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Mapping the Mysteries

June 11, 2008


Mapping the Mysteries © Jan L. Richardson

Reading from the Gospels:
Year A, Proper 6/Ordinary 11/Pentecost +5: Matthew 9.35-10.8 (9-23)
Year B, Proper 9/Ordinary 14/Pentecost +5: Mark 6.1-13
Year C, Proper 9/Ordinary 14/ Pentecost + 7: Luke 10.1-11, 16-20

Early in my ministry, I traveled to Alaska with a mission team from my church. During a free day, we did some exploring that included a stop at the Anchorage Museum of History and Art. As I wandered through the rooms, I found myself in an exhibit titled A World of Maps. These maps were unlike any I had ever seen. Artists from across the United States had taken the familiar forms of cartography, stretching and pushing and translating them into a fascinating library of landscapes. There were altered maps, painted maps, collaged maps. There were maps in the form of sculpture, of books, of pottery. There was a map that unfolded like a scroll, a map in the form of a diptych, a woven map. More than describing the geography of the physical world, these maps charted worlds of imagination, fantastical realms, the terrain of the soul and spirit. The maps told stories of things seen and unseen, and they challenged ideas about borders and boundaries. They embodied the lure and the hazards of exploring worlds unknown—and the worlds we think we know.

This week marks fifteen years that I have been in ministry. Yesterday, as part of my reflecting on this past decade and a half, I pulled out the catalog from that Alaskan exhibit and spent some time revisiting the maps I had encountered so early in my vocation. Looking back, I wonder if part of my fascination with those maps lay in my awareness, even then, of what an uncharted path I was on. I entered ordained ministry with a sense that at some point God would open a door that would take me off the beaten path. I had a gut sense, some hunches, a sense of longing about the ways the path might take shape, but no real idea of how it would unfold.

In this week’s gospel lection, Jesus gives the disciples the closest thing they ever get to a map for their ministry. Telling the twelve to go and proclaim the good news that “The kingdom of heaven has come near,” Jesus provides a rough—not to mention sobering—chart of the landscape they will venture into. He tells them of the hazards the terrain will likely pose, what towns and people to avoid, and how to navigate occasions of hospitality and resistance and hatred. And he gives them the authority to do the work he has called them to do: to chart a path that will be marked by healing and restoration.

So early in their ministries, the disciples could know little of what the territory ahead would actually look like or where it would take them. I wonder—as they looked back after Jesus’ death and resurrection, what kind of map might they have drawn to describe the paths they had walked with him? Reading the landscape with the eye of a cartographer, what marks might they have made to trace their travels? What would those contours and patterns have looked like—the places where, with the authority given to them, they cured the sick, raised the dead, cleansed the lepers, and cast out demons? Or where they shared meals together, or fed those who hungered, or listened to Jesus teach and challenge and encourage and stretch them? Or where they watched him die, and witnessed him alive again? How would they map all the terrain they crossed in the spaces of their own souls?

In Katharine Harmon’s wondrous book You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination, she includes an essay by Stephen S. Hall entitled “I, Mercator.” Hall writes,

I like to say that I never travel without a map, but then none of us do. We all travel with many maps, neatly folded and tucked away in the glove compartment of memory—some of them communal and universal, like our autonomic familiarity with seasonal constellations and the shape of continents, and some as particular as the local roads we have each traipsed. As we navigate on the trip that Dante called “our life’s way,” we are all creating our private maps. Like Mercator, we are not discovering entirely new worlds; rather, we are laying a new set of lines down on a known but changing world, arranging and rearranging metaphysical rhumbs that we associate with successful navigation. To each, her or his private meridians. To each, a unique projection. I, Mercator, and you, too.

This week’s collage is a map I made as I reflected on these past fifteen years in ministry. As with most maps, I can chart the landscape only in retrospect; I recognize the roads because I have traveled them, often making them up as I went along. Making this collaged map, I had certain kinds of landmarks on my mind, but I fashioned it with the awareness that I could have charted the landscape any number of ways. I could have marked the locations where pivotal conversations occurred, where I witnessed healing, where I encountered birth or death. I could have charted the places of peril, of heartbreak, of unexpected wonders. I could have marked the spots where the territory seemed to take me in circles, or was barren, or graced me with splendors. The map might have noted the underground streams, the secret passages, the wellsprings of sustenance, the paths not taken.

And it might tell of those sites where the convoluted terrain finally opened up and spilled me out into a plain where I knew more deeply who I was, what I was called to do, what Christ was giving me authority to do.

Still making the map as I go, I pray for a measure of the imagination of those artists whose work I saw in Anchorage, who pushed and stretched the traditional forms, who ventured beyond the customary boundaries, who dared to look deeper into their landscape, and deeper still. More than that, I pray for the imagination of the one who looked out into the terrain of a world “harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd,” a world broken by illness and injustice, a world bent by pain and hunger. I pray for the imagination of Christ, who dared to look into this world and to ask those who traveled with him, “Want to make a new map?”

So what’s your map look like? How would you chart the terrain of your last fifteen years, fifteen months, fifteen days? What landmarks would you note? What stories would your map tell? What are the maps beneath the map of your life—the hidden landscapes, the secret stories that shape the lay of your land? Are there tools you need in order to do some new mapping—to revisit and rethink and redraw the territory you thought you knew, or to change the course ahead?

Many blessings and traveling mercies as you continue to chart your way.

[To use this artwork, please visit this page at janrichardsonimages.com.]

Posted in art, books, Gospel of Mark, Gospel of Matthew, lectionary, mystery, Ordinary Time | 2 Comments »

Stories and Circles

June 7, 2008


Stories and Circles © Jan L. Richardson

Reading from the Gospels, Year A, Proper 5/Ordinary 10/Pentecost +4: Matthew 9.9-13, 18-26
(Year B, Proper 8/Ordinary 13/Pentecost +4: Mark 5.21-43)

Okay, so can I just say that there are some weeks when the creative process kicks me up one side and down the other? This has been one of those weeks.

It has to do with circles.

For many days I have been pondering this week’s gospel lection. I love this passage, which Matthew, Mark, and Luke each include in some fashion in their gospels. I particularly love it for the way it intertwines the story of the healing of the long-bleeding woman who reaches out to Jesus with the story of a young girl, the daughter of a leader of the synagogue (or “ruler,” in Matthew’s version), whom Jesus is on his way to heal.

The story of the woman occurs in the middle of the story of the young girl. It’s possible to read the woman’s tale as something of an interruption of the girl’s, but there is such resonance between them that it makes a lot more sense to read them as the intertwined stories they are. A number of folks have written about the connections between these stories, teasing out the details of the literary structure and Jesus’ work of healing and restoration in both cases. These commentators have noted the detail that Matthew omits but that Mark and Luke include in their tellings: The girl, they say, is about twelve years old—the same number of years that the woman has been bleeding. It’s a detail that further underscores the links between these stories.

Pondering this passage in the context of lectio divina, I have found myself reflecting in particular about how the story of the woman is contained within the story of the girl. The girl’s story holds the woman’s story, not only in terms of literary structure, but also in the mysterious way that happens in the realm of story. Their healing is bound together.

A couple of months ago, I began doing some focused work with a gifted listener. In our first meeting I told her I wasn’t in the midst of a crisis, and I didn’t sense there was anything huge that was waiting to be unearthed. I was there, I said, because I needed to tell some stories. I’m at a point in my life where I’ve accumulated a few. Some of them are particularly present with me these days, and I’m curious to look more closely at how they connect, what they hold, and what they have to tell me as I discern the path ahead. In talking with this listener, I have found myself deeply aware of how each story I tell her contains another story, and another. Stories that may have happened years apart in chronological time are near neighbors in the space of the soul. The stories of the girl I was contain the stories of the woman. And the stories of the woman hold the stories of the girl.

In her book Writing for Your Life, Deena Metzger offers this quote about stories:

Stories move in circles. They don’t move in straight lines. So it helps if you listen in circles. There are stories inside stories and stories between stories, and finding your way through them is as easy and as hard as finding your way home. And part of the finding is the getting lost. And when you’re lost, you start to look around and listen. (A Traveling Jewish Theatre, Coming from a Great Distance)

Moving in circles in a mindful fashion makes for great soul-work but not for easy blog entries. Though I’m not a terribly linear person at any time, I do value being able to achieve some coherence, which has been elusive this week both in my artwork and in my writing. The deeper a text connects with my story, the more challenging it sometimes is to articulate the connection. Sitting at my drafting table and wrestling with the collage, sitting at my computer and wrestling with the words, I have felt a little lost. But I’m pausing in the circling, finally, to offer some scraps from the path, along with a few questions that I’ve brought with me:

How do your stories move in circles? What are the stories that are most present to you? How do the stories of your past and present contain one another? How do those stories pull you into the path ahead? Is there anyone who hears your stories, someone who helps you look around and listen?

A blessing on your circling.

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

Posted in art, Gospel of Matthew, lectionary, Ordinary Time, writing | 6 Comments »

House Dreaming

May 28, 2008


© Jan L. Richardson ◊The Painted Prayerbook◊

When a friend of mine was ready to build a house on the land he had purchased in eastern Kentucky, he sent out a request to some friends. Scott invited us to offer an object, a tangible blessing that he would bury in the ground upon which he would build the house. He recalls that “Folks were amazingly thoughtful—some of the items included tea, Legos and puzzle pieces from my childhood sent by my mother, guitar strings, a bit of climbing rope, a bit of granite from my home town (Lithonia meaning roughly ‘rock place’), a wine chalice from my potter friends, shells from our childhood vacation spot, herbs, bits of plants and dirt from various parts of the country, and chocolate.” After all the gifts arrived, Scott gathered with some friends for a ceremony on his property. Placing the gifts in the ground, they offered a blessing for what would take root in that place. Married now and with young children, Scott and his family flourish in the house built atop the buried blessings.

It was just a few weeks ago, on Easter 5, that we did some reflecting on houses. Pondering Jesus’ words in John 14, where he speaks of the dwelling place he is preparing, we noted how houses are places not only of personal but also collective memory and imagination. Jesus’ words in that passage, as well as in this week’s Gospel lection, underscore the fact that throughout the scriptures, a house is rarely just a physical building. Rather, it evokes a constellation of meanings: a house may refer to a place of worship, the people of Israel, the members of a particular ancestral lineage (as in the house of Jacob), or a group of people who dwell together (a household). Jesus sometimes uses houses to describe the kingdom of God, as in the parable of the woman who sweeps her entire house, looking for her lost coin. Houses also contain a deeply individual meaning, as in this week’s gospel lection, Matthew 7.21-29. Here the image of the house is thoroughly personal, in that it refers to the house that we build with our own particular life, yet it resonates with nearly all the other meanings that house holds. The house that we construct with our life, the house that is our life, is intimately involved with the entire household of God.

In this parable about the wise man who built his house on rock and the foolish man who built his house on sand, Jesus urges us to dig deeper, as it were, into this homely imagery. He challenges us to recognize how the health of a house (and its inhabitants) depends on what we build it upon. The wholeness of the house, he tells us, rests on its foundation. And for Jesus, our tangible response to him forms the foundation of our dwelling with him. Our practices, our searching, our work to live out his call: these acts are blessings that sustain the structure and help its inhabitants flourish.

Jesus makes clear that we can’t cut corners in this kind of house building. There is no shortcut to the kingdom, no substitute for doing the work that’s involved. We are saved by grace alone, but we are called to respond to that grace, to give flesh to our understanding that hospitality is not something we only receive in Christ but that we offer as well. Many of the gospel lections that we’ll journey with during Ordinary Time will speak specifically, and sometimes uncomfortably, to the kind of work that Christ beckons us to do. He emphasizes that it’s not work just for the sake of work (and it’s not constant work, either; rest is one of the ways that we respond to Christ). Rather, our response is for the purpose of relationship. As Jesus highlights in the opening verses of this passage, it’s possible to do really impressive work, work that seems holy on the surface, but is empty because it’s focused on results—on a show of power—rather than on relationship with the one who is the source of true power. “I never knew you” is the lament that Jesus, in Matthew 7.23, predicts he will utter to those who hear but do not respond.

The solidly built house in Jesus’ parable has, like the kingdom of God, a now-and-not-yet quality. The house that he describes is something of a mystical house that stands complete and inhabited, yet which we are also in the process of building. Living together in a house that we are still working on sometimes seems daunting. We can get to feeling like Sisyphus in our perpetual practicing, particularly in those times when we start focusing more on the practices themselves and less on the relationship the practices are designed to cultivate. Too, we don’t always know precisely how the structure will take shape and what it will look like. Our call, however, isn’t always to finish the house but rather to be faithful in laying the groundwork, to discerning and doing the work that’s in front of us, the work that is ours to do.

And here’s a cool thing: don’t gotta do it alone. Aren’t meant, in fact, to do it alone. I think again of my house building friend, how he asked for help and invited others to share in blessing and building the foundation.

What are you building your life on? What are the practices that give wholeness to the house of your life? Are there any places in the foundation that feel shaky? Is there someone you could ask for help as you build? What’s the dream house of your soul look like?

A blessing upon your building.

Posted in art, Gospel of Matthew, lectionary, Ordinary Time | Leave a Comment »

Happy Ordinary Time!

May 24, 2008


© Jan L. Richardson ◊The Painted Prayerbook◊

So, did you sense the shift when we moved into the new season? Did you hit the after-Pentecost sales and send out your “Merry Ordinary Time” cards? No? It tends to sneak up on us, doesn’t it, this new and subtle season of the Christian year. We have spent the past six months swimming in the Big Stories that Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, and Pentecost provided for us. These holy days and seasons have offered something approaching an embarrassment of riches with the themes they have brought us: birth, incarnation, the wilderness, suffering, death, resurrection, the life of the community, and the work of the Holy Spirit. It’s been a good and grounding groove.

And now for something completely different.

Ordinary Time officially began with the ending of Pentecost, and with Trinity Sunday now behind us, the new season is upon us in earnest. Stretching out for the next six months, Ordinary Time invites and challenges us to move into a mode that is shaped by something other than the “high seasons” that the past half-year has offered us. I sometimes find this new rhythm a little disorienting at first. Living in Florida, where the natural seasons are present (really, we do have them) but subtle, I rely on the liturgical year to help me tell time. Without the big markers I’ve been living with for the past six months, the days and weeks sometimes seem like they’ve lost their cohesion, that they’re oozing out into a nearly interminable horizon that holds few occasions for liturgical celebration. Plus, it’s a really long stretch of looking at green paraments every Sunday.

This season, however, beckons us to find the sacred in its subtlety. In the introduction to her book The Time Between: Cycles and Rhythms in Ordinary Time, Wendy M. Wright reminds us that the “ordinary” in “Ordinary Time” does not mean “boring, uneventful, undistinguished, everyday.” Rather, it “comes from the word ordinal, to count.” With its being a seemingly in-between time, however, Wright observes that this season holds us in a different way than do the seasons “when the beauty of the faith is etched in high relief.” She writes,

I like to think of the entire spectrum of the liturgical cycle of Ordinary Time with all its varied rhythms—of Sunday observance, daily prayer, the sanctoral cycle, the tapestry of stories that dramatize the call and response of Jesus and the first disciples, the seasons of our own discipleship throughout the life cycle, the ritual practice of the great Christian rites, the dynamics of our inner faith lives—as one greater movement of desire to be face-to-face, heart-to-heart with God. The deep grammar of the church year’s Ordinary Time is perhaps uttered most keenly in our ceaseless longing. By it we are propelled into the future. We pine for it as past. We trace the surface of the present with anxious fingertips. Call our desire awareness, mindfulness, mysticism, aesthetic sensitivity, faithfulness, or whatever. It is the fundamental movement of the Christian life.

Given the intensity of the stories that have accompanied us during the months between Advent and Pentecost, one might be tempted to think that Ordinary Time gives us something of a rest. It offers us a different rhythm, to be certain, but as we move into this season, the lectionary doesn’t let us off the hook. The Gospel lection for this Sunday, Matthew 6.24-34, challenges us with questions that lie at the heart of Christian life: Whom will we serve? Where will we place our trust and our energy?

To pose these questions, Jesus turns, in his typical incarnational way, to a couple of earthy examples at hand: the birds of the air and the lilies of the field. Urging his disciples not to devote themselves to worry and anxiety, he borrows the well-fed birds and well-clad lilies as signs of how God cares for God’s creatures.

I have to say that living without worry seems pretty easy to do if you’re a creature who can get by on worms and water. For the rest of us, giving up anxiety often seems more of a challenge. I’ve been pondering this Gospel passage in the midst of hearing news of the mounting death count from the earthquake in China and the cyclone in Myanmar. And I’ve been contemplating Jesus’ words with an awareness, too, of the daily terrors and suffering that shape the lives of so many on this planet. How is it, I wonder, that God has provided, is providing, will provide for their needs? What do Jesus’ images of birds and lilies look like in places that seem devoid of beauty and care?

I was reflecting on this with a couple of friends at lunch today. We each know how little we have in the way of answers to these kinds of questions, other than a sense that somehow God is present in the rubble, literal or otherwise, that disasters leave behind. One of my friends, a Benedictine, reminded us of St. Benedict’s words in chapter 4 of his Rule. After he has provided his monks with a lengthy list of what he calls “The Tools for Good Works,” Benedict wraps up this chapter by writing, “And finally, never lose hope in God’s mercy” (Rule of Benedict 4.74).

Wrestling with this week’s lection, I find myself wondering not so much how to keep myself from worrying but wondering instead how I might be called to relieve someone else’s worry, to be part of the way that God provides clothing and shelter and solace for someone. How do I live as someone who not only hopes for God’s mercy, for myself and others, but participates in that hope by becoming a sign and a vessel of God’s mercy in this world? As someone whose ministry involves raising my entire income, and who lives with the ordinary causes of worry that so many of us deal with, I’m not unacquainted with anxiety. At the same time, I’m aware of how the presence of persistent worry and anxiety may be a sign that I’ve become too absorbed by my own concerns, too consumed with my own needs, and that I need to allow God to draw my attention beyond myself to attend to those who need something that I can offer. It’s a way of trying to do what Jesus, at the beginning and ending of this Gospel lection, challenges us to do: to choose whom we will serve, and to focus first on the kingdom of God, that all other things in our lives may fall into their rightful places.

As we set out into this season of Ordinary Time, where is your energy going? What—and whom—are you serving? What worries, anxieties, needs, and desires are shaping your days? How might you invite God to transform your anxiety into acts of hope, mercy, and love in this world?

Deep blessings to you in these ordinary days.

Posted in art, Gospel of Matthew, lectionary, monastic stuff, Ordinary Time, sacred time | 3 Comments »

Trinity Sunday: A Spiral-Shaped God

May 12, 2008


A Spiral-Shaped God © Jan L. Richardson

Some years ago, at a retreat center in Ontario, I led a retreat in which we explored some of the riches that come to us from Celtic Christian traditions. When I saw that our meeting room had a smooth linoleum floor, an idea stirred. After tracking down several rolls of masking tape, I returned to the gathering space and got to work. When I finished a couple hours later, the center of our space held a circle with a triple spiral inside, large enough to use for walking prayer and meditation.

The symbol of the triple spiral is particularly prevalent in Celtic lands, where, in Christian times, it came to signify the Trinity. Evoking the energy, interconnection, and mystery of the triune God, the triple spiral graces such works as the remarkable insular Gospel books of the early medieval period, including the Book of Durrow and the Book of Kells.

On Trinity Sunday, we both celebrate God’s triune nature and also acknowledge the great mystery that it holds. Throughout the centuries, theologians have sought to define just how it is that God, Christ, and the Holy Spirit dwell together and with all of creation. Symbols of the Trinity abound, evidence of our desire to describe a being that comprises a community within itself. Attempts to convey the nature of the Trinity in images have occasionally produced some curious artwork, as in this image from a medieval Book of Hours that depicts three fellows sharing a single crown, and this image, added to a medieval English Psalter, that shows Abraham adoring a three-headed Trinity.

In their commentary on Trinity Sunday, the authors of Handbook of the Christian Year counsel us that rather than approaching this day with an emphasis on “the Trinity as an abstract concept, idea, or doctrine,” and seeking to explain or define it, it rather “seems more in keeping with the character of worship and of the Christian Year to treat Trinity Sunday as a day in which we praise and adore the infinitely complex and unfathomable mystery of God’s being to which we point when we speak of the Holy Trinity.” They go on to write,

Because our celebration of the Easter cycle is based upon the mighty acts of the triune God, and because we are entering upon the Sunday-to-Sunday half of the year when the emphasis is wholeheartedly upon each Sunday as the Lord’s Day, whose celebration is also based upon the mighty acts of the triune God, it is appropriate that we pause on this transitional Sunday to give ourselves over to the adoration and praise of the being—as distinct from the acts—of the triune God.

It is sometimes difficult, of course, to separate the doing of the Trinity from the being of the Trinity, for it is part of the nature of the Trinity to be in action, to work in relationship within itself and in cooperation with creation. This is one of the reasons that the Celtic symbol triple spiral speaks to my imagination: it evokes the God who both exists in a dynamic wholeness within itself yet also reaches out (or is it in?) to embrace us.

Historically, Celtic Christians offered no systematic theology by which they sought to define the nature and work of Trinity, but evidence of their experience of the triune God abounds. Beyond their artistic and symbolic depictions of the Trinity, they left a remarkable body of prayers and poetry that offer us an incarnate experience of the Trinity. In their poems and prayers, Celtic Christians moved from the abstract to the actual; for them, the triune deity was not a theological concept but rather was deeply embedded in daily life. In the Celtic imagination, God, Christ, and Spirit are intertwined with one another and with all of creation.

The Carmina Gadelica, a collection of prayers, poems, and blessings that Alexander Carmichael gathered in the Scottish islands and highlands in the 19th century, offers a feast of examples of this rich relationship with the Trinity, as in this prayer for the baptism of a child:

The little drop of the Father
On thy little forehead, beloved one.

The little drop of the Son
On thy little forehead, beloved one.

The little drop of the Spirit
On thy little forehead, beloved one.

To aid thee from the fays,
To guard thee from the host;

To aid thee from the gnome,
To shield thee from the spectre;

To keep thee for the Three,
To shield thee, to surround thee;

To save thee for the Three,
To fill thee with the graces;

The little drop of the Three
To lave thee with the graces.

With an intent both poetic and practical, this baptismal prayer serves as a graceful commentary on, and response to, the gospel reading for Trinity Sunday. In Matthew 28.16-20, we read the words that are, according to Matthew, Jesus’ final words to his disciples. In this passage that we often call the Great Commission, Jesus tells them to “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you.” Jesus’ words here are about the closest thing we have to an articulation of the Trinity in the scriptures. Jesus never uses the term “Trinity,” and he offers nothing like a doctrine of its nature. His words here, however, perhaps provide doctrine enough: he lets us know that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit exist in an inextricable relationship that propels us to be in relationship with the world, to live in service and to cultivate community. “And remember,” Jesus tells them at the last, “I am with you always, to the end of the age.” I am with you, he says: that being thing again, invariably bound together with the doing of the Trinity, an endless spiral of action and existence in which it dwells, and calls us to dwell as well.

In the Celtic triple spiral, there is a space where the three spirals connect. It is both a place of meeting and of sheer mystery. Its vast, vibrant emptiness reminds me that, in this life, we will never know all the names of God. Even as the Trinity evokes, it conceals. We will never exhaust the images we use to describe the One who holds us and sends us, who enfolds us and impels us in our eternal turning.

This week, as we travel toward Trinity Sunday, I’ll be holding that image of the triple spiral and the community in whose company I walked its path: inward, outward, journeying ever around the mystery at its center. Those walking companions remind me of how we are to be a living sign of the Trinity who dwells in eternal, intertwined relationship within itself and with all creation. As individuals and as communities, we are beckoned to times of spiraling inward, to attend to our own souls. We are propelled, in turn, into times of spiraling outward, to attend to the world beyond us. In all our turnings, the presence of God persists. With you always, Jesus said.

How do you experience the God who exists as a community and invites us to intertwined lives? How does this God become incarnate in the rhythm of your days?

Blessings on your spiral-shaped path.

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

Posted in art, books, Gospel of Matthew, lectionary, mystery, sacred time | 17 Comments »

Holy Saturday: A Day Between

March 21, 2008

Holy SaturdayImage: Holy Saturday © Jan Richardson

Reading from the Gospels, Holy Saturday: Matthew 27:57-66 or John 19:38-42

At the end of my yoga session this morning, I relaxed into the pose that’s called Savasana, or the Corpse Pose. On this day of thinking about Christ in the tomb, the pose gave me pause.

I thought of a visit to Minnesota a few years ago, and how a friend took me to a nearby Catholic church where you can take a drive-through tour of the Stations of the Cross. Each station offers a large carved relief, with the most elaborate being a life-sized rendering of the Crucifixion. Beneath the Crucifixion, you can look through a sheet of plexiglass to see Christ stretched out in his tomb. It is…interesting. Not the kind of thing that a Methodist girl often comes across.

On Holy Saturday, the lectionary presents us with a choice of Gospel readings. Both readings describe the burial of Christ, with Joseph of Arimathea figuring in each one. Matthew’s version tells us that Mary Magdalene and “the other Mary” (the mother of James and Joseph) were present, sitting opposite the tomb as Joseph of Arimathea laid Jesus in the tomb, rolled a stone across its entrance, and walked away. In John’s Gospel, Nicodemus helps Joseph of Arimathea with Jesus’ burial, bringing a hundred pounds (a hundred pounds!) of myrrh and aloes that he and Joseph use as they wrap Jesus in his shroud and lay him in the tomb. I love how Nicodemus, whom we encountered on the second Sunday of Lent, shows up again here; the man who questioned Jesus about the womb now tends his body at the tomb.

Though the Sabbath soon descended after Jesus was laid in the tomb, some traditions hold that Jesus did not rest on this day. We see evidence of this in the Apostles’ Creed, in versions that follow the words “crucified, dead, and buried” with “He descended into hell” (or “He descended to the dead”). The idea that Christ descended into hell is particularly prevalent in Orthodox Christianity. It’s also known as the Descent into Hades, the Harrowing of Hell, or the Anastasis (Resurrection). Searching online for artwork depicting this scene, I found one image titled “Christ Visits Hell,” which makes it sound like a vacation. Artwork of the Descent regularly depicts Christ releasing Adam, Eve, and others from captivity in the underworld, such as in this image from the 12th-century Winchester Psalter. The Descent embodies the idea that the one who fully entered our humanity on earth and thereby freed us was able also to enter even into hell and release those in bondage there.

Whatever Christ was up to (or down to) on Holy Saturday, for his followers it was a day of sorrow and bewilderment. Bereft of the one around whom they had shaped their lives, they had to choose whether they would isolate themselves in their sorrow and fear, or whether they would remain together and wait for a way to present itself.

Holy Saturday is not a day for answers. It is a threshold day, a day that lies between, and so resists any easy certainty. It is a day of waiting, of remembering to breathe, of willing ourselves to turn to one another when grief lays hold of us. It is a day to open ourselves to the one who goes into the places of deepest pain and darkest fear, in order to bring us out.

What stirs within you on this holy, in-between day?

[To use the image “Holy Saturday,” 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, Gospel of Matthew, lectionary, Lent, medieval | 5 Comments »

Epiphany 1: Ceremony (with a Side of Cake)

January 10, 2008

blog2008-01-10.jpg
Ceremony © Jan L. Richardson

Reading from the Gospels, Baptism of the Lord, Year A: Matthew 3.13-17

Today I had lunch with a friend who’s down from Minnesota (he claims he’s here for meetings, but I think he’s really just thawing out). David is a Franciscan friar who used to live and work at the San Pedro Center, a retreat and conference center owned by the Catholic Diocese of Orlando. I met David when I was serving in my first pastoral appointment, in a congregation just up the road from Disney World; he’s the one who later opened the door (God bless him) to my becoming the Artist in Residence at San Pedro.

We had made plans to meet at San Pedro today, and I arrived in time to take a short walk on the beautiful grounds. It had been some time since I’d been to this place that had once been such an intimate part of my life; I had even lived there for a wondrous year at the outset of my stint as Artist in Residence. As I walked its landscape today, I found myself thinking that it’s interesting to have lived long enough to have a sense that the arc of my life contains several lifetimes. The Jan who once lived at San Pedro felt like a very long-ago self. She was just beginning the journey to figure out what a life devoted to the intersection of art and writing and faith might look like. And she had a few other Big Life Things to figure out besides. It was intriguing to walk alongside her for a few moments today, to remember the remarkable door she was walking through a decade ago, and to see her, and that landscape, through the eyes of the present Jan.

There wasn’t much ritual involved when I moved to San Pedro (although there was a pair of sandhill cranes standing welcome in the driveway when we pulled the moving truck into the entrance, which felt like some kind of blessing). Years later, though, when I moved out of my position as the Artist in Residence and took up my new role with The Wellspring Studio, it felt like an occasion that needed some ceremonial action. The transition had been a lengthy and convoluted process, in part because it took a while to do the institutional sorting-through of the form that my new ministry would take (that’s another blog post entirely!). With all that past, and quite sufficiently sorted through, it was time to celebrate, and to remember.

One afternoon I gathered at San Pedro with three friends who have been sustaining companions throughout the sometimes complicated and sometimes wondrous (and sometimes both) turnings of my path within and beyond San Pedro. I shared some reflections with them about what I had found in that place, and who I had become because of it. I talked about how I had imagined having some Big Ritual to mark what a huge transition had taken place for me in leaving San Pedro, and what a deep transformation had occurred within me over the course of my years there. But as the day of celebration had approached, I’d realized that I didn’t need a Big Ritual. Having already put copious amounts of energy into getting to this point in my life, I found that I needed a ritual that would be simple. Gathering together, telling some stories, and being in that place: that would be ceremony enough.

And, of course, we had cake.

I’ve been thinking about beginnings and endings and the marking of them as I’ve reflected on the Gospel text that the lectionary invites us to ponder this week. In Matthew 3.13-17, we encounter the story of John’s baptism of Jesus in the Jordan. It’s the first time we see the adult Jesus in Matthew’s Gospel. As he approaches the river, he is beginning to cross the threshold into his public ministry. Though John sees clearly that there seems to be no cause for Jesus to go through the ritual and confessional cleansing of baptism, there is a deeper need that drives Jesus to seek this sacramental act, this initiation. Jesus understands the power that ritual possesses to mark a beginning, the symbolic way that it blesses and prepares us to move into a new terrain. A new lifetime.

How do you mark the beginnings and endings of the lifetimes that unfold within your life? How would you describe the different selves you’ve been across the years? Did you know when you were passing from one phase of your life into another? Have you gone, or are going through, or are anticipating some change that could benefit from some ritual attention? How might it be to set aside some time, alone or with friends, in order to remember, and to mark the passage, and to name who you have been and who you are becoming?

Whether your ceremonial self enters into a ritual space that is simple or involved, I highly recommend the inclusion of cake.

A blessing upon all your beginnings and endings and beginnings again.

[To use the “Ceremony” image, please visit this page at janrichardsonimages.com. For all my artwork for the Baptism of the Lord, please see this page. Your use of janrichardsonimages.com helps make the ministry of The Painted Prayerbook possible. Thank you!]

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

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