Archive for the ‘Gospel of John’ Category

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Lent 3: A Well-Blessed Woman

March 23, 2011


Well Blessed © Jan L. Richardson

Reading from the Gospels, Lent 3 (March 27): John 4.5-42

With this week’s Gospel passage, the lectionary continues to trace a watery way through the wilderness of Lent, calling us to be mindful of God’s provision even in the desert places. This text fairly drenches us as it draws us into the story of the Samaritan woman who meets Jesus while making her daily visit to the well—Jacob’s well, as both the narrator and the woman point out; the well established by a man who knew about meeting God in the midst of one’s journey.

The encounter between Jesus and the unnamed woman offers something of an icon of the Lenten season and the invitation it extends to us. If we give ourselves to a daily practice, if we keep taking our vessel to the source even when we feel uninspired or the well seems empty or the journey is boring, if we walk with an openness to what might be waiting for us in the repetition and rhythm of our routines, we may suddenly find ourselves swimming in the grace and love of God that goes deeper than we ever imagined.

In his Gospel, John did not record the name of this woman who became the first evangelist. The Eastern Orthodox tradition, however, filled in that gap, naming her Photini or Photina (meaning “the enlightened one” or “resplendent”) and also designating her an apostle and a saint. For more about Saint Photini, visit Suzanne Guthrie’s reflection “The Well of Love” at her lovely blog Come to the Garden.

I have lingered at the well with the Samaritan woman and Jesus on another occasion and invite you to stop by Lent 3: The Way of Water for that reflection. As you travel through this season, what are you finding in the midst of your daily rhythms and routines? Are your habits and practices drawing you closer to the sustenance you need or pulling you farther away from it? What are you thirsty for?

As you continue on your Lenten way, here is a new blessing for the next leg of your journey. Peace to you.

Blessing of the Well

If you stand
at the edge
of this blessing
and call down
into it,
you will hear
your words
return to you.

If you lean in
and listen close,
you will hear
this blessing
give the story
of your life
back to you.

Quiet your voice
quiet your judgment
quiet the way
you always tell
your story
to yourself.

Quiet all these
and you will hear
the whole of it
and the hollows of it:
the spaces
in the telling,
the gaps
where you hesitate
to go.

Sit at the rim
of this blessing.
Press your ear
to its lip,
its sides,
its curves
that were carved out
long ago
by those whose thirst
drove them deep,
those who dug
into the layers
with only their hands
and hope.

Rest yourself
beside this blessing
and you will
begin to hear
the sound of water
entering the gaps.

Still yourself
and you will feel it
rising up within you,
filling every hollow,
springing forth
anew.

[To use the “Well Blessed” image, please visit this page at janrichardsonimages.com. Your use of janrichardsonimages.com helps make the ministry of The Painted Prayerbook possible. Thank you!]

Resources for the season: Looking toward Lent

Blogging also at Sanctuary of Women during Lent…

Posted in art, Gospel of John, lectionary, Lent | 6 Comments »

Lent 2: Born of Water, Born of Spirit

March 17, 2011


Born of Water, Born of Spirit © Jan L. Richardson

Reading from the Gospels, Lent 2 (March 20): John 3.1-17

Very sorry to be posting late in the week. I am easily distracted by shiny objects, and one came in the form of an enticing project that consumed the first part of my week. More on that in another post. Amidst it all, I have had Nicodemus and his nighttime visit with Jesus much on my mind.

We are just barely into Lent, a season suffused with wilderness and desert. Yet with its imagery of water and of Spirit, this Sunday’s Gospel lection brings us a welcome reminder that God provides sustenance to us in every season.

This text from John’s Gospel invites us to eavesdrop on the visit that Nicodemus pays to Jesus shortly after Jesus clears out the temple. The fact that Jesus and Nicodemus have their conversation at night seems fitting not just because the darkness offers a measure of protection and secrecy for Nicodemus, away from the eyes of his fellow Pharisees, but because Jesus speaks here of a mystery. In response to the question that Nicodemus asks about being born anew, Jesus does not really provide a clear explanation. Yet in his words about water and Spirit, about birthing and love, Jesus offers something better than an explanation: he extends to Nicodemus, and to us, an invitation to a relationship and to a journey of transformation.

I have contemplated this nighttime passage a couple of times previously, at Lent 2: In Which We Get Goosed and Lent 4: The Serpent in the Text, and invite you to visit those reflections. I don’t have many new words to say about this text, but I did get into the studio this week to create a collage and was glad for the ways the text drew me in some new directions into the story and into my art.

I want also to wish you a blessed Saint Patrick’s Day! I have written previously about this beloved saint at Feast of Saint Patrick and invite you to stop by and especially to click on the audio player near the end of that reflection; “Patrick on the Water” is a marvelous song that my husband, Garrison Doles, wrote for a Wellspring service that we did in celebration of St. Patrick.

Speaking of Garrison, his most recent CD also includes a song inspired by this week’s Gospel. Click the player below to hear “O Nicodemus” from his CD House of Prayer:

This week offers many reminders of God’s provision and love. And so, by water and Spirit born and blessed, may you be a living sign of that love, and a blessing to those whose path you cross.

[To use the “Born of Water, Born of Spirit” image, please visit this page at janrichardsonimages.com. Your use of janrichardsonimages.com helps make the ministry of The Painted Prayerbook possible. Thank you!]

Resources for the season: Looking toward Lent

And blogging daily at Sanctuary of Women during Lent…

Posted in art, Celtic, Gospel of John, lectionary, Lent, mystery | 4 Comments »

Epiphany 2: What Are You Looking For?

January 15, 2011


Who Gave You Your Eyes? © Jan L. Richardson

Reading from the Gospels, Epiphany 2, Year A: John 1.29-42

Who gave you your eyes? asks J. Ruth Gendler in her book Notes on the Need for Beauty. “Inside this question,” she goes on to write, “are several other questions. Who taught you to see? Who taught you what to see? What not to see? What are you paying attention to? What is beautiful to you?”

I’ve been spending time seeing, lately. After last year’s extraordinary outpouring of energy, I have devoted some space, in the opening days of this new year, to filling my creative well. Resting and restoring. Absorbing. Looking. Giving my attention to what feeds my eyes, grabs my imagination, renews my vision.

This involves books, of course. One of the books I’ve been keeping company with is Leslie Geddes-Brown’s marvelous book about Angie Lewin, an English printmaker whose work first crossed my path in a Seattle bookstore several years ago. I left the shop with a fistful of her cards, just because they made my soul and my eyeballs happy. The pages of Angie Lewin: Plants and Places, just recently published (and a post-Christmas treat to myself), brim with Lewin’s remarkable wood engravings, linocuts, lithographs, and screenprints, along with her working sketches as well as photographs of some of the places that inspire her art. The book, in fact, is thematically divided into sections that take their names from these places: woodland and hedgerow, river and loch, meadow and garden.

In images and in Lewin’s own words, the book reveals some of the sources of her seeing. She tells of landscapes she has sought or stumbled upon, along with artists whose work has helped her develop her distinctive vision. The book closes with a wonderful, offbeat bibliography (with photos) of books that are among Lewin’s favorites; she comments, “Many of the artists who inspire me have also illustrated books and designed textiles and ceramics, so this list is an eclectic mix of 1940s natural history books and obscure titles collected for the artwork regardless of their subject.”

The book, which came into my hands at about the same time as Ruth Gendler’s book, reads something like an extended meditation on the question that Gendler poses: Who gave you your eyes? Together these two books have prompted me to pay closer attention to how I see, what I see, where I look, what inspires me, how my seeing might need to stretch in new directions.

And into the midst of this strolls Jesus in this Sunday’s gospel lection, where we meet two of John the Baptist’s disciples who, after hearing John speak of Jesus as the lamb of God, begin to follow after Jesus. “What are you looking for?” Jesus asks them. They answer his question with a question: “Rabbi, where are you staying?” Jesus responds to them, “Come and see.”

Come and see. In all of the gospels, this is one of the most profound and challenging invitations Jesus will extend. Jesus is not beckoning them to a superficial seeing; what he offers them will demand more than a glance or a cursory look. The Greek word translated here as see comes from horao, which can be translated as perceive, understand, recognize, experience. Jesus is calling these disciples to the kind of seeing that opens a door, a seeing that draws us into a journey that will change us in ways we cannot know or imagine at the outset.

During Advent I wrote about getting stuck in my studio (“The Luminous Night”), and how getting stuck always seems to mean that a shift is brewing in my artwork. I’m in the early days yet of that shift, not clear what it means, but am feeling more excited than panicked about it. I know the shift is an invitation to a deeper seeing, a call both to extend my range of vision outward—to look beyond my usual lines of sight—as well as inward, to tunnel into layers of soul and guts and heart and see what—and who—is there. Lewin and Gendler’s books are good companions in these days; they not only feed my eyes and imagination but have also helped propel me into the studio, where I’ve begun to experiment with new colors and follow some different lines. Who knows where it will lead? The mystery and the risk are the price, and the gift, of learning to see—of being given our eyes, again and again and again.

What are you looking for? Jesus asks. Like that duo of disciples, I want to know where he is staying, where he is dwelling; I want to find where Christ makes his home. Come and see, he says. And in my studio, in my home, in my marriage, in my friendships, he keeps showing up; in the communities I’m part of, in the things I wrestle with, in the strangers who cross my path, in the questions and dreams and doorways that open onto places I could never have predicted, Christ lies in wait. Inviting me, beckoning me, challenging me to open my eyes wide, and wider still.

What are you looking for in these days?

Blessing

May God,
who comes to us
in the things of this world,
bless your eyes
and be in your seeing.

May Christ,
who looks upon you
with deepest love,
bless your eyes
and widen your gaze.

May the Spirit,
who perceives what is
and what may yet be,
bless your eyes
and sharpen your vision.

May the Sacred Three
bless your eyes
and cause you to see.

[The blessing is from In the Sanctuary of Women © Jan L. Richardson. For a previous reflection on this lectionary reading, visit Epiphany 2: Come and See.]

[To use the “Who Gave You Your Eyes?” 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 John, lectionary, mystery | 6 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 »

The Gastronomical Jesus

July 27, 2009

blog-welcome-table2
The Welcome Table © Jan L. Richardson

Reading from the Gospels, Year B, Proper 13/Ordinary 18/Pentecost +9: John 6.24-35

Following up on last week’s reading, the gospel lection for this Sunday offers us another image of provision and plenitude that come through Christ. Last week we saw him turn a couple of fish and five loaves of bread into a feast for the masses; this week he talks about his own being as bread: bread of God, bread of heaven, bread of life.

In the wake of last week’s stunning feeding, John tells us that the crowd dogs Jesus’ trail, with the air of people looking for seconds. When they catch up with him, Jesus tells them they are looking for him “not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves. Do not work for the food that perishes,” he cautions them, “but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you.”

Jesus is clear in calling them to discern the difference between what fills the belly and what fills the soul. At the same time, he well understands the ways that the hungers of the body and the hungers of the soul intertwine, and how both are at play when it comes to food. This is, after all, the man who so loved to share a meal—with all sorts of companions—that his critics called him “a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners” (Luke 7.34). When he wants to convey the essence of who he really is, in word and in action, it is to food, to the gifts of the earth, that Jesus turns. Wheat. Bread. Wine. In his hands, food is more than food; it is an enduring symbol of, and gift from, the one who offers his very being to meet our deepest hunger and our keenest thirst. Yet it is food nonetheless.

The famed food writer M.F.K. Fisher offers a passage that captures the ways that hungers of body and soul, and the feeding of them, are bound together. In the introduction to her book The Gastronomical Me, first published in 1943, she writes,

People ask me: Why do you write about food, and eating and drinking? Why don’t you write about the struggle for power and security, and about love, the way others do?

They ask it accusingly, as if I were somehow gross, unfaithful to the honor of my craft.

The easiest answer is to say that, like most other humans, I am hungry. But there is more than that. It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it…and then the warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied…and it is all one.

I tell about myself, and how I ate bread on a lasting hillside, or drank red wine in a room now blown to bits, and it happens without my willing it that I am telling too about the people with me then, and their other deeper needs for love and happiness.

There is food in the bowl, and more often than not, because of what honesty I have, there is nourishment in the heart, to feed the wilder, more insistent hungers. We must eat. If, in the face of that dread fact, we can find other nourishment and tolerance and compassion for it, we’ll be no less full of human dignity.

There is a communion of more than our bodies when bread is broken and wine drunk. And that is my answer, when people ask me: Why do you write about hunger, and not wars or love?

I find myself thinking, too, of Simone Weil, who wrote, in her book Waiting for God, “The danger is not lest the soul should doubt whether there is any bread, but lest, by a lie, it should persuade itself that it is not hungry.”

What are you hungry for these days? What does your relationship with food have to say about your relationship with God—and vice versa? Are there meals that hold memories of connection and communion? Do you have habits of eating, or not eating, that reveal a soul-hunger that needs God’s healing?

May the Bread of Life, who knew the pleasures of the table, feed you well in these days. Blessings.

P.S. Deep thanks to those offering prayers and blessings as I work to finish writing my book. Know that I am tremendously grateful for every good thought and prayer that comes my way; they are manna indeed on this intense journey!

[To use this image, please visit this page at janrichardsonimages.com. For a print, visit Color Prints at janrichardson.com. Thanks!]

Posted in art, books, food, Gospel of John, lectionary, Ordinary Time | 3 Comments »

One Fish, Two Fish

July 20, 2009

blog2008-07-281
A Gracious Plenty © Jan L. Richardson

Reading from the Gospels, Year B, Proper 12/Ordinary 17/Pentecost +8: John 6.1-21

For folks just tuning in, I want to mention that I’m mostly (though not entirely, as it’s turned out) taking a break from offering lectionary reflections this summer, as I’m up to my eyeballs working on a new book that’s due next month. Finishing a book in the midst of a hot and rainy Florida summer is proving quite a feat of endurance! Prayers are very, very welcome as I persist with the pages. Deadline pressures aside, I am glad to be so immersed in the making of a new book.

Every book seems to require and invite something different of me, and that’s certainly been the case with this one. One of the things I’ve especially felt a need to do has been to invite some folks to be in prayer for and with me. Writing is such solitary work that I sometimes forget that there are ways I can invite people into the process. In recent weeks I’ve become more intentional about doing this. The responses have been wondrous and heartening. Folks have offered not only prayers and blessings but also some tangible reminders of their presence in my life. My writing nook now holds such gifts as a prayer flag that artist friends painted for me, a string of prayer beads made by a friend who attached a St. Brigid’s cross of green marble from Connemara, a photo of my seminary girlfriends whom I gather with over Labor Day weekend every year, a buckeye (for luck) from a friend in Kentucky, a stone carved with the word “Presence,” and cards with wonderful words of support and blessing. My writer’s soul is feeling well fed.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about provision—how I seek it, how I offer it. Recognizing what I need can be a real challenge sometimes—and asking for it, even more so. Yet I’ve learned that in order to provide for others, in order to be a blessing to others, I have to discern what provision I need for my own self, and to seek it out. Though sometimes it comes unbidden, which is always a wondrous gift of grace, I find that it’s more likely to show up when I remember to invite it.

This Sunday’s gospel lesson about the feeding of the five thousand offers good food for thought as I continue to ponder what I need, what I’m hungry for, and what sustenance will carry me through these days, that I may in turn participate, like the disciples, in meeting people at the point of their own hunger.

I wrote a reflection on Matthew’s version of this miraculous feeding last year; I invite you to visit it by clicking this link: A Gracious Plenty.

This Sunday’s lection from John also includes a story of Jesus’ walking on the water. If you’re looking for some artwork to accompany this portion of the passage, I invite you to visit several earlier collages that I created for watery themes, including Matthew’s version of Jesus and Peter walking on the water (first image below). Clicking on each image below will take you to that image’s page at janrichardsonimages.com. Clicking the titles below will take you to the blog reflection where the collage originally appeared.

In these days, may we know and ask for the provision we need, that we may share in offering sustenance to others. Blessings to you!

blog2008-08-03

Night Passage

Lent 2: In Which We Get Goosed

blog2008-02-20

Lent 3: The Way of Water

blog-2009-01-07

Epiphany 1: Take Me to the River

Posted in art, Gospel of John, lectionary, Ordinary Time, writing | 8 Comments »

Easter 2: The Secret Room

April 13, 2009

blog-thesecretroomImage: The Secret Room © Jan Richardson

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

In his book The Art of Pilgrimage, Phil Cousineau writes that in every pilgrimage, there is a secret room, a place along the path that gives us insight into the deep mystery of our journey. In describing this hidden room, Cousineau draws on a story that poet Donald Hall tells of friends who purchased an old farmhouse. Cousineau writes,

It was a ‘warren of small rooms,’ and once they settled in and began to furnish their new home they realized that the lay of the house made little sense. ‘Peeling off some wallpaper, they found a door that they pried open to reveal a tiny room, sealed off and hidden, goodness knows why: They found no corpses nor stolen goods.’ For Hall, the mystery of poetry to evoke powerful feelings finds its analogy here, in its ability to be sealed away from explanation, this is the place where ‘the unsayable gathers.’

And so it is on the pilgrim’s path. Everywhere you go, there is a secret room. To discover it, you must knock on walls, as the detective does in mystery houses, and listen for the echo that portends the secret passage. You must pull books off shelves to see if the library shelf swings open to reveal the hidden room.

I’ll say it again: Everywhere has a secret room. You must find your own, in a small chapel, a tiny cafe, a quiet park, the home of a new friend, the pew where the morning light strikes the rose window just so.

As a pilgrim you must find it or you will never understand the hidden reasons why you really left home.

It is the day after Easter Sunday. I savored sleeping in this morning and am now in my writer’s nook at the top of the stairs, gazing out the window as I ponder the season past. I think of the pilgrimage these forty Lenten days led me on, the twists and turns they offered, the questions and challenges they posed, the graces they beckoned me to see.

Where was the secret room?

I think of a day in the week just past, when I went with my sweetheart to the Morse Museum of American Art in Winter Park, not far from where I live. The primary draw of the Morse is its collection of works by Louis Comfort Tiffany, the artist famed for his stained glass designs. I have always liked Tiffany well enough—a poster of one of his windows accompanied me through a succession of dorm rooms and apartments in college—but in more recent years found I had a somewhat limited affinity for this kind of work. I thought it was pretty, in an ornamental fashion, but didn’t go much beyond that.

I had, however, changed as an artist since the last time I had walked through the museum’s doors, had begun to work in ways that—I came to realize—altered the way that I saw Tiffany’s work. And so I found myself in front of one of his windows last week, leaning in close, pulling back, leaning in again. I was stunned by his line work, the loose style so markedly different from the stained glass designs of previous centuries. His lines captivated the part of me that had begun to work in charcoal since I’d last been to the museum, and had become fascinated with how the lay of a line—how it turns this way, then that—can convey a whole world.

And, between the lines, was the remarkable glass, so distinctive of Tiffany, who radicalized the manufacture of stained glass and turned each fragment into an art form in itself. I spent a long moment at a table that offered pieces of Tiffany glass to touch. Every piece a different texture—smooth, coarse, rippled, ridged. A fragment that so looked like flame that its coolness seemed incongruous. I ran my hand over each piece, each a living link with its maker, each an embodiment of his vision and daring, each a window onto the mysterious crucible that gives rise to art, each a threshold beckoning me deeper into my own creative path and reminding me why I set out on it in the first place.

This week’s gospel lection offers us a secret room, and, with it, an invitation to touch, to cross more deeply into Jesus’ story and our own. John tells of a room in which the disciples gather—a locked room, for fear. For secrets. And there, in their midst, Jesus appears, offering his hands and side, offering peace, offering the Holy Spirit, breathing into them (“and God breathed into his nostrils the breath of life,” John means for us to remember). But Thomas is gone, John tells us, and will not believe unless he sees. So Jesus returns a week later, slides through the shut doors of the secret room, shows himself to Thomas. “Put your finger here and see my hands,” Jesus says, as if touching and seeing are one and the same. “Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.”

History has labeled this disciple Doubting Thomas, as if his uncertainty were the most memorable thing about this follower of Jesus who, elsewhere, is the first to step up and say he is willing to die with him (John 11.1-16). Yet Jesus, as is his way, gives Thomas what he needs. In Jesus’ hands, in Jesus’ side, Thomas reaches into a secret room, a place that, though “sealed away from explanation,” as Cousineau writes, makes some kind of sense of the long pilgrimage that Thomas has undertaken with Jesus, to whom he is now able to say, “My Lord and my God!”

And you? Did the pilgrimage through Lent offer you a secret room? Somewhere along the way, did you find a place that offered, not an explanation of your path, but a window onto it, a space within it that enabled you to see it anew, and the one who called you there? Where was it, and what did you find there? How does it illuminate the way before you?

In the weeks to come, may we remember that Easter is not just a day but rather a season. May the gift and challenge of resurrection go with you, and may the path ahead be graced with secret rooms.

[To use the image “Secret Room,” please visit this page at janrichardsonimages.com. Your use of janrichardsonimages.com helps make the ministry of The Painted Prayerbook possible. Thank you!]

Posted in art, books, Easter, Gospel of John, lectionary, Lent, mystery, poetry | 8 Comments »

Lent 5: Into the Seed

March 24, 2009

Image: Into the Seed © Jan Richardson

Reading from the Gospels, Lent 5, Year B: John 12.20-33

So do you remember that kerfuffle back in the 90s when Mattel brought out a new Barbie doll called Teen Speak Barbie? The Barbies were programmed to say what the company considered typical adolescent girl phrases. Some of the dolls were heard to utter, “Math class is tough!” A protest ensued, and Mattel excised that phrase. The story still circulates, with the troublesome phrase often (mis)quoted as “Math is hard!”

At this point in the Lenten journey, I find myself getting in touch with my Inner Barbie. Call her Ecclesiastical Barbie, perhaps, or Exegetical Barbie. (Ooooh, can’t you see her now, complete with the Barbie Dream Church and Deacon Ken?) These days, when someone pulls the string on my Inner Barbie, she’s likely to say, “Lent is tough!” or “These lections are hard!”

The scripture passages that this season presents to us are intense, dense, and complex. They are laden with metaphor and meaning, swirl with constellations of symbols and images, and shimmer with vivid emotion and crucial teaching. These texts challenge us to look with honesty at our lives, they confront us with our attachments, and—in a phrase I recently encountered—they urge us to sit with our own mirrors.

Lent is not for sissies.

In these past few weeks, we have traveled with Jesus into the wilderness, listened to his challenge to discern between the things of heaven and the things of earth, witnessed his outraged and outrageous cleansing of the temple, and overheard him liken himself to the serpent that Moses raised in the wilderness. Now he comes along, in this week’s gospel reading, speaking of grain and dying, losing one’s life and keeping it, hating and loving. We hear a thundering voice from heaven speaking of glory, and Jesus talking of being raised up from the earth.

The import of these Lenten texts is all the more intense for the surety of Jesus’ violent death that looms ahead. As we walk with Jesus through these weeks, we know what we are walking toward. And so his words carry extra weight, and we bend closer to capture them, as we do with someone we know is not long for this world—but who is already beginning to see things we cannot see, and speaking a language we do not yet understand.

Unlike others loosing the tethers that have held them to this life, however, Jesus retains a passionate interest in this world. Despite any impression he may give to the contrary (“those who hate their life in this world will keep it,” he says this week), Jesus does not perceive this world, this life, merely as a prelude to heaven or as a stockyard for weeding out the blessed from the damned. He seeks, rather, to train our eyes to perceive the kingdom of heaven tucked into the midst of this very world.

Teaching us to see the kingdom requires symbol, myth, metaphor, story. It requires the visual poetry that Jesus repeatedly uses as he turns to the things of earth to describe the things of heaven: yeast, seeds, dirt, water, fish, lilies of the field, birds of the air. Again and again he employs the ephemeral as he seeks to explain what is eternal. His doing so both comforts and unsettles; taking what is familiar to us, he turns it on its head, and us as well. How will we ever come to understand such a language?

We may feel daunted at this point in the season. I do. So suffused with meaning and messages, not to mention impending murder, these passages can overwhelm with their density and intensity and with their challenge to us to hold their paradoxes and untangle their meanings. Their lines somehow intertwine with the stuff of my days, drawing me deeper into the questions they pose about what my life is really about. There is so much to discern, to sort through, to sift.

In the midst of feeling daunted, I find myself thinking of the mystic poet who asked, “What is the cure for love? More love.” The formula holds true elsewhere. The cure for mystery? More mystery. The cure for paradox? More paradox. Last week’s readings from Numbers and the gospel of John reminded us that the cure for snakebite lay in looking upon a serpent. And in such a way this season beckons us to consider that we find our cure not by shrinking from what besets and befuddles and daunts us but by looking deeper into those very places, and finding the treasure that God has placed within them.

Go into the things you shrink from, Jesus tells his hearers—and us—in this passage. Go into the questions, the mysteries, the paradoxes, the seeming contradictions. Go into the Lenten dying that is not dying after all. We work so very hard at letting go, sometimes, trying to train ourselves to release our grip on all that is not God. But what if it is not about giving up but giving in? Falling into dirt, as Jesus says here. Going where grain is supposed to go. Following the spiral within the seed that takes us deeper into the dark but also—finally, fruitfully—out of it.

The lectionary interrupts this passage before its end; Jesus’ conversation with the crowd actually extends to verse 36. After Jesus finishes his discourse, here’s what John tells us Jesus did: he hid from them. And perhaps that’s what Jesus means for us to do at this point on the Lenten path: to hide. To not be set on figuring everything out but rather to let at least some part of ourselves, for some space of time, withdraw. To cease from wrestling with the questions and mysteries and simply rest with them and give in to them. To secret our souls like a seed in the earth. To see what grows.

How is it with your soul at this point on the Lenten path? As you work with these texts, how are these texts working on you? What questions have they stirred for you in these days? How do you respond to the mysteries and paradoxes they hold? Can you rest with those questions and mysteries? What do you need?

May you fall into, rest into, a place that will tend and nourish you in these days. Blessings.

Resources for the Season: Looking toward Lent

P.S. Happy Eve of the Feast of the Annunciation! Falling on March 25, this feast celebrates the radical yes that Mary said to Gabriel when the angel beckoned her to become the mother of Christ. For some of my artwork and reflections on the Annunciation, visit Getting the Message and The Hour of Matins: Annunciation.

[To use the image “Into the Seed,” 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, Gospel of John, lectionary, Lent, mystery | 18 Comments »

Lent 4: The Serpent in the Text

March 15, 2009

Image: The Serpent in the Text © Jan Richardson

Reading from the Gospels, Lent 4, Year B: John 3.14-21

One evening a bunch of years ago, I found myself in a New Zealand coffeehouse with some friends I was traveling with. We were there with a friend whose presence in New Zealand had occasioned our trip, plus that friend’s flatmates. It was a wonderfully funky coffeehouse, and as we settled into the couches and chairs with cups in hand, I commented, “Hey, it’s just like Friends!” One of my companions commented that she’d recently read that one of the indicators of contemporary culture was the rising frequency with which we compared our lives to television shows. And this was the 90’s; so-called reality TV, with its further blurring between life onscreen and off, had barely made its appearance.

The comment didn’t cause me to stop watching Friends, but it did set me to noticing the referents I use when I tell something of my life, or hear others use in telling about theirs. Ever since that New Zealand coffeehouse evening, I’ve found myself watchful of what we hook our stories onto, and how we locate ourselves within our cultural landscape.

So I could hardly get past the way that Jesus does this from the opening sentence of the gospel lection for next Sunday. The passage begins in the midst of Jesus’ nighttime conversation with Nicodemus. “And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness,” Jesus says to Nicodemus, “so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him might have eternal life.”

Jesus, like a serpent in the wilderness? Hunh?

That’s quite the referent that Jesus inserts into their chat, a potent image that he brings into a conversation already drenched with symbolism and metaphor. Jesus and Nicodemus have been talking, after all, about being born again, with its attendant imagery of birthing, water, womb, spirit, and wind.

Being a good Pharisee, however, Nicodemus would have known the snaky reference. It comes from Numbers 21.4-9, which serves as the lection from the Hebrew Scriptures for Sunday. Frankly, it’s a right bizarre tale, and steeped in a few layers of magical lore. In it, we find the people of Israel in the wilderness. They have been delivered from their captivity. And they are complaining. “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt,” they cry to Moses, “to die in the wilderness? For there is no food and no water, and we detest this miserable food.”

On a similar occasion in the book of Exodus, God hears the complaints of the people and rains down manna upon them.

This time, God sends fiery serpents. Or, depending on the translation of the Hebrew word seraphim, God sends poisonous serpents. Or winged serpents.

Whatever they are, they aren’t good.

And the serpents bite the people.

And many of the people die.

And the people are very, very sorry.

They come to Moses, full of remorse for being grumbly, and they beg him to pray to God to take the serpents away. Moses prays. In a curious move, God does not take the serpents away. Instead God sends a strange remedy. God tells Moses to make a fiery serpent—or a poisonous serpent, or a winged serpent; whatever it is, Moses makes one out of bronze. As God has told Moses, whenever a serpent bit someone, that person could look at the bronze serpent and live.

Did I mention it’s a strange tale? It’s a little tempting to wade a bit further into the mythological waters that gave rise to this piece of the story. For now, however, let’s just say that part of its point is this: the people are saved by seeing. When the fiery/poisonous/winged serpents come among them, those who succumb to snakebite know where to turn their attention, and thereby live.

In his conversation with Nicodemus, Jesus accrues this meaning to himself. Look on me and live, he says. Turn your gaze, your attention, your focus to me, and you will be saved by the hand of the God who sent me, not for the punishment of the world but for the utter love of it.

The imagery that Jesus offers Nicodemus could hardly be more potent in our own time. Amid the perils of the present, amid the terrors and dangers, God in the main chooses not to remove the hazards from us but continues to provide a remedy for us. In the person of Jesus, God put on flesh and came not only to walk among the dangers with us but also to help make a way through them.

Jesus’ words in this passage prompt me to ponder, where am I turning my attention these days? How do I seek to do what Jesus invited Nicodemus to do: to turn my attention, to turn my gaze toward him—not merely to escape punishment, but as my response to the love that impelled God to send us Christ?

Those questions alone would be enough to carry me through the rest of Lent, a season designed to help us discern what we’re giving our attention to. Yet Jesus’ reference to the snaky tale in Numbers prompts me to ponder, too, where I’m turning not only my attention but also my imagination these days. The presence of the serpent in the text beckons us to attend to the mythic matrix out of which the story of Jesus arises.

If we know Jesus only from reading the New Testament, we’re missing entire layers of meaning. The early hearers of the Jesus story—those who were familiar with the Hebrew scriptures—encountered and understood him in the context of the symbols, images, and metaphors upon which he drew. As we find in next Sunday’s text, those images can take us down some strange paths, to be sure. But they tug at and feed our imagination in crucial ways, telling us what words alone cannot convey.

The metaphors, images, and symbols that slither through our sacred texts beckon us also to consider what we steep our imaginations in—not only within the scriptures but also beyond them. In a culture in which our conversational referents tend to fit within a fairly narrow patch of common ground that’s dominated largely by television and other electronic media, how do we feed our imaginations—and our souls—with the things that will bring richness and depth?

I’m not going to give up the occasional episode of Friends, or the other shows that provide a break for a brain that spends probably way too much time pondering and processing and thinking about stuff. In these Lenten days, though, I’m going to give some thought to where I’m turning my attention and imagination, and to how Jesus calls me not only to turn them toward him, but also to the widespread wonders in which he can be found.

Where are you turning your gaze these days? What are you steeping your imagination in? What are you giving your eyeballs, your mind, your soul to? Stories, images, metaphors, poetry, art: what is the culture that you are creating and participating in, or long to be? How does this help you encounter the incarnate presence of the God who came solely for love of you?

A blessing upon your eyes this week, that you will find wonders along the way.

[To use the image “The Serpent in the Text,” please visit this page at janrichardsonimages.com. Your use of janrichardsonimages.com helps make the ministry of The Painted Prayerbook possible. Thank you!]

Resources for the Season: Looking toward Lent

Posted in art, Gospel of John, lectionary, Lent | 6 Comments »

Lent 3: The Temple in His Bones

March 11, 2009

Image: The Temple in His Bones © Jan Richardson

Reading from the Gospels, Lent 3, Year B: John 2.13-22

On my first afternoon in Rome a few years ago, I climbed on the back of my friend Eric’s motorcycle and set off with him to begin my acquaintance with the Eternal City. A few minutes down the road, he told me to close my eyes. When we came to a stop and I opened them, my field of vision was filled with one of the most impressive sights in a city of impressive sights: the Pantheon. Built in the second century AD, the Pantheon replaced the original Pantheon that Marcus Agrippa constructed fewer than three decades before the birth of Christ. A temple dedicated to “all the gods” (hence its name), the Pantheon became a church in the seventh century when Pope Boniface IV consecrated it as the Church of Santa Maria ad Martyres. It’s said that at the moment of the consecration, all the spirits inhabiting the former temple escaped through the oculus—the hole in the Pantheon’s remarkable dome that leaves it perpetually open to the heavens.

As churches go, it’s hard to top the Pantheon for its physical beauty and power. It was perhaps risky to see it on my first day, so high did it set the bar for the rest of my trip. Yet Rome, of course, brims with delights for the eyes, and the next two weeks offered plenty of stunning visual fare. Amid the calculated grandeur, I found that it was the details that charmed me: the intricate pattern of a Cosmatesque marble floor, the shimmer of light on a centuries-old mosaic, the inscribed marble fragments that had been unearthed and plastered to the walls. It was staggering to contemplate the countless hours and years that went into the construction of these spaces, or to fathom the vast wells of talent and skill that generations of architects, artisans, and laborers lavished upon them.

The Roman churches that most linger in my memory are those that possessed a clear congruence between the physical environment and its purpose—those places of worship that were not primarily tourist destinations but true sanctuaries. I felt this congruence keenly, for instance, in the Church of Santa Maria in Trastevere. The space intrigued me from my first moments in it, on the first evening of my trip. I would return several times, learning along the way that one of the many ways the church serves the surrounding Trastevere neighborhood is as a place of prayer for the Community of Sant’Egidio, a lay movement of people who work for reconciliation, peace, solidarity with the poor, and hospitality to pilgrims.

On the day that Jesus sweeps into the temple, it’s this kind of congruence that is pressing on his mind. We don’t know precisely what has him so riled up; after all, particularly with Passover drawing near, there are transactions that need to take place in the temple. As Jesus enters, he sees those who are attending to the business involved in the necessary ritual sacrifices, but he seems to feel it has become simply that: a business. Commercial transaction has overtaken divine interaction. Time for a clearing out, a return to congruence between form and function, to the integrity of the purpose for which the temple was created: to serve as a place of meeting between God and God’s people.

To those who challenge his turning over of the temple, Jesus makes a remarkable claim: that he himself is the temple. “Destroy this temple,” he says to them, “and in three days I will raise it up.” His claim stuns his listeners, who know that the sacred space in which they are standing—the Second Temple, which was in the midst of a massive renovation and expansion started by Herod the Great—has been under construction for forty-six years. John clues us in on the secret that the disciples will later recall: “He was speaking of the temple of his body.”

This scene underscores a particular concern that John carries throughout his gospel: to present Jesus as one who takes into himself, into his own body and being, the purpose of the temple. Richard B. Hays writes that in making the link between Jesus’ body and the temple, this passage provides “a key for much that follows” in John’s gospel. “Jesus now takes over the Temple’s function,” Hays observes, “as a place of mediation between God and human beings.” Hays goes on to point out how Jesus’ sometimes enigmatic sayings about himself in John’s gospel—for instance, “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me, and let the one who believes in me drink” and “I am the light of the world”—are references to religious festivals whose symbolism Jesus takes into himself.

Perhaps, then, it all comes down to architecture. The decades of work that have gone into the physical place of worship, the skill of the artisans, the labors of the workers; the role of the temple as a locus of sacrifice, of celebration, of identity as a community; the power and beauty of the holy place: Jesus says, I am this. Jesus carries the temple in his bones. Within the space of his own body that will die, that will rise, that he will offer to us, a living liturgy unfolds.

We will yet see the ways that Jesus uses his body to evoke and provoke, how he will offer his body with all its significations and possibilities as a habitation, a place of meeting, a site of worship. Calling his disciples, at the Last Supper, to abide in him; opening his body on the cross; re-forming his flesh in the resurrection; offering his wounds to Thomas like a portal, a passageway: Jesus presents a body that is radically physical yet also wildly multivalent in its meanings.

The wonder and the mystery of this gospel lection, and of Jesus’ life, lie not only in how he gives his body as a sacred space but also in how he calls us to be his body in this world. Christ’s deep desire, so evident on that day in the temple, is that we pursue the congruence he embodied in himself: that as his body, as his living temple in the world, we take on the forms that will most clearly welcome and mediate his presence. In our bodies, in our lives, in our communities; by our hospitality, by our witness, by our life of prayer: Christ calls us to be a place of meeting between God and God’s people, a living sanctuary for the healing of the world.

The season of Lent beckons us to consider, are there things we need to clear out in order to have the congruence to which Christ invites us? Who helps you recognize what you need to let go of in order to be more present to the God who seeks a sanctuary in you? How is it with your body—your own flesh in which Christ dwells, and the community with which you seek to be the body of Christ in the world? What kind of community do you long for—do you have that? What would it take to find or create it?

In these Lenten days, may we be a place of hospitality to all that is holy. Blessings.

[Richard B. Hays quote from his chapter “The canonical matrix of the gospels” in The Cambridge Companion to the Gospels, ed. Stephen C. Barton.]

Resources for the Season: Looking toward Lent

[To use the image “The Temple in His Bones,” 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, Gospel of John, lectionary, Lent, medieval | 13 Comments »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »