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Lent 1: Discernment and Dessert in the Desert

February 7, 2008

Discernment in the DesertImage: Discernment in the Desert © Jan Richardson

Reading from the Gospels, Lent 1, Year A: Matthew 4.1-11

One day some years ago, taking a walk with one of my Franciscan friar friends, I asked him, “What’s discernment like for you?” I was in the midst of making some decisions and found myself curious to know how he sorted through the choices in his own life. Being a good Franciscan, David’s response included a couple of stories about St. Francis.

In the first story, St. Francis and Brother Masseo are on a journey and come to a crossroads. Not knowing which path to take, St. Francis tells Brother Masseo to stand at the center of the crossroads and spin himself around. When Masseo finally falls down, Francis and his dizzy brother set off in the direction in which Masseo had landed.

In the second story, Francis is trying to discern whether he should spend all his time in prayer, or whether he should also go out and do some preaching. He senses this is not something he should decide for himself, so he enlists Brother Masseo’s aid once again. He sends Masseo to two trusted souls, St. Clare and Brother Sylvester, to ask them to pray about this question. In prayer, they each discern the same response: Go and preach. When Brother Masseo takes this word back to Francis, he leaps up, saying, “In the name of the Lord, let’s go!”

As someone capable of making the act of discernment a loooooooong and involved process, I have found great companions in both the tales that David shared. The first story may strike us as a bit silly, but it reminds me that on those occasions when there’s no one path that’s obviously the right one to take, it’s often better to set off in some direction if the alternative means staying stuck at the crossroads. God knows how to make use of any path.

The second story reminds me of the importance of turning to those who can help me in times of discernment. Faced with a momentous decision, Francis realized the question was too big for him to find his way through alone. He sought the insight of those who knew both him and God well. When their mutual answer came, Francis trusted it to be the voice of God, and he moved forward without hesitation.

This Sunday’s gospel lection finds Jesus on a journey of discernment. With the waters of baptism still clinging to him, Jesus enters the wilderness, where for forty days and forty nights he fasts and prays. His wilderness experience continues the initiation begun by the ritual of his baptism. Son of God he may be, but here at the outset of his ministry, he needs this liminal space, this in-between place, to deepen his clarity and to prepare him for what lies ahead. In this harsh landscape, bereft of any comforts that might distract him, Jesus comes to a vivid knowing about who he is and what is essential to his ministry. When the devil shows up at the end of his fast, Jesus is so centered and clear that nothing the tempter says can distract or entice him.

The root meaning of the word discernment has to do with sifting and separating. When there’s a lot to sort through, it can be, as Brother Masseo found, a dizzying process. The work of discerning one direction or choice from among many may require that we separate ourselves. Removing ourselves from at least some of our usual routines, for moments or for months, can shift the way that we view our life. It doesn’t often require taking ourselves to a literal wilderness in the manner that Jesus did. But his sojourn there reminds us there is wisdom in knowing when to turn toward a place, a person, or a practice that can help us see what we cannot always see under our own power.

This wisdom lies at the heart of Lent. These days challenge us to take on a practice, or give one up, so that we can look at our lives in a different way. As Jesus knew, going into the barren and uncomfortable places isn’t about proving how holy we are, or how tough, or how brave. It’s about letting God draw us into the place where we don’t know everything, don’t have to know everything, indeed may be emptied of nearly everything we think we know. And thereby we become free to receive the word, the wisdom, the clarity about who we are and what God is calling us to do.

Mercy, I love that the angels come to Jesus, there in that wilderness. I imagine them showing up with armfuls of bread and plenty of wine after the tempter has tucked tail and split. I like to think maybe they looked a little like Masseo and Clare and Sylvester.

So here I am, come to ask you the same question I asked David on that road a bunch of years ago: What’s discernment like for you? When you have a choice to make, when something needs sorting and sifting, what do you do? Is there a place, a person, a practice that helps you see what you need to see? Do you have someone like Clare or Sylvester who listens so well to both you and God that they help you hear God’s longing for you? Are you keeping your eyes open for the sustenance that comes in even the deepest wilderness?

Here’s a poem for your Lenten path.

Desert Prayer

I am not asking you
to take this wilderness from me,
to remove this place of starkness
where I come to know
the wildness within me,
where I learn to call the names
of the ravenous beasts
that pace inside me,
to finger the brambles
that snake through my veins,
to taste the thirst
that tugs at my tongue.

But send me
tough angels,
sweet wine,
strong bread:
just enough.

—Jan Richardson
from In Wisdom’s Path: Discovering the Sacred in Every Season

Blessings to you in all your sorting and sifting. I wish you angel-borne treats in these days.

[To use the image “Discernment in the Desert,” 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, Lent, monastic stuff | 10 Comments »

Ash Wednesday, Almost

February 5, 2008

Image: Ash Wednesday © Jan Richardson

Recently my sweetheart Gary and I revisited the movie Chocolat, based on the novel of the same name by Joanne Harris. I hadn’t rented the movie with Lent in mind—I actually ordered it during Advent and hadn’t gotten around to watching it—but it offered some tasty images that I’m carrying with me as I cross the threshold into the season of Lent. And by tasty images I don’t just mean Johnny Depp or the stunning sensory overload that Mme. Rochet’s Chocolaterie provides.

Both the movie and the book offer a narrative that beckons us to see the effects of clinging so fiercely to a practice that we miss the point of it. This shines through especially in the figure who appears as the mayor in the film and the priest in the book; his grip on his Lenten fast is ferocious but so fundamentally empty and ungrounded that when he draws near to that which he has resisted for so long, intending to destroy it, he falls helpless before (and in) it. We see a fierce clinging in other characters as well, their lives shaped around practices that keep them insulated and sometimes alienated from one another and from their own selves. For most of the folks in the story, slamming against their beloved walls finally causes them to crumble, opening them to an experience of mercy, reconciliation, and release.

The season of Lent beckons us to see what we are clinging to. The imagery of this season, therefore, is frequently stark. These days draw us into a wilderness in which we can more readily see what we have shaped our daily lives around: habits, practices, possessions, commitments, conflicts, relationships—all the stuff that we give ourselves to in a way that sometimes becomes more instinctual than intentional. Much as Jesus went into the desert to pray and fast for forty days, Lent offers us a landscape that calls us to look at our lives from a different perspective, to perceive what is essential and what is extraneous.

For centuries, the Christian tradition has given us the Lenten fast as a way to gain this perspective. At the core of this practice is a recognition that in giving up something precious to us, we are better able to make room for God. Entering into a spiritual practice, however, always carries the risk that we will become more attached to the form of the practice than to its original intent. Like the priest/mayor in Chocolat, we may become so invested in holding to a certain structure that it insulates us from God and isolates us from other people. Lent challenges us to see and sort through what we are attached to, including our attachments to the practices themselves. Christ’s words in the Gospel reading for Ash Wednesday, Matthew 6.1-6, 16-21, underscore the danger of this kind of attachment. He urges us to remember that being discreet about our practices helps guard against the possibility of becoming overly identified with them or prideful of them.

The desert mothers and fathers—those folks who, in the early centuries of the church, went into the wilderness to seek God—had a keen awareness of the profits and the perils of spiritual practice. In the midst of their earnest desire for God, wise ones among them recognized how seemingly holy habits could sometimes distance them from God and each other. The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, translated by Benedicta Ward, SLG, offers such a story:

Abba Cassian related the following: “The holy Germanus and I went to Egypt, to visit an old man. Because he offered us hospitality we asked him, ‘Why do you not keep the rule of fasting, when you receive visiting brothers, as we have received it in Palestine?’ He replied, ‘Fasting is always to hand but you I cannot have with me always. Furthermore, fasting is certainly a useful and necessary thing, but it depends on our choice while the law of God lays it upon us to do the works of charity. Thus receiving Christ in you, I ought to serve you with all diligence, but when I have taken leave of you, I can resume the rule of fasting again. For “Can the wedding guests fast while the bridegroom is with them, but when the bridegroom is taken from them, then they will fast in that day.”’” (Mark 2.19-20)

The monks’ host recognizes that in even the most devoted spiritual life, God compels us to root out whatever habit stands in the way of the hospitality to which God calls us.

In the ritual of Ash Wednesday, which begins the Lenten journey, we receive a cross-shaped smudge on our forehead. The ashen sign reminds us of what we are fashioned from, and to what we will return. It initiates and impels us into the wilderness where we remember what is most essential to us. It is a dark, stark mark. At the heart of this season, however, is a call to remember that something gleams among the ashes. We do not cling to the ashes for the sake of ashes, nor to the wilderness, nor to the outer form of whatever practice God gives us. Lent beckons us to cling to the one who dwells within and beneath and beyond every ritual and practice and form: Christ our Light, who desires us to receive his hospitality even—and perhaps especially—among ashes.

What habits are you shaping your life around? Which of your habits are instinctual, and which are intentional? What do you feel drawn to practice in the coming season? As you engage in that practice, what will help you stay focused on the purpose of the practice, so that it will remain a doorway to God, rather than becoming a wall?

A blessed Shrove Tuesday/Fat Tuesday/Mardi Gras to you today, and traveling mercies as we head into the landscape of Lent.

[To use the “Ash Wednesday” image, please visit this page at janrichardsonimages.com. Your use of the Jan Richardson Images site helps make the ministry of The Painted Prayerbook possible. Thank you!]

Posted in art, lectionary, Lent, monastic stuff, sacred time | 3 Comments »

Transfiguration Sunday: Mum’s the Word (Maybe)

January 30, 2008

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One of the greatest challenges in being a writer—or an artist or a preacher, for that matter—is discerning what to reveal and what to conceal. It’s a tricky thing, figuring out how much of our own experience should make its way into our work in an obvious fashion. There’s no well-defined line, though I find that my gut tends to sound the alert when it senses that something I’m reading or viewing or listening to has tilted toward providing Too Much Information.

The TMI syndrome doesn’t simply involve an overabundance of content; it’s sometimes a matter of timing. I read a book some years ago that the author crafted around a profound experience that had taken place not all that long before she began to write about it. I remember thinking that, in this case, I wished she had waited a while. Clearly the act of telling the story was an integral part of how she processed the experience, but it struck me that both she and the story would have benefited from giving herself more time and space before offering that experience to the public. I find myself wondering what the story feels like to her years later, how the experience of sitting with it, pondering it, reading it over time might have honed and deepened her telling of it.

I’ve been thinking about that elusive line between revelation and concealment as I’ve pondered this week’s Gospel lection. We’ve had a terribly brief post-Epiphany season, and we’re already approaching Transfiguration Sunday. Matthew gives us our Transfiguration story this year, in Matthew 17.1-9.

The transfiguring of Jesus provides a dazzling, dizzying experience for the three disciples who have accompanied him up the mountain. One can well understand that Peter, James, and John would desire to find a form for their experience, some kind of container to help them absorb and define what has taken place. We perceive this in Peter’s impulse to construct dwellings for Jesus, Moses, and Elijah. Faced with an event of overwhelming spiritual import, he responds at a physical level: Let me build something.

Peter’s offer is still on his lips when a bright cloud envelops them, a voice from within it speaking words akin to those that came from heaven at the moment of Jesus’ baptism: “This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased; listen to him!” The word for what the cloud does is overshadow, from the Greek word episkiazo. We’ve seen this word before. It appears in the angel Gabriel’s conversation with Mary, when he responds to her question about how it will be possible for her to give birth to the child whom he has asked her to bear. “The Holy Spirit will come upon you,” he tells her, “and the power of the Most High will overshadow you” (Luke 1.35).

In the Gospels, this is the only occasion besides the Transfiguration that this word appears. It draws our attention to the resonance between the story of the Annunciation to Mary and the story of the Transfiguration. Each tale reminds us that we cannot contain or confine God within man-made structures. When God shows up, God often tends to appear in and through people: God goes not for architecture but for anatomy. Or, rather, God makes architecture of our anatomy: God seeks to make of us a dwelling, a habitation for the holy.

This business of being host to the divine is no easy thing, God (literally) knows. So it’s interesting that the soon-to-be-mother Mary and the flat-on-their-faces disciples each receive precisely the same assurance: Do not be afraid. And each goes on their way, carrying something they had not previously known.

In the absence of being able to build physical dwellings, the disciples would have wanted, I suspect, to construct a story about their mountaintop experience: a container of words, at least, that would help them hold and convey what had happened to Jesus and to themselves. Perhaps anticipating this, Jesus enjoins them not to tell what has transpired until after his resurrection. It’s one of the only times that Jesus, a man of action, urges them to wait. This is not for revealing, he tells them; this is for you to carry within you, to ponder, to conceal until the fullness of time.

Perhaps like Mary with the child in her womb.

It was important that Peter, James, and John have that mountaintop experience. It wasn’t important for them to tell the story, not yet; that wasn’t the point of their outing. But the experience would work on them, shape them, and continue to transform and perhaps even transfigure them. The knowledge they carried would alter every future encounter: with Jesus, with their fellow disciples, and with those to whom they ministered.

The story of the Transfiguration calls me to remember that there are times for revealing and times for concealing. There are seasons to tell our story. And there are seasons to hold the story within us so that we can absorb it, reflect on it, and let it (and us) grow into a form that will foster the telling.

As a writer and artist and preacher, I don’t claim to handle that line between revelation and concealment with consistent finesse. But I’ve figured out that one of the core questions in discerning whether to share an experience is this: Whom does the story serve? Does my telling it help you reflect on your life and how God is stirring within it? Or does it merely provide information I think you should know about my own life because I hope it will impress you and induce a response that serves me more than it does you?

How do you discern what and where to share about your life? Whom do your stories serve? Do you have a story of transformation that could help someone else? Is it time to tell it? Is there work that God still needs to do within you so that you can tell the story in the way it needs telling? Whether revealing or concealing, how are you continuing to become a dwelling for the presence of the God who transforms us?

Posted in art, lectionary, sacred time, writing | 4 Comments »

The Inner Library, Revisited

January 26, 2008

initial-i1.jpgthink it was Michelle Brown who first got me pondering the idea of an inner library, which I wrote about on Wednesday. In her book The Lindisfarne Gospels: Society, Spirituality, and the Scribe, Brown makes mention of a painting that appears in the eighth-century Codex Amiatinus. The earliest surviving copy of a complete Bible in Latin, the Codex Amiatinus contains a thought-provoking painting of Ezra, a priest and scribe of the Israelites.

We find the tale of Ezra in the biblical books of Ezra and Nehemiah and also in the books of 1 and 2 Esdras, which are in the Apocrypha. Ezra lived during the time of the Israelites’ exile in Babylonia and was responsible for leading a group of them back home. This priestly scribe had particular renown for his devotion to the law of Moses. 2 Esdras contains a wonderful exchange in which God calls Ezra to rewrite and restore the law that has been destroyed:

Then I answered and said, ‘Let me speak in your presence, Lord. For I will go, as you have commanded me, and I will reprove the people who are now living; but who will warn those who will be born hereafter? For the world lies in darkness, and its inhabitants are without light. For your law has been burned, and so no one knows the things which have been done or will be done by you. If then I have found favor with you, send the holy spirit into me, and I will write everything that has happened in the world from the beginning, the things that were written in your law, so that people may be able to find the path, and that those who want to live in the last days may do so.’ (2 Esdras 14.19-22, NRSV)

I love how the author of 2 Esdras clearly depicts Ezra’s act of writing as a sacred call. Ezra’s remembrance and restoration of the law of Moses is, like the rebuilding of the Temple, an integral part of the reconstruction of the people of Israel.

It is this sacred scribe who appears among the pages of the Codex Amiatinus, laboring over a page as he sits beside a cabinet filled with holy books. (Take a gander at the Ezra painting here.) As with so much medieval art, there’s a lot happening in this image that our 21st-century eyes may not readily read. Michelle Brown places this bookish portrait of Ezra in the wider context of a Celtic monastic tradition that viewed the contemplation, study, and scribing of the scriptures as a way of drawing closer to God. “The act of copying and transmitting the Gospels,” she writes, “was to glimpse the divine and to place oneself in its apostolic service…. As such these books are portals of prayer, during the acts both of making and studying.” (Brown, 398.)

Brown goes on to write,

In an insightful discussion of the Ezra miniature in Ceolfrith’s Codex Amiatinus, Jennifer O’Reilly has drawn attention to the patristic [referring to the early church fathers] concept of the ‘inner library’ and the necessity for each believer to make him or herself a library of the divine Word, a sacred responsibility which Cummian [a seventh-century Irish bishop-theologian] referred to as ‘entering the Sanctuary of God’ by studying and transmitting Scripture. Books are the vessels from which the believer’s ark, or inner library, is filled. They are enablers of direct, contemporary Christian action, channels of the Spirit, and gateways to revelation, for ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God’ (John 1.1). (Brown, 398-9.)

The painted Ezra invites us to cultivate a sacred inner library not merely for the sake of filling our interior shelves, like homeowners who decorate their dwellings with pretty books they have bought by the yard but which they never intend to read. He challenges us instead to fashion a library whose contents inspire and sustain us to embody the Word of God in this world.

What are the books that circulate in your inner library? Within the Bible and beyond it, what texts have opened you to the presence of the God who lingers in their lines? Where have you found words that helped you to read and to create your own life?

Posted in art, books, lectionary, monastic stuff, writing | 1 Comment »

Epiphany 3: In Which We Visit Our Inner Library

January 23, 2008


The Inner Library © Jan L. Richardson

This week the lectionary leads us to Matthew 4.12-23 for the Gospel reading. It’s a passage that provides a great example of one of the things I find intriguing about how Matthew tells the story of Jesus. Matthew frequently turns to the Hebrew scriptures to interpret and explain who Jesus is. Drawing from the prophets—especially Isaiah—as well as the Psalms, Matthew grounds the story of Jesus in the remarkable landscape of the Hebrew scriptures and offers a vivid portrayal of Christ as the longed-for savior, the enfleshed fulfillment of an ancient hope.

At the outset of this passage, Matthew tells us that Jesus, upon hearing of the arrest of John the Baptist, leaves Nazareth and makes his home “in Capernaum by the sea, in the territory of Zebulun and Naphtali.” Matthew turns, as he loves to do, to Isaiah, explaining Jesus’ move as a fulfillment of Isaiah 9.1-2. Drawing from the prophet’s words, Matthew writes,

Land of Zebulun, land of Naphtali,
on the road by the sea, across the Jordan,
Galilee of the Gentiles—
the people who sat in darkness
have seen a great light,
and for those who sat in the region and shadow of death
light has dawned. (Mt. 4.15-16)

Isaiah’s testimony about the great light that comes to those in darkness—one of the particularly lovely and powerful passages from his book—is among the lectionary readings for Christmas Eve. In quoting from these words, Matthew works to make especially clear that in the birth and life of Jesus, our hopes for light have been fulfilled.

Matthew’s use of the Hebrew scriptures, here and elsewhere, reminds me of something shared by the Dominican nun who first taught me about lectio divina. In talking with our group about praying with the scriptures, Sr. Kathleen cautioned that it’s important to remember that the Hebrew scriptures can stand on their own. Though Christians typically refer to this part of the Bible as the Old Testament, for our Jewish sisters and brothers it is the sole testament, a living and present word that continues to speak to their lives. Oftentimes Christians have treated the Hebrew scriptures as an extraneous appendage, a hefty section that merely makes our Bibles heavier. We have frequently read the Old Testament primarily as a prelude, a prooftext, viewing it solely through the lens of the New Testament and mining it for little else but news of Jesus and some lovely poetry.

I think it’s important to read the Hebrew scriptures with the kind of caveat that Sr. Kathleen offered us. At the same time, she affirmed that in the context of lectio divina, we who read the Hebrew text with Christian eyes may indeed find the presence of Christ there, and if we grow closer to him as a result, then that is a blessing and a gift.

For Christians, it’s possible to read the Hebrew texts both with an understanding of Christ as the embodiment of the ancient hope of which they speak, and also with a respect for the fact that they can also stand on their own as a testimony that is not merely “old” but eternal. Beyond what they reveal about the Messiah, the Hebrew scriptures provide an amazing and crucial context for our history as the people of God who have been on a journey that in some ways hasn’t changed all that much in millennia. The stories, longings, and lamentations that we find in the Old Testament—the kind of material that Matthew continually returns to in his Gospel—are some of the same kinds of stories, longings, and lamentations that we continue to live with. In this living, it’s crucial to engage this text not merely as prelude but rather as a persistently relevant revelation that grounds us in the ancient story of our long wrestling with God.

I find it intriguing, the way that Matthew preserves this ancient and living text. Had the Hebrew scriptures disappeared—God forbid—we still would have had essential fragments of it preserved in his gospel. It’s like having little books within his book, an essential and precious library tucked away within his tale.

The practice of lectio divina invites us to think of our lives as sacred texts that can be read and prayed with in much the same way that we approach a sacred written text such as the Bible. With that understanding, my pondering of this week’s gospel lection has prompted me to wonder about what I’ve preserved in my own interior library. Following Matthew’s lead, what are the texts that help me understand who I am? What words are tucked into the larger story of my life, and how do they influence how I read and live that story? In talking about texts in this context, I’m thinking both of written texts that have impacted me as well as the unwritten texts—the stories, experiences, and understandings through which I interpret my life.

What texts, sacred or otherwise, are preserved in the library of your life? What are the words through which you interpret your story and respond to the world around you? As you move through this world, what experiences and stories do you default to? What are the texts within and beneath the texts, the old and sometimes forgotten stories that influence how you read your present life?

Some of those texts that we carry in our interior library may readily strike us as sacred and life-giving; others may feel burdensome, painful, unlovely to us, and we keep them on the most remote and abandoned shelves. Yet God, that consummate recycler, has a remarkable habit of redemption. Every word of every text we carry, every scrap of every story: God has a place for it, a use for it, a need of it in the ongoing crafting of our tale.

[To use the “Inner Library” 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, lectio divina, lectionary | 2 Comments »

Epiphany 2: Come and See

January 17, 2008

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In recent weeks I have been in fierce, fervent, and sometimes fearful prayer for someone who probably doesn’t know how much he needs it. Enmeshed in dynamics and beset by forces he is not yet able to understand, he hasn’t honed the skills to sort through what’s going on. I’ve been praying that he will perceive the currents that are shaping him. I want God to give him wise eyes.

And pretty darn soon.

Bear in mind that I’ve gotten pretty good at taking the long view of things. Being an oblate of a monastery that draws on the Benedictine tradition, which has been around for more than 1500 years, helps in that regard. So this isn’t a post about my need to cultivate patience until this person sees what he needs to see. And I don’t want to make this a “Wow, I can perceive so clearly what someone else needs, and here I am, missing the log in my own eye, golly!” sort of reflection. I generally take it as a given that there’s always a log in my eye that God is inviting me to work on. (I don’t know that I’ll ever get rid of it; I think perhaps the most I can hope for is to carve it into something artful.)

I will say, however, that reflecting on this week’s Gospel lection has given me pause in the midst of my fierce prayers for this person’s vision. This passage, John 1.29-42, is something of a primer in the art of seeing. From the first sentence, in which John the Baptist sees Jesus, to the last, in which Jesus looks at Simon (and, as a result of his looking, renames him Cephas, or Peter), this lection contains twelve references to seeing or looking. The Greek words that John uses for sight-related verbs carry different shades of meaning; there are different kinds of vision taking place in this passage.

Here’s the sort of seeing that especially intrigues me in this story.

The passage tells us that John the Baptist is standing around with two of his disciples one day. Watching Jesus walk by, he exclaims, “Look, here is the Lamb of God!” His disciples turn and follow Jesus. Perceiving them behind him, Jesus says to them, “What are you looking for?” They don’t say what they’re looking for; I think perhaps they don’t quite know. Instead, they ask him where he is staying.

The disciples aren’t on a Tour of Homes; they’re not interested in simply taking a gander at Jesus’ house. The word they use for staying comes from the Greek word meno, which can also be translated as remain, abide, endure. It’s the same word that John the Baptist just used a few verses ago, when he says that he saw the Spirit descend from heaven and remain on Jesus. Jesus uses the same word in John’s account of the Last Supper when he beckons his disciples to abide in him as he abides in them.

“Where are you staying?” There’s a deeper question beneath their question. I think it translates roughly as, “Who the hell are you?”

Jesus hears this. Answering them in kind, Jesus tells them, “Come and see.”

Come and see.

The word that’s translated here as see comes from the Greek horao. It can be translated as perceive, understand, recognize, experience. It’s a word that connotes more than casual looking. This a kind of seeing that invites us to look closely, to enter fully. It’s the kind of seeing that can transform us.

This kind of seeing rarely happens quickly. We know from the stories of Jesus’ disciples that, though passionate about following him—remaining with him—they weren’t always terribly quick on the uptake. They didn’t always perceive or understand. But, for the most part, they remained with him. And in their remaining, in their abiding with him, they began to see more deeply.

John’s gospel has provided a good tutorial for me as I continue to learn how to pray for this person who desperately needs to learn to see. John’s sight-crammed story, in which the disciples’ seeing is intertwined with movement, with setting out, reminds me that seeing is a process. I’m more mindful these days that if the person for whom I’ve been praying were suddenly able to recognize the forces that are working on him, he wouldn’t have the internal structures to be able to handle it. Not yet. So now, when I’m asking God to help him see, it’s the horao kind of seeing I’m praying for: seeing that is intertwined with the experience and perception and understanding that he needs to gain so that he can sort through what he sees and not have his head explode.

For my part, I’m also chewing on that Greek word meno as I pray. Though I may carry all kinds of clarity about this other person and what I think he needs to see, there is, in the midst of this, an invitation to me to see more deeply, to dig beneath my own stunning clarity. (Does my sarcasm come through here?) I sense that God is beckoning me to ask the same question that John’s disciples asked: Where are you staying? Where are you remaining and enduring?

If I can see that: if I can learn to move more fully into Christ’s invitation to come and see where he is abiding, where he is showing up; if I can learn to see in a horao kind of way that deepens my own experience and understanding, then everything else will fall into place. Eventually.

Come and see.

Posted in art, lectionary | 2 Comments »

Epiphany 1: Ceremony (with a Side of Cake)

January 10, 2008

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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 »

The Feast of the Epiphany: Magi and Mystery

January 6, 2008

Image: Magi and Mystery © Jan Richardson

Merry Epiphany to you! I preached at First United Methodist Church of Winter Park this morning; here’s an approximation of what I shared.

Magi and Mystery
Matthew 2.1-12

We’ve seen them everywhere over the holidays: three regal men, sometimes depicted with camels, bearing gifts that they have traveled hundreds of miles to offer to Jesus. Although their story, which appears in the Gospel of Matthew, is distinct from the nativity story in Luke’s Gospel, and although it’s likely that they didn’t reach Mary, Joseph, and Jesus until Jesus was a couple of years old, these wise travelers are almost always depicted along with the shepherds and others who inhabit the story of the birth of Christ. Christmas cards and nativity sets vividly bring together the stories that Matthew and Luke offer. In the manger scene in my parents’ home, the wise men join not only the shepherds and the traditional cow and donkey who welcome Christ into the world; owing to my mom’s great sense of whimsy, they stand also alongside such creatures as a dinosaur, a moose, and a giraffe. Kind of a “Noah’s Ark meets the Nativity” sort of thing.

We have these really familiar images of these wise men who come to welcome the Christ and lavish him with gifts, but the truth is that Matthew’s Gospel tells us very little about them. Matthew refers to them as “magi,” a word that means wise men or astrologers. We’re not certain where they came from; possibly Persia, about a thousand miles away, where there was a class of priestly folk who were referred to as magi. We’re not sure how many of them there were. Because they offered three gifts, tradition has often assumed there were three wise men (one gift per wise man, please!), but estimates across the centuries have ranged from two to twelve. We don’t even know their names, though legend has called them Gaspar, Melchior, and Balthasar.

The wise men are sometimes referred to as the three kings, a designation that comes not from Matthew’s Gospel but from passages in the Hebrew scriptures that refer to kings who come bearing gifts for a great new ruler.

All this is to say that the magi are shrouded in mystery. In the midst of Matthew’s relative lack of information, we do know these things: they possessed the ability to read the heavens, they felt compelled to follow a star, they traveled a vast distance to welcome and pay homage to Jesus, and they brought him amazing presents.

I’m intrigued by the fact that Matthew, who is so fuzzy on certain details regarding the magi, is very specific about the gifts they brought. This suggests that the gifts are part of Matthew’s whole point in telling the tale of Jesus’ birth. The first hearers and readers of Matthew’s story would have understood the significance of the wise men’s offerings, but, as we ponder the story two millennia later, it’s good to remind ourselves of what these gifts would have meant.

In Jesus’ day, the first gift, gold, had lots of the same connotations that it does for us. It’s precious. It’s lavish. It’s a gift fit for a king. In the Bible, gold is sometimes mentioned in the same breath as royalty. Isaiah and the Psalms refer to kings who bring gold to honor a great ruler. For the wise men, the gift of gold was a way of acknowledging Jesus as a king.

It is, perhaps, a little harder for us to grasp the value of frankincense and myrrh. Both frankincense and myrrh come from the aromatic resin of trees. More bluntly put, they are dried tree sap. What a gift for a child! But in Jesus’ time, they were costly, myrrh especially so. Frankincense was typically used in religious rituals. In Exodus 30, God tells Moses to make an incense that includes frankincense, for use in the tent of meeting, where God meets with the priests; God tells Moses, “It shall be for you most holy.” The wise men’s gift of frankincense symbolizes that God has come in the person of Christ, that Christ himself has become the place of meeting between divinity and humanity.

Myrrh seems like perhaps the strangest gift of all. In Jesus’ time, it was especially associated with funerals and was used in the process of preparing a body for burial. In the New Testament, the only mentions of myrrh, besides today’s reading, are in the gospels of Mark and John, in connection with Jesus’ crucifixion and death. This seems a curious gift for a young child, and I have to wonder if this gift haunted Jesus a bit. Though it carries some foreshadowing of what will happen to Jesus, I think the magi intended it not as a morbid gift but rather as a reminder to Jesus that, even for him, earthly life is brief, and we are called to use it well.

On this day of Epiphany, as we set off into the new year, I want to invite us to think of the wise men’s gifts to Jesus as gifts for us as well. These gifts, rich with symbolism, have invitations for us who seek to follow Christ, who are the body of Christ. I want to suggest that within these gifts, so rich with significance and symbolism, are questions that can accompany us into this new year.

The gift of gold, the gift that recognized Jesus was as a king, invites us to consider the question: Who were you born to be? This is perhaps the most crucial and most complicated question of our lives. Some of the most interesting people I know are those who, well along in their journey, are actively discerning who God has called them to be. When I was in seminary, half of my classmates were what we call “second career students,” folks who had been doing some other work in the world before discerning a call that involved theological training. I entered seminary straight out of college, very wet behind the ears, and it was a wonderfully rich experience to be in classes with folks in their 40s, 50s, and 60s. They were a great reminder that this process of becoming who we were born to be is a lifelong adventure. That’s true even for those of us who carry a strong sense of what we’re called to do. I tend to be really focused—I sometimes think of it as Attention Surplus Disorder—and have always had some sense of what I’ve wanted to do. What I wanted to do went through some changes before I discerned a call to ordained ministry, but I can see the common thread linking those vocations I was interested in. Even now, in a vocation that has taken me deeply into who I believe I was born to be, I’m still growing into my understanding of that call.

The gift of frankincense, the gift that recognized Jesus as the one who is a meeting place of humanity and divinity, invites us to ponder the question: How do you want to encounter God? This kind of question is at the core of the Connect theme that we’re living with at First Church. As we set out into this new year, how might you seek to stay connected with God, within and beyond this congregation?

The gift of myrrh, the gift that recognized that even for Jesus, earthly life is brief, a twinkling of an eye, invites us to reflect on the question, What is your relationship with time? How do you enter into your days in a way that helps you discern who you are and helps you seek God? Annie Dillard writes that “how we spend our days is, after all, how we spend our lives.” She also writes, “Live every day as if it were your last and then someday you’ll be right.”

So, a trinity of questions for this new year:

Who were you born to be?

How do you want to encounter God?

What is your relationship with time?

Carrying the crucial questions can be uncomfortable. It’s not always easy to live with mystery, but I’ve found that a good question can carry me a long way. It invites me to rely on God to show me the path, rather than thinking I should always rely on myself to know everything and do everything.

The magi didn’t show up with maps; they brought gifts that helped Jesus know who he was. Like the wise men, who had to travel by another road when they left Jesus, we may find ourselves on some strange and unfamiliar and mapless paths when we seek to follow Christ. But in his company, we will, like those wise travelers, find our way home.

[To use the image “Magi and Mystery,” 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, holidays, lectionary, mystery, sacred time | 1 Comment »

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