Archive for the ‘Gospel of Matthew’ Category

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The Thin Man

August 19, 2008


A Thin Place © Jan L. Richardson

Reading from the Gospels, Year A, Proper 16/Ordinary 21/Pentecost +10: Matthew 16.13-20

When I was in seminary, one of my professors threatened each year to give a Rock of Ages award to the student who made it through their theological education the least changed. We didn’t have such folks in abundance, but they were evident in each class: those who were present solely because their church or denomination required that they have a seminary degree. Sticking it out until they had that parchment in hand, these classmates went through the motions of education but remained impervious to the transformation that it offered.

Though Jesus refers to Peter as a rock in this week’s gospel lection, I suspect that Peter would have eluded such an award as my seminary professor threatened to give. Matthew tells us that Jesus and the disciples visit Caesarea Philippi, where Jesus, after asking his companions who others say that he is, then turns the question on them: “But who do you say I am?” Simon Peter, in a dazzling moment of clarity and insight, tells Jesus, “You are the Messiah, the son of the living God.”

Jesus is elated by Peter’s insight, and he begins to lay a blessing on him. He opens with calling him Simon, harking back to his follower’s former name. Jesus goes on to tell him, “You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it.” Jesus’ naming of Peter plays on the Greek word for rock, petra; his name is sometimes translated as Cephas, from kepha, the Aramaic word for rock.

Peter, however, is a rock of a different sort. Unlike the folks who were candidates for my professor’s Rock of Ages award, Peter is not impervious to change. He exhibits his own points of resistance, to be sure, but he also harbors a fundamental openness to the transformation that Jesus offers. Jesus recognizes that Peter is still in formation. This disciple will yet do things that will provoke Jesus’ ire and disappointment. The human and earthy still run deep in Peter. Yet Jesus glimpses strength within him, and an openness that he knows will become a habitation for the holy.

Pondering this Petrine passage, I find myself thinking of Jacob in the wilderness. Genesis 28 describes how Jacob, having fled for his life, finds himself in a place between the home he has known and the life that is yet ahead of him. As darkness falls in that place, Jacob settles down to rest, laying his head upon a stone. During the night, he dreams of a ladder stretched between earth and heaven, with angels ascending and descending the ladder. He becomes aware of God standing beside him, offering words of promise and sustenance. Waking, Jacob cries, “Surely the Lord is in this place—and I did not know it!” He takes the stone he had used for a pillow, sets it up as a pillar, and pours oil on top of it. Jacob renames the place Bethel: House of God.

Jacob’s stone marks that spot as a thin place, to borrow a notion from Celtic traditions. Celtic folk have long held that in the physical landscape and in the turning of the year, there are places where the veil between worlds becomes thin. It’s not that God is somehow more present in those places, as if God could be more there than elsewhere; rather, something in those places and times invites us to be more present to the God who is always with us. We open, and we see.

Jesus names Peter the rock. In doing so, Jesus signifies that he both recognizes what is within Peter and is also calling forth what has yet to take form in him. In an action that echoes Jacob’s sacramental gesture, Jesus pours a blessing like oil upon Peter. After telling Peter that he will build his church—a house of God—upon him, Jesus goes on to say, “I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” His words have the tone of incantation, of ceremony, of one who is initiating another into a sacred role. And, in fact, “binding and loosing” are words that come from the rabbinic tradition; they refer to what happens when a question arises about whether an action may be permitted. Steeped in the law, the rabbis had the power to determine which actions would be forbidden (bound) and which would be allowed (loosed). Jesus confers power upon Peter, an authority so profound that what Peter does will have import in both heaven and earth.

Like Jacob who recognized the presence of God in that in-between place, Peter knows Jesus in an instant of brilliant clarity. Where Jacob turned his stone into a sacrament and renamed that place the House of God, Jesus marks this moment by blessing his disciple and renaming him as a rock who will become a dwelling place for God. Peter himself becomes a thin place; within him meet the things of heaven and the things of earth. What Jacob knew, Jesus knew: this is a place upon which to build something holy.

And so I am asking myself this week, what is solid within me? What do I contain that would serve as the ground for a holy place, a sanctuary? How do I allow sacred ground to inhabit me even as I remain open to transformation, to change, to renovation and renewal? How does this happen for you? What thin place might God be seeking to create in the midst of your life and your own being? What might we need to let go of in order to make room for such a space?

May you recognize the holy in your midst this week, and be a place for it to dwell.

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

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The Feast Beneath

August 15, 2008


The Feast Beneath © Jan L. Richardson

It took a couple of days to get here, but I’ve made my way back from my sojourn at The Grünewald Guild. My travels home included hitching a ride from the Guild with a friend who lives near Seattle. En route we stopped by her sister’s home and had a mid-afternoon meal that involved homemade tortillas and salsa, courtesy of her in-laws who were visiting from Texas, yum. Midway through the meal we were joined by a gaggle of girls—my friend’s nieces and their cohorts. One of the girls was sporting a decorative Band-Aid, and another commented on how the Band-Aid had migrated from her lower arm to her upper arm. Another girl said the Band-aid was for an imaginary wound. The girl next to me, all of ten years old, dryly observed, “Yeah, those things hurt.”

I’m not sure when it happened, probably because it evolved so slowly, but somewhere in my adulthood I began to discern that motherhood was not part of my calling in life. When it comes to children, I’ve worked instead to cultivate being The Odd Aunt, and I am navigating the delights and challenges that come in sharing a life with a man who has a teenage son. Still, I get a twinge once in a while, like when I sat at that table of splendid girls on my way home from the Guild, and I wonder for a moment what the path of parenthood might have been like.

Had I become a mother, I hope I would have shared some of the qualities of the one we meet in this week’s gospel lection, Matthew 15.(10-20), 21-28. This Canaanite woman, whose name has gone unrecorded, offers an intriguing contrast to last week’s gospel reading. Where the storm-tossed disciples found it difficult to recognize and know Jesus, the Canaanite mother is replete with the gift of sight. Like so many women in the gospels, she recognizes Jesus, sees him, knows full well what he can do.

This Canaanite mother calls upon Jesus in his role as the Son of David to help her daughter, whom she says is tormented by a demon. For all her fervor, Jesus meets her shouting with silence. She has stirred up the disciples, however. As on previous occasions, they petition Jesus to send away someone who is making them uncomfortable. Yet unlike the instances involving children and hungry people, where Jesus stepped in to take action, he assumes here a stance of indifference. When Jesus finally speaks, it is to claim that he has been sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.

It is not enough for this desperate mother. She kneels before him, saying simply, “Lord, help me.”

To the woman’s plea, Jesus responds, “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” In the absence of hearing Jesus’ inflection and seeing his face, it’s difficult to discern how he intends these words. Is he weary by this point and short of temper? Is his human side feeling overwhelmed by the work that yet remains for him within the house of Israel, let alone the world beyond this house? Or does he know full well what this mother is made of, and chooses to use this as a teaching moment and an opportunity to match wits with a worthy opponent?

Whatever Jesus’ intent, it’s hard to avoid hearing the insult that lurks within his words. The woman, however, refuses to be dissuaded. Rather than hearing Jesus’ response as a barrier, she uses it as a doorway.

The woman is kneeling before Jesus, but she is not merely a supplicant. She is poised to wrestle a blessing from him. She is in a stance designed to disarm Jesus, to sweep him from his feet. She is in a posture from which she can look for crumbs and, from them, make a feast. She knows there’s one here somewhere for her and for her daughter.

She knows that Jesus knows this, too. She knows that Jesus carries abundance with him. It hasn’t been so long since he presided at the feeding of more than five thousand women, children, and men. She can smell the feast on him, the scent of the crumbs that cling to him.

“Yes, Lord,” the Canaanite woman responds to Jesus, “yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.”

This woman knows there is a whole other world beneath the table. She recognizes that beyond the tabletop of privilege, there is yet a place for her and the daughter whom she is desperate to save. Taking what lies beneath the table, the woman makes a feast. And in that place, the unnamed woman becomes a celebrant. She leaves with the blessing she has wrestled from Jesus; she leaves with a healing for her daughter.

Though I may not be a mother, the encounter between the Canaanite woman and Jesus challenges me to ponder what I’m feeling fierce about in my own life, and to what lengths I’m willing to go in order to save and preserve what lies within my care. How about you? What are you feeling fierce about in your own life? For what are you willing to cry out and challenge Jesus? Do you believe he can stretch himself to help you? What is the blessing that you need to wrestle from him?

Peace to you as you search for what will sustain you and all that is within your care.

[To use the “Feast Beneath” 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, food, Gospel of Matthew, lectionary, Ordinary Time | 4 Comments »

Night Passage

August 5, 2008


Night Passage © Jan L. Richardson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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A Gracious Plenty

July 30, 2008

Image: A Gracious Plenty © Jan Richardson

Reading from the Gospels, Year A, Proper 13/Ordinary 18/Pentecost +12: Matthew 14.13-21

Years ago, when I moved from a position as a pastor in a congregation into a creative ministry well off the beaten path, it stirred lots of questions. I was based at a retreat center outside Orlando, where I served as artist-in-residence. During my first few years there, many folks—most often my clergy colleagues—would ask me, “So are you still on that sabbatical?” Though my bishop had appointed me to this specialized ministry, in which I served full time, I realized that some folks thought I was taking a break from my vocation. The question occasionally grated, but I came to see that it contained opportunities to help stretch people’s ideas about where and how ministry takes place. I learned to love responding, “No, this is my real life!”

Eleven years since moving into the form of ministry to which I feel most called, I don’t get the sabbatical question these days, but I continue to be intimately acquainted with the ways that many folks perceive the arts and other creative work to be extraneous to who we are as the people of Christ. In some quarters, art is considered to be fluff, a luxury, a needless extravagance. Or art becomes a tepid, sanitized, watered-down endeavor that misses what an astounding thing it is that the first face we see of God in the scriptures—there, at the beginning of Genesis—is of God as creator, who labors with such artful passion, imbuing each creative gesture with a wild extravagance.

Because of lingering, centuries-old prejudices about art, I still find myself fielding questions about what it is that I do, and why I do it, and just how is it ministry, again? I’m glad to have those conversations. But especially with living in a place where the art-and-faith community is comparatively small (which describes any number of places, not just mine), I often feel like my call has led me into a pretty remote spot.

I’ve been paying attention to this sense of remoteness in pondering this Sunday’s gospel lection. Matthew offers his version of how Jesus, having just heard about the death of John the Baptist at a feast of a most gruesome sort, withdraws to a deserted place by himself. The crowds find him, however, and flock to him. He cures the sick among them. When the disciples remind Jesus that the hour is growing late, and that they are in a lonely, remote spot with no concession stands at hand, and that he needs to send the people into the villages to buy food, Jesus tells the disciples to feed the people themselves. By the time Jesus and the disciples leave this remote place, a miracle of feeding has occurred, with twelve baskets left over from what began as two fish and five loaves of bread.

Perhaps like most of us, I’m accustomed to often feeling like I’m in the position of the disciples, listening to Jesus tell me to do what I think I can’t do myself, in a place that seems more remote than I might like. Pondering the text this time around, I have found myself thinking, “Please, could I maybe, this time, think of myself as being among the crowds who were fed, and found nourishment in abundance, here in this isolated spot?”

I’m feeling that way because for the past few days, I’ve been in a remarkable place called The Grünewald Guild. Nestled among the Cascade Mountains in eastern Washington State, the Guild was founded more than twenty-five years ago as a retreat center devoted to exploring the connections between art and faith. For nine weeks each summer, as well as at other times of the year, the Guild offers classes in a variety of media. Most compelling for me is the way that our creative work takes place in a rhythm of community life, with morning and evening prayers, shared meals, presentations in the evening, and conversations in the in-between places. Those who come to the Guild may not necessarily identify themselves as artists in a vocational sense (or as Christians, either; it’s a community of hospitality to anyone who wants to come). But each person comes with some particular sense of the interplay between faith and art, along with the desire to explore that interplay in their own lives and in community. In the midst of a vocation that beckons me to do a lot of explaining, the Guild is a place where I am most in my element.

It is a miracle of feeding for body and soul.

Barely four days into my stay (I’m teaching this week and staying on next week to do some writing), I have received extraordinary gifts marked by synchronicity and grace. Friends who were here earlier in the summer left me a gift card for tea at the nearby hardware store/café. I enjoyed the tea yesterday in the company of a friend, who later sang to me several wondrous songs she had written here. Another friend gave me a folded paper structure that I can use as the basis for some of my work in the Soul of the Book class that I’m teaching. Some of the gifts, like this one, are very specific to this place, and it’s difficult to briefly describe them or the ways that they provide sustenance for someone whose vocation takes me to some pretty remote places in my inner terrain.

I don’t quite know how to take it all in, these gifts that appear like manna, like living bread. There is so much abundance. When I leave here in a dozen days, I am certain I will be trailing crumbs behind me. At least twelve baskets full. Sustenance enough for the path ahead.

What are you hungry for these days? How are you being fed? In the most deserted and remote places in your soul and in your community, how have you found, or long to find, sustenance?

May God meet your deepest hungers of body and soul with extravagance and grace. And may we know how to receive—and give—such feeding.

[To use the image “A Gracious Plenty,” please visit this page at janrichardsonimages.com. Your use of janrichardsonimages.com helps support the ministry of The Painted Prayerbook. Thank you!]

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Something Old, Something New

July 23, 2008


Something Old, Something New © Jan L. Richardson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted in art, books, Gospel of Matthew, lectionary, medieval, monastic stuff, mystery, Ordinary Time, writing | Leave a Comment »

In the Weeds

July 15, 2008


In the Weeds © Jan L. Richardson

Reading from the Gospels, Proper 11/Ordinary 16/Pentecost +5: Matthew 13.24-30, 36-43

I’m lingering in Minnesota for a few days in the wake of a great retreat with the Saint Brigid’s community. As I was running some errands yesterday with my friend Mary, the founder of Saint Brigid’s, we passed some wheat fields—not a typical sight in my usual landscape. It was an interesting bit of convergence, given our gospel lection for the week. Matthew offers us a tale of wheat and weeds, with Jesus weaving these agrarian images into a parable about the kingdom of God.

Matthew lets us in on Jesus’ explanation of this parable, and it seems pretty straightforward at the surface. Jesus offers an interpretive equation in which, not surprisingly, wheat=good and weeds=bad. I’m curious, however, about how Jesus has the householder respond to the laborer who asks him whether they should gather the weeds. The householder tells him to allow the weeds and the wheat to grow together until harvest time, at which point the laborers will gather the weeds and burn them. Removing the weeds too soon would cause harm to the growing wheat.

Jesus’ parable has set me to pondering how weeds and wheat grow together in my own life. I have found myself thinking about my creative process, in particular the challenges that I experience as an artist and a writer. I’ve long been aware that part of my ongoing work is to cultivate practices that support the work. There is part of me that needs a measured rhythm of life—like orderly rows of wheat, say. Yet that orderly part of me regularly grapples with the part that needs a strand of something that’s a bit wilder, something less domesticated.

Something weedy.

I sometimes grow dismayed by what I allow to creep into my creative life: commitments that distract me, weariness, or plain old resistance to the process. Though being an artist and writer lies at the heart of who I am, I sometimes wrestle with how the work brings my inner self to the surface, confronting me with the raw, unformed stuff I carry around inside me. Some days it’s easier to let the weeds grow, as if they could provide a bit of wild shelter from the work of cultivating my interior crop.

My spiritual director has challenged me to think about the ways I see those times of distraction and discouragement, those occasions when I skirt the demands of the drafting table or the blank page in favor of something else. Where I have tended to view those times as wasteful, extraneous to what I’m supposed to be about in this world, she invites me to see them as part of the process, integral to the creative crop. There’s something about spending time among the weeds that serves to clarify my vision and sharpen my desire. Weeds don’t make for a steady diet, and eventually I get hungry for what will sustain and satisfy, and will do whatever is necessary to find my way to that sustenance. In the fullness of time, an interior apocalypse comes around: the weeds fall away, and burn in the fire that comes in times of focused creating. The longed-for crop flourishes, and feeds.

What’s growing in the landscape of your life? How do you discern the difference between the weeds and the wheat? What do you do with the weeds? How might they be part of the work of cultivating your landscape?

Blessings to you in the wild and weedy places.

[To use the “In the Weeds” 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, Gospel of Matthew, lectionary, Ordinary Time, writing | 5 Comments »

Getting Grounded

July 8, 2008


Getting Grounded © Jan L. Richardson

This week finds me packing my bags, getting ready to head to Minnesota for my always-anticipated annual retreat with fellow oblates of St. Brigid of Kildare Monastery. As usual, we’re having our gathering at a wonderful retreat house on the grounds of St. John’s Abbey, a Benedictine men’s community. Also as usual, our retreat falls over the Feast of St. Benedict (July 11), which always makes for a festive time to be hanging out with Benedictine folk. The retreat offers a near-embarrassment of Benedictine riches, in fact. In addition to having occasion to celebrate and pray with the monks and others connected with St. John’s, we’ll visit the sisters at St. Benedict’s Monastery just down the road, joining them for Vespers on the Eve of the Feast.

Throughout our retreat, we’ll also have our own rhythm of community prayer. Stepping together into the ancient rhythm of the Liturgy of the Hours, my fellow retreatants and I will keep a schedule that will include morning, noon, and evening prayer as well as compline, the nighttime prayer. Getting up for 7 AM morning prayer is a real stretch for this night owl. But entering that rhythm of prayer together for a few days, when we are otherwise a dispersed community praying in relative (if spiritually connected) solitude, is a cool thing.

Though we keep to a liturgy schedule that sets aside appointed times for prayer, the Liturgy of the Hours beckons us to a pace that is anything but task-oriented. It invites us to slow down and savor what the liturgy offers us: the Word that reveals itself in the scriptures, in the prayers, and in the silence. In her book The Cloister Walk (which she wrote during a stay at St. John’s), Kathleen Norris observes that liturgical time “is essentially poetic time, oriented toward process rather than productivity, willing to wait attentively in stillness rather than always pushing to ‘get the job done.'”

When not praying the Liturgy of the Hours, we’ll spend some of our retreat in sessions exploring this year’s theme, “Simplicity in the Monastic Tradition.” I’m delighted that one of the folks presenting a session this year will be Fr. Luke Dysinger, OSB. For years I’ve been passing around Fr. Luke’s online introduction to lectio divina, Accepting the Embrace of God: The Ancient Art of Lectio Divina, providing it as a resource on retreats and elsewhere. I particularly appreciate Fr. Luke’s discussion of what he calls lectio on life, which first got me thinking about our own lives as sacred texts—an idea that shapes much of my work these days.

With all this to look forward to, I’m intrigued that the lectionary offers us Matthew 13.1-9, 18-23 for this Sunday. The Parable of the Sower is all about the work to which both the Liturgy of the Hours and lectio divina invite us. These ancient practices each beckon us to be loiterers in the neighborhood of the Word, to hang out and dawdle with it, rather than moving through it with a briskness that assumes we know what it has to say. The liturgy and lectio both invite us to consider how we’re allowing God to cultivate us, how we are tending our interior earth as a place where the Word can take root and grow—not just for ourselves but for the life of the world.

As I head out tomorrow, I’ll be carrying those images that Jesus offers in this week’s gospel lection. I’m curious to see what earth might get moved in my soul in the coming days, what new ground God might challenge me to give. How about you? What sort of cultivation is going on in your soul these days? Is there any earth that God might be inviting you to offer? What practices are you keeping—or needing—that help you do this kind of sacred groundwork?

Me, I’m off to finish packing. Blessings to you in all your journeying.

[To use the “Getting Grounded” 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, Gospel of Matthew, lectio divina, lectionary, monastic stuff, Ordinary Time | 4 Comments »

If the Yoke Fits…

July 2, 2008


If the Yoke Fits © Jan L. Richardson

Reading from the Gospels, Year A, Proper 9/Ordinary 14/Pentecost +3: Matthew 11.16-19, 25-30

In the church that my sweetheart Gary attends, there is a young man who has a syndrome that affects his cognitive abilities. Among the challenges this poses, both for him and those around him, is that he doesn’t always make good choices for himself, and this has sometimes made his road pretty rough. At a recent worship service, in which we celebrated the ordination of one of the church’s pastors, this young man was among those who spoke. It’s sometimes difficult to follow the thread of what he’s saying, but I found myself struck when he said that the newly ordained pastor had helped him understand how God wants us to make things easier for ourselves, not harder. I commented on it to Gary afterward, how those particular words had constellated like a divine message amid his somewhat disjointed words. “Yeah,” Gary said, “I’ve learned it’s good to pay attention when he talks. That kind of stuff happens a lot with him.”

Make things easier, not harder. The words have been haunting me for weeks now. I am a creature drawn to complication. Given the choice between making the way easy and making the way difficult, I sometimes tilt toward difficulty. I’ve learned my soul often needs to have something to push against, something to forge and form it. I feel kind of like Jacob sometimes; occasionally I need a heated wrestling match with the divine, a struggle that will help me find a new name.

There’s a difference, though, between the complications and complexities that forge the soul and those that drain it. I can wax poetic about the holy disruptions that have deepened me, but I recognize, too, my capacity for choosing complications that stem from some other, less sacred impulse. There are times when I make the way difficult for myself because I’ve taken on too much, or because I’m avoiding something that needs attention, or because I’m giving too much energy to something that I don’t need to be giving that energy to. I recognize that I’m capable of manufacturing my own complications rather than waiting for the ones that come around naturally in traveling with Christ.

So this week’s Gospel lection has given me pause for thought. I’ve found myself particularly chewing on the part where Jesus urges his followers, “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you,” he continues, “and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden light.”

I have to say that it’s long been a challenge for me to buy the notion that Jesus’ yoke is easy and his burden light. I’ve seen a lot of evidence that suggests the contrary. But I wonder if much of the difficulty, heaviness, and exhaustion that we experience in ourselves and that we witness in others comes because we are making our own darn way—and making it difficult—rather than tending our connection with the one who wants to make the way for us and to work alongside us. I wonder if perhaps what Christ meant is not that walking with him is uncomplicated but rather that when we focus on our relationship with him, the road opens before us with less resistance and less striving on our part.

I have to say, too, that I’ve struggled with Jesus’ use of the image of a yoke. On the surface, a yoke connotes bondage, servitude, and the diminishing of freedom and choice. In scanning the Web for images of yokes, however, I realized that I was imagining a single-user yoke, one that someone who has power over us places upon us, something that we have to pull alone. What I found more often on the Web were images of double yokes, designed for working animals to pull in tandem. How might it be to imagine this as the kind of yoke that Jesus was talking about, a yoke that we don’t have to pull alone, a yoke that he wears with us? A yoke not for servitude, not for bondage, but a tool of connection, a way of being in relationship with Christ that makes our work easier, not more difficult.

It’s this kind of relationship, this connection with the Christ who labors alongside us, that makes it possible to go into the complicated realms that our souls sometimes need. This relationship helps us choose between complexity that deepens us and complexity that deadens us. So closely connected with Christ, it becomes more possible to discern how to move in directions that will provide energy and wisdom.

Jesus’ yokeish words find an intriguing resonance in the apocryphal Book of Sirach, also known as Ecclesiasticus. As he describes the Wisdom of God, whom he depicts as a woman, the author of the Book of Sirach writes,

Come to her with all your soul,
and keep her ways with all your might.
Search out and seek, and she will
become known to you;
and when you get hold of her,
do not let her go.
For at last you will find the rest she gives,
and she will be changed into joy for you.
Then her fetters will become for you a strong defense,
and her collar a glorious robe.
Her yoke is a golden ornament,
and her bonds a purple cord.
You will wear her like a glorious robe,
and put her on like a splendid crown. (Sirach 6.26-31)

I don’t know that the yoke imagery will ever sit comfortably with me, but it challenges me to ponder what I’m attaching myself to these days. Truth is, we always bind ourselves, however subtly, to something: people, places, habits, possessions, beliefs, ways of being in the world. What or whom are you yoked to right now? Have you sought these connections, or have you allowed them to be placed upon you by others? Do these connections deepen you or deaden you? Do they draw you closer to Christ or farther away from him? Do they connect you with the power, freedom, and choice that God gives you, or do they diminish your power, freedom, and choice? How might Christ be inviting you to live and work in closer relationship with him?

In your living and your laboring, may you find deep relationship and rest. And a few holy complications.

[To use the “If the Yoke Fits” 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, Gospel of Matthew, lectionary, Ordinary Time | 4 Comments »

A Place for the Prophet

June 23, 2008


A Place for the Prophet © Jan L. Richardson

Reading from the Gospels, Year A, Proper 8/Ordinary 13/Pentecost +2: Matthew 10.40-42

In her book Dakota: A Spiritual Geography, Kathleen Norris tells a story that’s said to come from a Russian Orthodox monastery. A seasoned monk, long accustomed to welcoming all guests as Christ, says to a young monk, “I have finally learned to accept people as they are. Whatever they are in the world, a prostitute, a prime minister, it is all the same to me. But sometimes,” the monk continues, “I see a stranger coming up the road and I say, “Oh, Jesus Christ, is it you again?”

Hospitality is on Jesus Christ’s mind in this week’s Gospel lection, Matthew 10.40-42. In this passage we find Jesus continuing his instructions to the disciples as he prepares to send them into the towns to “heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse lepers, and cast out demons” (Matthew 10.8). He tells them, “Whoever welcomes you welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me. Whoever welcomes a prophet in the name of a prophet will receive a prophet’s reward….”

I find myself thinking that it’s one thing to welcome a prostitute or a prime minister, as the longtime monk had learned to do. But a prophet?

As guests go, prophets are not the easiest folks to have around. In their role as the mouthpiece of God, they tend to come out with things that can make a host uncomfortable. The Hebrew prophets, after all, weren’t so much foretellers as forth-tellers: they perceived the present injustice among their people with uncommon clarity, and they addressed it with uncommon candor. “Thou art the man,” Nathan says to David (2 Samuel 12.7). “The dogs shall eat Jezebel within the bounds of Jezreel,” Elijah says of Ahab’s wife (1 Kings 21.23). “Do not pray for the welfare of this people,” God says to Jeremiah. “Although they fast, I do not hear their cry, and although they offer burnt-offering and grain-offering, I do not accept them; but by the sword, by famine, and by pestilence I consume them” (Jeremiah 14.11, 12). Famine and destruction, devastation and woe: the prophets were pretty intense fellows. Even in their hopeful moments, which produced some of the most amazing and sustaining poetry of the Bible, they still confront their hearers with words that make it hard to relax around them.

It’s not always easy to welcome those who remind us what it is we’re supposed to be in this world, who call us to live as the people God created us to be, who ask so much of us. It can sometimes be a tiresome, “Jesus Christ, is it you again?” kind of prospect.

But I think of a woman who extended this kind of hospitality to a traveling prophet. Her name, like that of so many women, went unrecorded; history recalls her simply as the Shunammite woman. Having befriended the prophet Elisha and recognizing him as a holy man, she convinces her husband that they should provide a space for him. I love the homely, hospitable details that the story in 2 Kings 4.8-37 provides. “Let us make a small roof chamber with walls,” says the woman of Shunem, “and put there for him a bed, a table, a chair, and a lamp, so that whenever he comes to us, he can go in there” (2 Kings 4.10).

Elisha recognizes the gift, and after a time, he wants to know how he can repay the woman for her hospitality. “What is to be done for you?” the prophet asks. And thus begins a tale of birth, and death, and the raising of the dead, a story that echoes in Jesus’ sending of the disciples to do the same kind of work.

I think of the Shunammite woman as I ponder Jesus’ words about how those who welcome a prophet in the name of a prophet will receive a prophet’s reward. Which at first doesn’t hold a lot of appeal, given the usual “rewards” bestowed upon prophets. For their efforts, they are dangerously prone to imprisonment. Beheading. Crucifixion. Slaughter by various methods. But in the land of Shunem, a woman welcomed a prophet with a room, a bed, a table, a chair, a lamp. Looking for no reward, the woman provided a sacred space for a holy man. And within the space of her own self, an unexpected child began to grow.

It’s a strange economy, this kind of hospitality. We can’t know what we will set in motion when we offer some space to the ones whom Jesus tells us to welcome. We offer a cup of cold water, or a place to rest, or an extra room, or a corner of our heart; we cede some precious territory to one who comes with a word from God; we open ourselves to remembering who it is God put us here to be, and all of a sudden, we’re carrying something we never expected to carry. Maybe it’s not a literal child, as it was for the Shunammite woman. But this kind of hospitality always makes room for new life to take root in us and to come through us in ways that we can’t predict. That’s part of the strange economy, the curious ecosystem of hospitality: open a space to the holy stranger, and God creates a sacred space within our own selves. An extra room in our own souls. A place for God to grow.

What’s hospitality like for you these days? How do you make room for those who challenge you to remember who God created you to be? What kind of holy space might God be wanting to create in your life? In you?

Blessings to you as you discern where to extend a welcome, and where to receive one.

[To use the “A Place for the Prophet” 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, Gospel of Matthew, lectionary, monastic stuff, Ordinary Time | 1 Comment »

Out of the Dark

June 17, 2008


© Jan L. Richardson ◊The Painted Prayerbook◊

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

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

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

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

One spring morning she wrote,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blessings to you in darkness and in daylight.

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

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