Gary and I look toward being married this April. Mostly the question has prompted laughter from me, as the past few months have been so wildly full that we’ve had little time to take care of any wedding planning except for a few of the major things: location, food, music. I’d like to think that with those things covered, what else could we need? Which puts me in mind of a young relative of mine who still gets ribbed for asking, at the outset of his engagement, “How complicated can it be to plan a wedding?” Having been an officiant or a bridesmaid at plenty of weddings, I know that designing even a simple celebration, as Gary and I are aiming to do, can be a real feat.

Still and all, I’m aware that even with as much as we still need to do to plan the festivities—and, now that January is here, we’re shifting into higher gear on that—there are plenty of other things to be sorted out as we plan and plot our marriage together. We’ll need to find a house, as I mentioned in a recent post. We’ll need to figure out how to make a home and a life together as two people who each require a good measure of solitude and space for our souls. I—who have lived on my own for nearly twenty years—will need to learn a different rhythm of living, not only with a husband but also with his teenaged son. And Gary and I will need to do all the work of establishing a household and creating a home as two people whose ministries involve the adventure of raising our own incomes.

As I look at all that needs to be done, both before the wedding and after it, I’m aware that we’re going to need a few miracles. So it’s been good to be keeping company with the story of the wedding at Cana of late. It’s a story, after all, that reminds us that marriage and miracles go together.

John’s account is familiar enough: Jesus and his disciples, along with Mary, Jesus’ mother, are invited to a wedding in Cana. The wine gives out—an occurrence which, I once heard someone point out, might not have happened if all those disciples hadn’t been there. Mary points out the lack of libations to Jesus. Initially resistant, Jesus relents and calls for the servants to fill six stone jars, used for the Jewish rites of purification, with water. When a sampling of the contents is taken to the chief steward, he is stunned and begins to praise the groom for saving the good wine until now, when many of the guests have become too drunk to notice.

John makes a point of letting us know that this is the first of Jesus’ miracles—“the first of his signs” (from the Greek semeion), as some translations put it. It’s John’s way of calling us to pay particular attention to what’s going on here. Jesus’ action at the wedding at Cana is not only a wonder in itself; it reveals much about who he is and what he has come to do. Jesus offers here a foretaste, if you will, of the wonders he will yet perform; his gesture is a harbinger of the bent toward plenitude that will mark his ministry. Again and again, in the chapters to come, we will witness Jesus’ persistence in entering places of lack—lack of health, of justice, of wisdom, of wholeness—and offering abundance in its place.

To a couple setting out on a life together—the couple at Cana, and the couple of which I am a part—Jesus’ wondrous act comes as a comfort and a sign of hope that those who undertake the journey of committing their lives to one another will be met with the abundance and provision they need.

But here’s the thing. As miraculous as Jesus’ provision is, and as hopeful as I find it, I wonder if he was up to something more here than just supplying what was lacking.

The older I get, the more aware I become of what particular and complex individuals we humans are. We are so deeply imprinted by our experiences, our genes, our personal and cultural history, our instincts and desires, our biases and patterns. This imprinting only becomes deeper as we go along. My dad calls this “Dr. Moreso’s Theory”: whatever our personality characteristics are, as we age they tend to become more so. Given this, I occasionally find it something of a wonder that any two of us can pass five minutes in the same room, let alone make a life together, sometimes for decades on end.

The fact that so many people choose, in the midst of this, to commit themselves to another person is a wonder and a delight. To choose to make a life with someone while also knowing some of the obstacles to such a life is a sign of profound hope. And lest anyone think by my ponderings about the challenges of marriage that I’m not actually looking forward to it, let me say that my wonderings about how my beloved and I are going to sort through some of those challenges are much outweighed by my anticipation and delight at the prospect of making a life together. My wonderings are grounded by my clarity, present nearly from the outset and borne out by eight years together (“Kinda rushing things, aren’t you?” one friend recently observed), that this is the person I feel called to go through life with. The presence of such love and clarity is a gift and a wonder.

And perhaps this is something of what Jesus was up to at that wedding: by his action, Jesus was not only providing a needed plenitude but also recognizing that it was already present. Encouraged by his mother, a woman who knew something of marriage and miracles, Jesus was offering a sign by which he acknowledged and celebrated the miracle already present when two people enter into a covenant with one another, with all the challenges and the blessings it will bring, most of which can hardly be seen at the outset.

Relational miracles aren’t reserved just for couples who have covenanted to make a life together, of course. In friendships, in families, in communities, in all the places where we honor the threads of connection and commit to engage the struggles and joys that come with them, the presence of wonder lurks, and the miraculous lies in wait for us to notice. When we do notice, when we see the plenitude present in our connections, it comes as a reminder of what we celebrate in this season of Epiphany: the life and work of God-with-us, who, in the person of Jesus, came to tangle himself up with us in the messy miracle of this shared life.

So in the midst of your relationships, in the web of your connections, how are you keeping your eyes open for signs and wonders these days? What sustains you when the signs are hard to see? As you pray or yearn or ache for needed miracles in your life or in the life of another, are there marvels that God is already up to? Might the miracle be coming in a different form than you expect, and can you let yourself see it? How might God be inviting you to participate in the working out of a wonder in the life of another? How do you keep yourself open to the surprising gifts—the sharp, sweet wine—that God is conniving to bring?

In these days, may we perceive the wonders at hand, be part of the miracles yet to come, and encounter unexpected delights along the way. Blessings to you.

[To use the “When He Surprised Us with Wine” image, please visit this page at janrichardsonimages.com. For my charcoal drawing of the wedding at Cana, which first appeared in The Christian Century magazine, please see this page. Your use of the Jan Richardson Images site helps make the ministry of The Painted Prayerbook possible. Thank you!]

Posted in art, Epiphany, Gospel of John, lectionary | 7 Comments »

Epiphany 1: Baptized and Beloved

January 3, 2010


Baptized and Beloved © Jan L. Richardson

Reading from the Gospels, Epiphany 1/Baptism of Jesus, Year C: Luke 3.15-17, 21-22

A few nights ago, I had a dream. In the dream, I was sitting by a lake. A woman came and sat down beside me. She looked like a woman on whom life had been especially hard. Turning to her, offering my hand, I told her my name and asked hers. “My name,” she said as she took my hand, “is Fayette.”

Fayette. It’s the name of a woman who has haunted me for years and whom I have never met in waking life. I first learned of her in a story told by Janet Wolf, who used to serve as the pastor of Hobson United Methodist Church in Nashville, Tennessee. Hobson UMC is a wildly diverse congregation that includes, as Janet has described it, “…people with power and PhDs and folks who have never gone past the third grade; folks with two houses and folks living on the streets; and, as one person who struggles with mental health declared, ‘those of us who are crazy and those who think they’re not.’”

Years ago, a woman named Fayette found her way to Hobson. Fayette lived with mental illness and lupus and without a home. She joined the new member class. The conversation about baptism—“this holy moment when we are named by God’s grace with such power it won’t come undone,” as Janet puts it—especially grabbed Fayette’s imagination. Janet tells of how, during the class, Fayette would ask again and again, “And when I’m baptized, I am…?” “The class,” Janet writes, “learned to respond, ‘Beloved, precious child of God, and beautiful to behold.’ ‘Oh, yes!’ she’d say, and then we could go back to our discussion.”

The day of Fayette’s baptism came. This is how Janet describes it:

Fayette went under, came up spluttering, and cried, ‘And now I am…?’ And we all sang, ‘Beloved, precious child of God, and beautiful to behold.’ ‘Oh, yes!’ she shouted as she danced all around the fellowship hall.

Two months later, Janet received a phone call.

Fayette had been beaten and raped and was at the county hospital. So I went. I could see her from a distance, pacing back and forth. When I got to the door, I heard, ‘I am beloved….’ She turned, saw me, and said, ‘I am beloved, precious child of God, and….’ Catching sight of herself in the mirror—hair sticking up, blood and tears streaking her face, dress torn, dirty, and rebuttoned askew, she started again, ‘I am beloved, precious child of God, and…’ She looked in the mirror again and declared, ‘…and God is still working on me. If you come back tomorrow, I’ll be so beautiful I’ll take your breath away!’

Beloved, the voice from heaven had proclaimed as the baptismal waters of the Jordan rolled off Jesus’ body. Beloved, the voice named him as he prepared to begin his public ministry. Beloved, spoken with such power that it would permeate Jesus’ entire life and teaching. Beloved, he would name those he met who were desperate for healing, for inclusion, for hope. Beloved, echoing through the ages, continuing to name those drenched in the waters of baptism. Beloved.  Child of God.

Fayette—beloved, precious child of God, and beautiful to behold—haunts me, blesses me, goes with me into this season. She challenges me to ask what it means that—like her, with her—I have been named by God’s grace with such power that it won’t come undone. As I remember the Baptism of Jesus, how will I reckon with the fact that I, that we, have shared in those waters—that in the sacrament of baptism and as members of the body of Christ, we, too, are named as beloved children of God? How will we live in such a way that others will know themselves as named by God, beloved by God—especially those who have been given cause to think they are less than loved, less than children of the One who created them?

In the coming days, may the waters of our baptism so cling to us that in their depths we see who we are, and from our depths reflect to others their true name: beloved, precious child of God, and beautiful to behold.

Blessings to you.

[Janet Wolf’s story is from The Upper Room Disciplines 1999 (Nashville: The Upper Room).]

[To use the “Baptized and Beloved” image, please visit this page at janrichardsonimages.com. For all my artwork for the Baptism of Jesus, please see this page. Annual subscriptions for unlimited downloads from janrichardsonimages.com are available at a special holiday discount through Epiphany (January 6). Visit subscribe for more info. Your support of JRI helps make the ministry of The Painted Prayerbook possible. Thank you!]

For previous reflections on the Baptism of Jesus, please see these posts:

Epiphany 1: Take Me to the River
Epiphany 1: Ceremony (with a Side of Cake)

Posted in art, Epiphany, Gospel of Luke, lectionary | 10 Comments »

Feast of the Epiphany: Blessing the House

December 31, 2009

Image: The Wise Ones © Jan Richardson

Reading from the Gospels, Epiphany, Years ABC: Matthew 2.1-12

In the rhythm of the liturgical year, the season of Christmas comes to an end with the Feast of the Epiphany on January 6. The word epiphany comes from the Greek word epiphaneia, meaning manifestation or appearance. In Western Christianity, we observe this day primarily as a commemoration of the wise men who journeyed to see Jesus. In the East, Epiphany is a major feast day that celebrates not only Christ’s manifestation to the world through his birth and to the magi in their visit but also the way in which he showed himself forth in his baptism and in his first recorded miracle, the changing of water to wine at the wedding at Cana.

In doing some reading about the Feast of the Epiphany recently, I’ve been intrigued by a custom that is often mentioned in connection with this day of celebration: the blessing and chalking of the house. Many versions of the ceremony that I’ve come across include these elements:

-The reciting of a blessing upon the house (or other dwelling) and those who inhabit it

-The blessing of a piece of chalk that is then used to write a formula above the entry of the house. The formula incorporates the current year with the initials of the wise men (whose names are not recorded in scripture but were given by tradition as Caspar [or Gaspar], Melchior, and Balthasar). This coming Epiphany, it would be written this way:

20 + C + M + B + 10

(Some folks note that “C M B” can also stand for “Christus Mansionem Benedicat,” which means “May Christ bless this dwelling.”)

-The sprinkling of the door with holy water

Although it seems to be an ancient practice, I haven’t found any explanation of the origin of the custom. I suspect that, like many rituals, it has several layers of meaning and that its origin has more than one source. Certainly it has much resonance with the visit of the wise men to the home of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, and the manner in which they blessed it with their presence and their gifts.

So I’ve been thinking about house blessings as Epiphany approaches, especially since Gary and I will soon be in search of a house of our own. We’re engaged to be married next spring, and I’m daily praying that God will lead us to a (spacious) abode that will welcome two adults, each of whom needs a studio at home (and a copious measure of personal space), and Gary’s teenaged son. (Did I mention we’re looking for something spacious?)

At the same time that I’m thinking of (and praying for) a physical dwelling that we will inhabit and bless, I also find myself imagining the coming year as a house—a space in time that is opening itself to all of us. How will we inhabit the coming year? How will we enter it with mindfulness and with intention? How will we move through the rooms of the coming months in a way that brings blessing to this world?

With these questions in mind, I offer this blessing for you.

The Year as a House: A Blessing

Think of the year
as a house:
door flung wide
in welcome,
threshold swept
and waiting,
a graced spaciousness
opening and offering itself
to you.

Let it be blessed
in every room.
Let it be hallowed
in every corner.
Let every nook
be a refuge
and every object
set to holy use.

Let it be here
that safety will rest.
Let it be here
that health will make its home.
Let it be here
that peace will show its face.
Let it be here
that love will find its way.

Here
let the weary come
let the aching come
let the lost come
let the sorrowing come.

Here
let them find their rest
and let them find their soothing
and let them find their place
and let them find their delight.

And may it be
in this house of a year
that the seasons will spin in beauty,
and may it be
in these turning days
that time will spiral with joy.
And may it be
that its rooms will fill
with ordinary grace
and light spill from every window
to welcome the stranger home.

—Jan Richardson

Wherever you make your home, may it be blessed, and may you enter this Epiphany and the coming year in peace.

[For other Epiphany reflections, please visit my previous post. If you’re working with the lection from John’s gospel for this Sunday (Christmas 2), please see this reflection.]

[To use the “Wise Ones” image, which is from my book In Wisdom’s Path: Discovering the Sacred in Every Season, please visit this page at janrichardsonimages.com. For all my artwork for the Feast of the Epiphany, please see this page. Your use of janrichardsonimages.com helps make the ministry of The Painted Prayerbook possible. Thank you!]

Posted in art, Epiphany, Gospel of Matthew, holidays, lectionary, sacred time | 25 Comments »

On the Sickth Day of Christmas

December 30, 2009


Magi and Mystery © Jan L. Richardson

Reading from the Gospels, Epiphany, Years ABC: Matthew 2.1-12

I’ve spent the past few days dealing with an unexpected Christmas guest: a rare (for me) head cold. It’s one way to get a break, I suppose, but not the way that I’d planned to spend these lovely days between Christmas Day and Epiphany. I finally gave in and went to the doctor today and trust I’ll be back in the swing of things soon.

I had planned to post a new reflection for Epiphany early this week, and still have hopes of doing so before the week is out; we’ll see how that goes. In the meantime, I invite you to visit my previous Epiphany posts: Magi and Mystery, Inviting Epiphany, and Feast of the Epiphany: A Calendar of Kings.

To see all my artwork for the Feast of the Epiphany, please visit this page at janrichardsonimages.com.

On this sixth day of Christmas, I wish you peace and good health!

Posted in art, Christmas, Epiphany, Gospel of Matthew, lectionary | 2 Comments »

Transfiguration Sunday: Show and (Don’t) Tell

February 15, 2009

Image: Transfiguration © Jan Richardson

Reading from the Gospels, Transfiguration Sunday, Year B:
Mark 9.2-9

One of the greatest challenges in being a writer—or an artist or a preacher, for that matter—is discerning what to reveal and what to conceal. It’s a tricky thing, figuring out how much of our own experience should make its way into our work in an obvious fashion. There’s no well-defined line, though I find that my gut tends to sound the alert when it senses that something I’m reading or viewing or listening to has tilted toward providing Too Much Information.

The TMI syndrome doesn’t simply involve an overabundance of content; sometimes it’s a matter of timing. I read a book some years ago that the author crafted around a profound experience that had taken place not all that long before she began to write about it. I remember wishing she had waited a while. Clearly the act of telling the story was an integral part of how she processed the experience, but it struck me that both she and the story would have benefited from giving herself more time and space before offering that experience to the public. I find myself wondering what the story feels like to her years later, how the experience of sitting with it, pondering it, reading it over time might have honed and deepened her telling of it.

I’ve been thinking about that elusive line between revelation and concealment as I’ve pondered the gospel lection for next Sunday. It seems we’ve only recently tidied up from Christmas and Epiphany, and we’re already approaching Transfiguration Sunday and the threshold of Lent. Next Sunday’s reading beckons us to pause and gather ourselves for a moment in this space between the seasons of Epiphany and Lent, and to give thought to the questions this passage poses. Mark does the transfigurative honors for us this year with his account of this strange journey that Jesus takes with a trio of his disciples.

The transfiguring of Jesus provides a dazzling, dizzying experience for those who have accompanied him up the mountain. One can well understand that Peter, James, and John would desire to find a form for their experience, some kind of container to help them absorb and define what has taken place. We perceive this in Peter’s impulse to construct dwellings for Jesus, Moses, and Elijah. Faced with an event of overwhelming spiritual import, he responds at a physical level: Let me build something.

Peter’s offer is still on his lips when a bright cloud envelops them, a voice from within it speaking words akin to those that came from heaven at the moment of Jesus’ baptism: “This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased; listen to him!” The word for what the cloud does is overshadow, from the Greek word episkiazo. We’ve seen this word before. It appears in the angel Gabriel’s conversation with Mary, when he responds to her question about how it will be possible for her to give birth to the child whom he has asked her to bear. “The Holy Spirit will come upon you,” he tells her, “and the power of the Most High will overshadow you” (Luke 1.35).

In the gospels, the Annunciation is the only occasion besides the Transfiguration that this word appears. The gospel writers’ use of the word draws our attention to the resonance between the story of the Annunciation to Mary and the story of the Transfiguration. Each tale reminds us that we cannot contain or confine God within man-made structures. When God shows up, God often appears in and through people: God goes not for architecture but for anatomy. Or, rather, God makes architecture of our anatomy: God seeks to make of us a dwelling, a habitation for the holy.

This business of being host to the divine is no easy thing, God (literally) knows. So it’s interesting that the soon-to-be-mother Mary and the flat-on-their-faces disciples each receive precisely the same assurance: Do not be afraid. And each goes on their way, carrying something they had not previously known.

In the absence of being able to build physical dwellings, the disciples would have wanted, I suspect, to construct a story about their mountaintop experience: a container of words, at least, that would help them hold and convey what had happened to Jesus and to themselves. Perhaps anticipating this, Jesus enjoins them not to tell what has transpired until after his resurrection. It’s one of the only times that Jesus, a man of action, urges them to wait. This is not for revealing, he tells them; this is for you to carry within you, to ponder, to conceal until the fullness of time.

Perhaps like Mary with the child in her womb.

It was important that Peter, James, and John have that mountaintop experience. It wasn’t important for them to tell the story, not yet; that wasn’t the point of their outing. But the experience would work on them, shape them, and continue to transform and perhaps even transfigure them. The knowledge they carried would alter every future encounter: with Jesus, with their fellow disciples, and with those to whom they ministered.

The story of the Transfiguration calls me to remember that there are times for revealing and times for concealing. There are seasons to tell our story. And there are seasons to hold the story within us so that we can absorb it, reflect on it, and let it (and us) grow into a form that will foster the telling.

As a writer and artist and preacher, I don’t claim to handle that line between revelation and concealment with consistent finesse. But I’ve figured out that one of the core questions in discerning whether to share an experience is this: Whom does the story serve? Does my telling it help you reflect on your life and how God is stirring within it? Or does it merely provide information I think you should know about my own life because I hope it will impress you and induce a response that serves me more than it does you?

How do you discern what and where to share about your life? Whom do your stories serve? Do you have a story of transformation that could help someone else? Is it time to tell it? Is there work that God still needs to do within you so that you can tell the story in the way it needs telling? Whether revealing or concealing, how are you continuing to become a dwelling for the presence of the God who transforms us?

Blessings to you in these threshold days.

[To use the image “Transfiguration,” 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, Epiphany, Gospel of Mark, lectionary, sacred time, writing | 10 Comments »

The Medium and the Message

February 10, 2009


Testimony © Jan L. Richardson

Reading from the Gospels, Epiphany 6, Year B: Mark 1.40-45

One of the aspects that most engages me about the new book I’m working on (a book of prayer and reflection that draws on the lives of women from the Judeo-Christian tradition) is getting to meet the women who show up along the way. Drawing as I do from several thousand years of history, I encounter these women primarily in fragments they have left behind. Stories, scriptural references, letters, prayers, poetry, visionary literature, journals, biographies, artwork, and more: the sacred texts of these women’s lives take a multitude of forms. Often working amid forces that sought to constrain and circumscribe them, women continually stun me with the persistence and creativity by which they embodied and passed down the Word from generation to generation.

In doing some research recently, I met a woman whose work is stoking my imagination. Born in the southern United States in 1837, Harriet Powers grew up in slavery and spent much of her life near Athens, Georgia. We know a scant handful of facts about her life. She had children, she was emancipated, she and her husband purchased a farm, she worked as a seamstress. We know about her primarily because of two of her stitched creations that survived: a pair of quilts.

Known as Bible quilts, Powers’s creations captivate with their style and with the stories they tell. Most often using the technique of appliqué, and perhaps drawing on the long tradition of appliqué that came from Benin (once known as Dahomey) in West Africa, Powers stitched her quilts with bold, colorful figures of humans, animals, and celestial bodies: sun, moon, stars. Frame by frame, her quilts tell stories that Powers absorbed, pondered, and reconstructed in an intensely personal and artful fashion. Not only did she include biblical stories such as Adam and Eve, Jonah and the Really Big Fish, the crucifixion of Jesus, and John’s vision of the angels with their trumpets and vials; Powers also stitched in local legends and references to astronomical and climatological events that she had heard of or experienced. Her stitched stories included “The independent hog that ran 500 miles from GA to VA,” “the falling of the stars on November 13, 1833,” and “a man frozen at his jug of liquor” on Cold Thursday in 1895. (See the quilts, and a photograph of Harriet Powers, in a brief bio here.)

We know some of Powers’s thoughts about her work through several people who recorded her reflections. Describing her first Bible quilt, now in the Smithsonian Institution (her second quilt resides in the collection of The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston), Powers said it was “a Sermon in Patchwork,” and that she desired to “preach the gospel in patchwork, to show my Lord my humility…”

As experts have pointed out, Powers’s quilts are not the size of typical bed covers; they are significantly wider than they are long. When one takes that together with Powers’s own words about her work, it becomes tantalizing to consider the possibility that she created them primarily as a form of proclamation. With the vibrant vocabulary she had at hand, she bore testimony to the Word who had taken flesh in her own life.

We saw this impulse toward vernacular proclamation in Peter’s mother-in-law last week, who responded and testified to Jesus’ gift in the only way she knew how: the vocabulary of a meal. This week we see the impulse toward testimony in the form of a man who finds healing in the presence and in the touch of Jesus. In this Sunday’s gospel reading, Mark tells us of a man whom Jesus releases from leprosy. Jesus attempts to confine the man’s response. “See that you say nothing to anyone,” he tells the one whom he has healed; “but go, show yourself to the priest, and offer for your cleansing what Moses commanded, as a testimony [Greek marturion, which also means witness] to them.” The man, however, cannot contain himself. His testimony spills over the boundaries that Jesus has set. Mark tells us that the man “went out and began to proclaim [Gk. kerusso, also translated as to make known, to preach] it freely, and to spread the word, so that Jesus could no longer go into a town openly, but stayed out in the country; and people came to him from every quarter.”

Like Harriet Powers, like Peter’s mother-in-law, this healed man offers his testimony with the only vocabulary he has: in this case, his own body, his own flesh, healed and made whole. In this man, the medium is the message. His body proclaims everything he knows about Jesus. Voice lifted up, arms flung wide, he is an open book, a gospel: the good news is embedded in his body, a living testament to the incarnate God who tangles Godself up in the business of our bodies.

Freed from the bondage of slavery, Harriet Powers offered her testimony stitch by artful stitch. Released from the imprisonment of illness, Peter’s mother-in-law gave her testimony through ministering to Jesus and his companions at the table. Set loose from the captivity of leprosy, the healed man proclaimed his testimony with every fiber of his flesh. Each with their own medium, they did what lay in their power to do.

How about us? How do we offer our testimony about the one who has freed us? What medium do we have at hand to proclaim the news of how Christ has worked, and works still, to release all people from every form of captivity and bondage? What is the unique vocabulary that God has given to you to articulate how God takes shape in your life? How willing are you to use that vocabulary in ways that only you can express?

In every word, with every gesture, by every art, through every means, may we be a living gospel, for the life of the world. Blessings.

[Harriet Powers’s “Sermon in Patchwork” quotation is from Harriet Powers’s Bible Quilts by Regenia A. Perry. See also Stitching Stars: The Story Quilts of Harriet Powers by Mary E. Lyons.]

[To use the “Testimony” 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 | 4 Comments »

The Domestic God

February 4, 2009


The Domestic God © Jan L. Richardson

Reading from the Gospels, Epiphany 5, Year B: Mark 1.29-39

So we had a lovely little celebration on Saint Brigid’s feast day last Sunday. I invited my sweetheart Gary and our friend Linda over for tea that afternoon. Like me, Linda is an oblate of Saint Brigid of Kildare Monastery. We three had time for a cup of jasmine tea, a slice of cappuccino cheesecake (Brigid would’ve loved cheesecake if she’d known of it), and a few strawberries before the next phase of our celebration: a conference call with a bunch of other folks from the Saint Brigid’s community. Scattered across a physical distance that stretches from California to the Dominican Republic, we joined together for a feast day liturgy that brought us close across the miles.

Then Linda and Gary and I had more cheesecake.

I don’t do a huge amount of entertaining. This owes to a combination of factors including my need for copious amounts of solitude (especially with a book deadline coming up this summer) and the fact of my wee living space, which tends to discourage the gathering of more than, say, a half dozen folks at once (and that’s if some of them sit on my futon). My cozy studio apartment has an efficiency kitchen that Gary calls my yoga kitchen, as getting something out of the tiny refrigerator that sits under the sink sometimes involves doing contortions. Since I’m not wildly domestic, my two-burners-and-a-toaster-oven arrangement suits me okay, most days.

Still, when I get my act together to invite even a friend or two over for a cup of tea or a meal, I love sharing my home and receiving the gift of a loved one’s presence in my quiet space. At times such an occasion feels like a miracle. In the cup, in the conversation: sustenance and grace.

I sometimes tend to overlook the ordinary miracles that unfold in the domestic realm. So often do I take it for granted that on a daily basis, several times a day, there will be something to fill my hunger, and that I will be able to reach for it. But this week, with Saint Brigid’s festive tea lingering with me (along with the stories of the domestic provisioning for which she was especially known, including wondrous feats involving bacon and butter and beer) and with this Sunday’s gospel lection on my mind, I’m paying particular attention to what’s going on the everyday sphere of home, looking to see where the mundane gives way to the miraculous.

This Sunday’s gospel leads us straight into a home, that of Simon (Peter) and Andrew (Matthew and Luke refer to it solely as Simon/Peter’s house). Jesus has come straight from the synagogue, where he cast out the unclean spirit of last week’s reading. Once inside the house, he learns that Simon’s mother-in-law is in bed with a fever. He goes to her, takes her by the hand, lifts her up. In his gesture of reaching toward the woman, touching her, Jesus crosses with great intention into her condition, her realm, her world.

Here we see the domestic Jesus, the intimate Jesus. Crossing from the house of worship into the home of Simon, standing at the bed of a woman whose body has been disordered by illness, Jesus conveys with his outstretched hand that there is no sphere that he does not control, no suffering that is beneath him to heal, no place where he does not desire wholeness and peace. He makes clear that his power is present in every realm, the home no less than the synagogue. He extends his healing to all, the woman in the grip of a fever no less than the man in the clutch of an unclean spirit.

There is no place, no person, unworthy of a miracle.

In response to her healing, Simon’s mother-in-law begins to serve Jesus and his companions. Where other stories of healing sometimes end with the recipient offering a verbal testimony to what Jesus has done (as we will see in next week’s gospel), this story does not ascribe any words to the woman. Whatever she may have said, if anything, the act of her serving Jesus and his companions, her ministering to them in this basic, bodily way, provides eloquent testimony in the vocabulary that she has at hand. That her act falls squarely in the realm of what society sometimes, wrongfully, denigrates as “women’s work” does not minimize its grace. Rather, it unveils the holiness present—and sometimes hidden—in the everydayness of domestic life.

In her commentary on this passage in The Women’s Bible Commentary (Carol Newsom and Sharon Ringe, eds.), Mary Ann Tolbert points out that the word denoting the woman’s action, rendered in the NRSV as serve (from the Greek root diakoneo, related to the word for deacon), is the same word used to describe what angels do for Jesus at the end of his forty days in the wilderness. The choices of some translators, however, have elevated the service of the angels over that of the woman; for instance, translating the action of the angels as “ministering” to Jesus—a more overtly sacramental act—and the woman’s action as “serving” him, which gives a subservient cast to her gift. “The author of Mark,” Tolbert observes, “by using the same word for the action of the angels and the action of the healed woman, obviously equated their level of service to Jesus. What the angels were able to do for Jesus in the wilderness, the woman whose fever has fled now does for him in her home.” Tolbert goes on to note that the door of the woman’s house “becomes the threshold for healing for all in the city who are sick.”

What Jesus later says of a woman who blesses his body with an anointing, we can say of this woman who blesses his body with her domestic gesture: she has done what lay in her power (Mark 14.8, New English Bible). Can the same be said of us? In the places in which our lives unfold, what lies in our power to do? What ordinary miracles hide out in the rhythm of our days, beckoning us to see them or to help enact them? What miracles might Christ be inviting our participation in, as a response and witness to his presence? What’s going on in your home, and how might Christ be wanting to show up within it?

Wherever you live, may Christ bless you there.

jan-linda
With Linda on Saint Brigid’s Day

[To use the “Domestic God” 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, Epiphany, Gospel of Mark, lectionary, monastic stuff | 12 Comments »

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