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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 »

A Postscript to Pentecost

May 11, 2008

Happy Pentecost to you! On this occasion of Pentecost’s unusual confluence with Mother’s Day, I’ve found myself thinking about the frequency with which Mary, the mother of Jesus, appears front and center in artful depictions of Pentecost. In the first chapter of Acts, the author makes a point of noting that “certain women, including Mary the mother of Jesus,” were among those who gathered in the upper room, devoting themselves to prayer. The text implies her prayerful presence at Pentecost, and artists across the centuries highlighted her among the gathered assembly. Because of her presence and leadership among the disciples, along with her role as the mother of Christ, Mary became known as Queen of the Apostles as well as Mother of the Church.

The artful images of the Pentecostal Mary illuminate an intriguing resonance with the story of the Annunciation. In Luke’s gospel, we read of how the angel Gabriel tells Mary that the Holy Spirit will come upon her, and the power of the Most High will overshadow her. As with the Annunciation, paintings of Pentecost, such as this one in the St Albans Psalter, typically depict a woman open to the Spirit who appears—as so often in Christian iconography—in the form of a dove.

In much the same way that many medieval artists portrayed Mary reading at the Annunciation, they often depicted her in a similar fashion at Pentecost, as in this page from a 15th-century French Book of Hours. Another French Book of Hours depicts Mary kneeling at a prie-dieu as she reads, a motif that often appeared in artwork of the Annunciation.

As a blissfully incurable lover of books, I take great delight in these images of the literary, Pentecostal Mary who remained steeped in the Word throughout her life. These images also challenge me to ponder how I’m opening myself to the God who comes to us as both Word and Spirit. What do they stir in you?

On this day and all the days to come, may the Spirit breathe through the mothers and others who care for the children of the world.

(Artwork: Annunciation to Mary [detail] from The Advent Hours © Jan L. Richardson.)

Posted in art, books, holidays, lectionary, sacred time | Leave a Comment »

Pentecost: Fire and Breath

May 5, 2008


Fire and Breath © Jan L. Richardson

In my junior year of high school, I landed in the hospital several times because one of my lungs kept collapsing. It wasn’t due to an injury; each collapse was spontaneous, owing to a genetic predisposition not uncommon among tall, skinny girls. (It often comes accessorized with a mild heart murmur, something I didn’t know until a doctor picked it up in a routine exam a few years ago.) Normally a really healthy kid, I was concerned about the inordinate level of excitement it stirred in my doctor’s office. After he had his nurses come and listen to my chest, my doctor explained that I’d have to go to the hospital to get my lung reinflated. I imagined something like a bicycle pump, a quick procedure that would have me out in time to take a major test the next day. Instead, I spent the next five days getting intimately acquainted with a chest tube and the oddities of morphine.

The trip to the hospital provided only a temporary fix for my lung. When a partial collapse the next month was followed by a complete collapse the month after that, I knew the next step would be more drastic. The chest tube was put back in, and this time, they poured tetracycline down it. A recently developed alternative to surgery, tetracycline served to form scar tissue to keep the lung intact and prevent it from collapsing again.

Painkillers and local anesthesia only do so much to dull the sensation of acid flowing over your innards. Mostly I remember unbelievable pressure on my chest, the sensation that I could not breathe, would never do it again, that my body would not remember how. But in the wake of the fire came breath: breath that came without assistance, breath that sustained itself and did not seep out. In time I came to understand the experience as a gift, one marked by the presence of God, who did not inflict it upon me but used it as an occasion of transformation, an experience of initiation. With the fire and the breath came knowledge: I would never be in my body in the same way. It altered how I experienced my own body, and it changed how I would engage people whose bodies are vulnerable. A good gift for a girl who would grow up to be a pastor.

That initiation of fire and breath has been much on my mind as the day of Pentecost approaches. A defining day in the life of the early church, Pentecost finds its roots in the Jewish tradition, where it is called Shavuot or the Festival of Weeks. Falling fifty days after Passover, Shavuot is a harvest festival and also commemorates the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai. Acts 2.1-21 tells us it is on this festival day that the followers of Jesus are “all together in one place” when the Spirit appears. It arrives as a rushing wind, filling them, in-spiring them, causing them to draw breath and speak. The scene at Pentecost offers a brilliant display of how in Greek, as in Hebrew, the word for Spirit, wind, and breath is the same: pneuma (In Hebrew, ruach).

Along with the wind comes fire, a symbol that stirs our collective memory of the God whose transforming presence has so often been marked by flames. Think of Moses and the burning bush, the column of fire that led the people of Israel through the wilderness, the temple fire that consumed the sacrificial offerings. “For the Lord your God is a devouring fire,” Deuteronomy 4.24 tells us. In contemporary culture, we most often experience fire as a contained, controlled, gentle force. Yet the fires of Pentecost are not the tame flames of birthday candles or a cozy winter’s hearth; the fires of Pentecost are a sign of the God who resists our every attempt to domesticate the divine and to control how the holy will work.

For the followers of Jesus, the day of Pentecost becomes an occasion of profound initiation. With the gift of spirit and flame, the community that Jesus had formed is now fired, prepared, propelled into a new stage of its journey. Like a vessel in the furnace of a kiln, the followers of Jesus receive the transformation they need. They are no longer a group of believers but rather a catalyzed community, a body that, enlivened by the Spirit, will endure and continue the work of Christ.

As those followers knew, we can’t always plan our moments of initiation. If we cannot control God, it follows that we cannot control the ways that God beckons or, sometimes, seemingly flings us across a new threshold. We can work to make ourselves available when it happens, but we don’t always get to choose our initiations.

In her book Reinventing Eve, Kim Chernin describes initiation this way:

Initiation is not a predictable process. It moves forward fitfully, through moments of clear seeing, dramatic episodes of feeling, subtle intuitions, vague contemplative states. Dreams arrive, bringing guidance we frequently cannot accept. Years pass, during which we know that we are involved in something that cannot easily be named. We wake to a sense of confusion, know that we are in dangerous conflict, cannot define the nature of what troubles us. All change is like this. It circles around, leads us a merry chase, starts us out it seems all over again from where we were in the first place. And then suddenly, when we least expect it, something opens a door, discovers a threshold, shoves us across.

At Pentecost, initiation occurred not only at the individual level (“and a tongue rested on each of them”) but also at the corporate level. The outpouring of the Spirit upon the whole community reminds us that we are not on an individual journey but a shared one. God calls us, compels us, to attend to the Spirit in one another.

The celebration of Pentecost beckons us to keep breathing. It challenges us to keep ourselves open to the Spirit who seeks us. The Spirit that, in the beginning, brooded over the chaos and brought forth creation; the Spirit that drenched the community with fire and breath on the day of Pentecost: this same Spirit desires to dwell within us and among us. Amidst the brokenness and chaos and pain that sometimes come with being in community, the Spirit searches for places to breathe in us, to transform us, to knit us together more deeply and wholly as the body of Christ, and to send us forth into the world.

As we approach Pentecost, what occasions of initiation do you remember? Sought or unbidden, how did those experiences alter you, transform you, change who you are in this world? How did they deepen your understanding of yourself, your community, and how God desires to breathe through you? How do you continue to open yourself to the work of the Spirit in you and in those around you?

Blessings to you in these days of celebration. May we keep breathing. May we blaze.

[To use this artwork, 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, lectionary, sacred time | 8 Comments »

Ascension/Easter 7: A Blessing at Bethany

April 30, 2008


Ascension © Jan L. Richardson

Reading from the Gospels, Ascension Day: Luke 24.44-53

These days I’m at work on a new book that’s something of a sequel to the first book I wrote (if you don’t count the book about animals that I wrote and illustrated when I was about eight, in which my drawing of a horse looks very much like my drawing of a dog). Working on this sequel has set me to thinking about who I was when I was writing the first book. I began that book, Sacred Journeys, during my final year in seminary, stayed in Atlanta an extra year to work on it, and finally completed it a year and a half after moving back to Florida to take my first pastoral appointment.

The span of time I spent on that first book included one of the happiest years of my life—my final year in Atlanta—and one of the most difficult years of my life—my first year in Orlando. In Atlanta I had an amazing community. Based largely within the seminary I attended, these friends nourished and stretched and sustained me. They were part of my daily rhythm of life. They mediated the presence of Christ to me.

Leaving the community I had found in Atlanta was a source of deep grief. I knew no one when I moved to Orlando. Though I was clear this was where I needed to be, this clarity provided an incomplete comfort. I remember trying to figure out how to appear competent as a pastor and carry grief at the same time. During that first year, I received an anonymous letter (and if you’re a pastor, you know how much we love getting those letters from people who feel strongly enough to write but not strongly enough to put their name to it) from someone who suggested both that I share more about myself in my sermons and also that I use more humor. “Honey,” I thought at that point in my journey, “it’s one or the other.”

The sorrow ran its course. Time and focused work did their usual healing, and I found a new community in Orlando. Different from the one I had in Atlanta, but nourishing, creative, and amazing in its own ways: a community that reminds me of the infinite forms that the body of Christ can take in this world.

In the midst of remembering the loss of community, and the finding of one, I’ve been pondering the gospel lection for Ascension Day. Having lingered for forty days (a good biblical number) following his resurrection, during which he engaged in such acts as eating and wound-showing to demonstrate that he wasn’t a ghost, Jesus prepares to take his final leave of those who have been his companions on his earthly path. He shares his final words with them—crucial words, words of call and of promise. And then, Luke tells us, Jesus leads them “as far as Bethany,” where he will depart from them.

I am struck by Luke’s mention of Bethany as the site of Jesus’ ascension. The gospels mention Bethany a number of times. It is a place to which Jesus withdraws on more than one occasion, and we know the town most memorably as the home of Mary, Martha, and Lazarus, who are particular friends of Jesus. As the site of the raising of Lazarus and two accounts of Jesus’ receiving the gift of a woman’s anointing, Bethany stands as a place of healing, restoration of life, hospitality, and friendship. Likewise, at Bethany the fullness of Jesus’ divinity and his humanity come into sharp focus: in his raising of Lazarus, Jesus had displayed his power over death, and in his friendship with Mary, Martha, and Lazarus, he revealed himself as someone who took solace and delight in their human company.

For Jesus’ companions who witness his ascension, Bethany conjures memories that Jesus means for them to draw upon as they begin to live without him. Bethany was a place where hospitality, friendship, and the miraculous intertwined in the community around Jesus. The fact that he chooses it as his place of departure suggests that he intends for them to remember that these gifts will remain with them—and not only these gifts, but also his own spirit.

In depicting Jesus’ ascension, medieval artists often painted Jesus with only his feet showing (one can almost see his toes wiggling), just barely visible as he departs, as in the St Albans Psalter or this thirteenth-century German Psalter. They wanted to emphasize his bodily departure from the earth. Yet, as Gail Ramshaw points out in Treasures Old and New, such a depiction does not suggest that “Christ has gone away from the church. The church fathers,” she goes on to write, “taught just the opposite: that as Christ went to God, his body became available to all the church.” And not only available to the church, but also enfleshed within it and by it, a point these same medieval artists emphasize by their attention to those who remain as Jesus leaves. Though Jesus’ departure poses the risk of profound disruption among his followers, his ascension becomes an opportunity for the community not merely to reorganize and refashion itself but to become the very body of Christ in the world.

Luke writes that it is as Jesus is blessing the disciples that he begins to leave them. He does not raise his voice in a lamentation over his departure, he does not offer any further words of wisdom and instruction, he does not fling last-minute advice their way. He blesses them. Where the disciples might have been justly distraught, Luke tells us that instead they worshiped Jesus “and returned to Jerusalem with great joy; and they were continually in the temple blessing God.” Jesus’ disciples recognize that his leaving is part of his blessing. Having called them into relationship with him and one another, having lived and journeyed with them, he frees them to live into their ongoing call. They, in turn, respond to Jesus’ blessing by offering blessings of their own, in the temple and beyond. They respond to his blessing by becoming his body.

We may grieve—and rightly so—the changes and leave-takings that come with being in community. This relationship stuff is risky business. Yet Jesus’ ascension reminds us there is something deeper at work in such times, something that not only carries us through the changes but also uses them to transform us and to bless the body of Christ. In the midst of every loss and change, the presence of Christ persists, shaping his community anew and calling us to blessing and joy.

Where have you found a blessing in the midst of loss? How have you experienced—and offered—the body of Christ among the changes in your life? Having received the blessing of Christ, how do you offer a blessing in return?

May you journey, along with those first disciples, with great joy and blessing.

[To use this artwork, 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, Easter, Gospel of Luke, lectionary, sacred time | 3 Comments »

Easter 6: Side Orders

April 23, 2008


You in Me in You © Jan L. Richardson

On a day when I was dealing with a vexatious situation, I spent some time talking about it with my sweetheart. Gary is a great thinking partner, adept at asking questions and offering insights (in a non-advicey kind of fashion) that help me find a path through the muddle at hand, whether it’s a tangle of words in something I’m writing, a stuck place I’ve gotten to in a piece of artwork, or the challenges that come up in having a ministry that doesn’t fit a specific mold. I don’t remember precisely what was vexing me on this particular day—I have some recollection I was struggling with an institutional system, which means it was probably either the church or the publishing industry—but I do remember some words that Gary offered as we finished our conversation. “The thing to remember here, Jan,” he said, “is that I am on your side.”

Having somebody on our side, somebody whose sidefulness doesn’t require that we always agree with them or bend ourselves to their agenda, is a remarkable gift. My experience of this with my sweetheart provides something of a glimpse into what Jesus is offering to his disciples in this Sunday’s Gospel lection, John 14.15-21. Jesus’ words in this passage immediately follow our Gospel lection from last week. He and the disciples are still at the table, lingering as Jesus speaks the crucial words he feels pressed to offer his friends before he is taken from them. We see again the depth of Jesus’ desire for them to understand how he means for them to abide with him after he is gone. In this passage he tells them that he “will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever. This,” he continues, “is the Spirit of truth….”

In his commentary on John’s Gospel, D. Moody Smith notes that parakletos, the Greek word commonly translated as Advocate (the New Revised Standard Version offers “Helper” as an alternative), “means literally one called to the side of, an advocate or an attorney.” As Smith suggests, however, the context of this passage indicates that this parakletos—often called the Paraclete in English—“does not function so much to advocate the disciples’ cause before God as to mediate the presence of Jesus to the disciples.” This Paraclete will do more than help out the disciples in the wake of Jesus’ death; the Paraclete will sustain and make possible their ongoing relationship with him.

Jesus tells them that they will know this Advocate because “he abides with you, and he will be in you.” There it is again, that word abides—from the Greek meno, as we noted last week. Jesus is at pains to impress upon them the fact of this abiding, and how it will happen: he tells them not only that the Paraclete will be in them, but also that he will be in the Father, the disciples will be in him, and he will be in them.

That’s a whole lot of shared indwelling going on, a plethora of mutual meno-ing. It’s this kind of passage that has made John’s Gospel so appealing to mystics across the ages. With John’s intensely spiritual style, it sometimes becomes a challenge, in reading his Gospel, to keep one’s feet on the ground, or one’s head above water—pick your own metaphor, John offers a host of his own. John’s Gospel is a wonder in part for this very reason, that he drenches us with words that draw us into spiritual depths. He always means for us to see, however, the bedrock beneath it all, the response that a life in the Spirit calls us to make.

As any good mystic knows, being in relationship with Christ does not mean forever wallowing around in this mutual, mystical indwelling that takes place among God, Jesus, the Spirit, and us. Abiding with Christ is a wonder and a gift of grace, but it’s not a perpetual feel-good fest. There at the table, Jesus emphasizes that being in relationship with him, and receiving the Advocate, compels us to a concrete response in the world; in fact, we can take Jesus’ words to mean that his sending of the Advocate is contingent upon the disciples’ actions. “If you love me,” Jesus says at the outset of this passage, “keep my commandments.” He will say it again in a similar fashion at the end of the text: “They who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me; and those who love me will be loved by my Father, and I will love them and reveal myself to them.”

When it comes to Jesus giving commandments in the Gospel of John, this is what he has to say:

I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another. (13.34, 35)

This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you…. I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another. (15.12-14, 17)

Living with Jesus challenges us to love not only him but also those whom he sends to us. And perhaps this is the real gift and intent of the Spirit, the Helper and Advocate whom he promised to send to the disciples: that the Spirit will sustain us as we live into the love to which Christ calls us, even when, and especially when, it means abiding with those whom we’d rather build walls against.

Jesus’ words this week have me wondering who might need me to say the words that Gary offered me on that vexatious day: I am on your side. Who might need to hear those words from you?

May you know the challenging peace of the One who is on your side and who is within you.

[To use the “You in Me in You” 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, Easter, Gospel of John, lectionary | 1 Comment »

Easter 5: A Place to Dwell

April 18, 2008


A Place to Dwell © Jan L. Richardson

As I’ve shared in a couple recent posts, I’ve been doing some traveling, most recently to Connecticut, where I led a retreat for a wondrous group of women. I left for Wisdom House just twelve hours after arriving home from the funeral for my sweetheart’s mom in South Carolina, so I wasn’t exactly in the most rested state when I arrived in Connecticut. Fortunately, the retreat didn’t start until the following day, and it was a great gift to have some time to rest, settle in, and absorb the hospitality of the staff and the space at Wisdom House. So much of the space that weekend invited me to be aware of the holy: the art gallery, the chapel, the soulful space created by the women who gathered.

Sister Jo-Ann, my wonderful host at Wisdom House, took me on a tour of the Farm House that’s on the property of the retreat center. Built in the 1700s and used for smaller retreats, the Farm House enchants. With seemingly endless rooms, including tiny bedrooms that remind me of monks’ cells, and lots of inviting nooks and crannies, it’s the kind of space I could happily spend a few weeks in. Though nobody resides there full-time these days, the Farm House possesses a sense of habitation and warmth. There’s a plaque by the front door that lists the names of those who have lived there, from generation to generation. It invites those who cross the threshold, whether for a few hours or a few days, to enter it as a dwelling place, a habitation for the holy.

Nourished by the hospitality I received at Wisdom House, I’ve returned home to my sweet little studio apartment. I’ve lived here for nearly a decade, and the ongoing process of learning how to inhabit this 300 square foot space, and how to work in it as an artist and writer, is one of the most creative things I’ve ever done. Every few months or so I move a few things around in order to squeeze out a few more square inches. My latest accomplishment has involved creating a writing nook. Desperate for a space that I can devote solely to writing (an activity from which I am easily distracted), I recently looked at the landing at the top of my stairs and realized that, especially with its window that overlooks the back yard, it would make a great space to write. It doesn’t make the writing any easier (I didn’t expect it to), but it does offer greater focus, which comes as a needed gift.

I’m intrigued by spaces and by how our experience of architecture shapes our perception of it. Our sense of a physical place goes beyond the interplay of form and function; particularly as we experience a space over time, the outward, physical space can become intertwined with the interior space of our psyches and souls. The places we inhabit or regularly visit imprint themselves on our memory and imagination, coloring how we perceive and engage those spaces. Gaston Bachelard, in his famed book The Poetics of Space, observes that “A house that has been experienced in not an inert box.”

With spaces on my mind, I’ve particularly appreciated the chance to ponder this week’s Gospel lection, John 14.1-14. Sharing a table (an evocative space in itself) with his disciples shortly before his death, Jesus tells them—among many other things—that “In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places.” He uses an architectural image to help them begin to understand the kind of place that he is preparing for them, yet Jesus himself, recognizing the layers of meaning that a house can evoke, is talking about far more than architecture here. The word that Jesus uses for “house” is the Greek word oikia (related to oikos), which refers not only to the physical structure of a house but also to the family that dwells there: the household. D. Moody Smith, in his commentary on John’s Gospel, notes the relationship between the word for “dwelling places,” monai, and the verb meno, which means to remain, abide, dwell, endure.

John likes this word. We visited meno on Epiphany 2, reflecting on the story in the first chapter of John’s Gospel, in which two of John the Baptist’s disciples ask Jesus where he is staying—where he is meno-ing—and he tells them, “Come and see.” He knows they are asking more than where his physical dwelling is.

Here, at the other end of Jesus’ ministry, we find this word again. The disciples did indeed come and see—boy, howdy, what they saw—yet Jesus is still beckoning them to go deeper in the ways that they will abide with him, both now and in the future.

Jesus tells his companions about these dwelling places in order to encourage them and stir their hope. At the same time, he desires to be clear with the disciples that dwelling with him is not a far-off proposition; rather, he is calling them to live with him now and throughout their earthly lives. In John 15, which we don’t visit in the Revised Common Lectionary this year, Jesus goes on to offer the image of the vine and branches as a vivid metaphor for how he desires the disciples to abide with him and he with them. Variations of meno appear many times in John 15; Jesus really wants them to get this whole abiding thing before he goes.

In addition to the images that Jesus offers with oikia and monai, he tells the disciples (in response to Thomas’ question about how to get to these dwelling places) that he himself is the way—the hodos in Greek, which can mean a physical road or journey as well as a way of life. Jesus’ description of himself as the way has a deep resonance with other images that we have visited in the weeks of Lent and Easter. His invitation to the Baptist’s disciples to come and see, the wellspring of living water that he offers a thirsty woman, breaking bread at Emmaus, the piercing of his body in the crucifixion, his invitation to Thomas to place his hand in his very flesh: these are among the stunning images that describe how Jesus opens his very self—body and soul—to us. In reflecting on this, D. Moody Smith draws our attention to Hebrews 10.20, in which the author writes of how we can enter the sanctuary—that holy space—“by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain (that is, through his flesh).”

I wrote last week of Christ as the radically hospitable shepherd who not only guards the flock but lays himself down to become the gate for them. This week’s metaphor of Christ as the way further develops this image. Here at the Last Supper, Jesus speaks not only of future concerns but also of present ones, and he means for his friends to understand that the way, the journey, is itself a dwelling place. Jesus is not simply telling them about the destination he intends for them; he is calling them to make their dwelling in him now; he is urging them to make the way, and Christ’s very self, their home.

Where are you living these days? Where are you making your home? How do you make your journey, your path in life, a dwelling place?

Blessings to you in these resurrection days.

[To use the “A Place to Dwell” 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, Easter, Gospel of John, lectionary | 1 Comment »

Easter 4: In Which We Do Some Sheep Wrestling

April 11, 2008


The Sheepgate © Jan L. Richardson

This week’s gospel lection, John 10.1-10, introduces a paired set of images that Jesus plays with in intriguing ways: the shepherd and the gate.

I have to admit that of all the ways of describing Jesus, the image of him as a shepherd is one I’ve never particularly gravitated toward. I suspect this owes to a combination of factors: I live in a culture that is far removed from the agrarian setting in which Jesus employed this image, and I grew up around cows, so am not very knowledgeable in the ways of sheepdom. I suspect, however, that the real reason that I struggle with shepherd imagery is this: I am resistant to being herded. I am also all too aware of how badly things can go wrong when we are overly willing to let ourselves be led. (“Lambs to the slaughter” comes too easily to mind.)

The thing about living with the lectionary is that it confronts us with texts and images that may not sit easy with us, so John’s passage has been a good challenge for me this week. In letting the text work on me, I’ve come to appreciate how Jesus offers several points that provide crucial clarity about the sheep-and-shepherd thing.

First, Jesus does not call us to follow him in a mindless fashion. Part of my trouble with ovine imagery is that I’ve heard plenty of times that sheep are stupid, and so what does this metaphor say about us? It was illuminating to attend a workshop last year with Roberta Bondi, who was one of my professors at Candler School of Theology. In the course of the workshop, during which Roberta spun wool as she talked, she challenged this pervasive notion about sheepish intelligence. It’s not that they’re stupid, she told us; they are prey animals, not predators, and so their instincts strike us as counterintuitive or just plain dumb, because they don’t think as we do. Gail Ramshaw, in her wondrous lectionary resource Treasures Old and New, adds another layer of insight, observing that “At the most ancient level of biblical storytelling, sheep are highly respected, for without their life, communal survival would not be possible. Contemporary interpretation of the Bible’s sheep stories,” she goes on to write, “needs to balance its characteristic talk about how stupid sheep are with the economic reality that sheep were the primary life source for the people, God’s gift of sustenance for the people.” Christ likens us to sheep not because he expects us to be vapid, but because he counts us as valued.

Second, Jesus calls us to follow him in the context of relationship. He wants us to know him. “He [the shepherd] calls his own sheep by name and leads them out,” Jesus says in this passage; “…the sheep follow him because they know his voice.” Jesus’ call is grounded in his desire for a relationship with us, to know us and to be known by us. He expects us to engage in discernment, to ask questions, to be wise in the ways that we follow him. It’s important to note that this passage follows on the heels of his healing of the blind man in John 9, which we visited on Lent 4; this week’s gospel lection is a continuation of Jesus’ teaching about how he desires us to see.

A third point of clarity that Jesus offers in this passage is that we are not to follow him just because he says so, or because hellfire and damnation await us if we don’t. The presence of the shepherd is never threatening; rather, it is precisely the opposite. The shepherd is the one who extends radical hospitality to the sheep; he protects them against whatever would threaten them, even, as Jesus states repeatedly later in this chapter, laying down his own life for them. Ramshaw points out that “herders in that part of the world lay their own bodies down for a night’s rest in the gap of the fence, the body of the shepherd thus serving as the gate.” Indeed, Jesus describes himself in this passage not only as the gatekeeper of the sheepfold but as the gate itself.

Jesus’ image of himself as a gate underscores the fact that his way is one of hospitality, not of threat. The gate—the one that Christ opens to us, the one that Christ himself is—does not open by way of force. Rather, this entry becomes compelling because of the one who offers it, who opens it to us as a way of blessing. “I came that they may have life,” Jesus proclaims in the final verse of this text, “and have it abundantly.”

Jesus means for us to have this abundant life not solely in some future world but also in this present world. He intends, too, for us to have this life together. Christ calls us to fields where following him means tending to one another—to our sheepmates. In the midst of my resistance to being herded, I have to take care not to forget that there are good reasons to travel in flocks. Ramshaw offers a good reminder here—and if I keep turning to her this week, it’s partly because I’ve just recently found her treasure of a book, but mostly because she’s been particularly helpful to me in thinking sheepishly; she writes, “Shepherding stresses the communal nature of the sheep. Our singular noun flock is one made of many. The church proclaims the good news that I am not alone. We are the flock, and we share a common life.”

As you navigate this shared life, what, or who, is determining the direction of your path these days? Which has more influence over the shape of your path—your reactions, or your intentions? How are you experiencing the hospitality of Christ? How might he be challenging you to know and hear him in this season? What gate might he be beckoning you toward?

[To use the “Sheepgate” 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, Easter, Gospel of John, lectionary | 2 Comments »

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