The Painted Prayerbook

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!]

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!]

© 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.