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Lent 2: Born of Water, Born of Spirit

March 17, 2011


Born of Water, Born of Spirit © Jan L. Richardson

Reading from the Gospels, Lent 2 (March 20): John 3.1-17

Very sorry to be posting late in the week. I am easily distracted by shiny objects, and one came in the form of an enticing project that consumed the first part of my week. More on that in another post. Amidst it all, I have had Nicodemus and his nighttime visit with Jesus much on my mind.

We are just barely into Lent, a season suffused with wilderness and desert. Yet with its imagery of water and of Spirit, this Sunday’s Gospel lection brings us a welcome reminder that God provides sustenance to us in every season.

This text from John’s Gospel invites us to eavesdrop on the visit that Nicodemus pays to Jesus shortly after Jesus clears out the temple. The fact that Jesus and Nicodemus have their conversation at night seems fitting not just because the darkness offers a measure of protection and secrecy for Nicodemus, away from the eyes of his fellow Pharisees, but because Jesus speaks here of a mystery. In response to the question that Nicodemus asks about being born anew, Jesus does not really provide a clear explanation. Yet in his words about water and Spirit, about birthing and love, Jesus offers something better than an explanation: he extends to Nicodemus, and to us, an invitation to a relationship and to a journey of transformation.

I have contemplated this nighttime passage a couple of times previously, at Lent 2: In Which We Get Goosed and Lent 4: The Serpent in the Text, and invite you to visit those reflections. I don’t have many new words to say about this text, but I did get into the studio this week to create a collage and was glad for the ways the text drew me in some new directions into the story and into my art.

I want also to wish you a blessed Saint Patrick’s Day! I have written previously about this beloved saint at Feast of Saint Patrick and invite you to stop by and especially to click on the audio player near the end of that reflection; “Patrick on the Water” is a marvelous song that my husband, Garrison Doles, wrote for a Wellspring service that we did in celebration of St. Patrick.

Speaking of Garrison, his most recent CD also includes a song inspired by this week’s Gospel. Click the player below to hear “O Nicodemus” from his CD House of Prayer:

This week offers many reminders of God’s provision and love. And so, by water and Spirit born and blessed, may you be a living sign of that love, and a blessing to those whose path you cross.

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

Resources for the season: Looking toward Lent

And blogging daily at Sanctuary of Women during Lent…

Posted in art, Celtic, Gospel of John, lectionary, Lent, mystery | 4 Comments »

Lent 1: A Blessing for the Wilderness

March 10, 2011

Wilderness and WingsImage: Wilderness and Wings © Jan Richardson

Reading from the Gospels, Lent 1 (March 13): Matthew 4.1-11

The first time they met, they were in the waters of their mothers’ wombs. On that day, John had leaped with joy at the presence of his cousin Jesus. Now the kinsmen stand together by other waters. On this day that they meet at the Jordan, they see each other with different eyes. There is a deeper knowing in their gaze, and in their recognition of each other a joy perhaps no less keen than at the first but with a wiser edge. Here at the river, John and Jesus have lived out nearly their entire lives. Yet there is still much to do; everything to do.

And so, grudgingly at first, but then with understanding, John the Baptist plunges Jesus beneath the surface. This, at least, he can do for his cousin, can help prepare him for the way that lies ahead of him. John speaks the words of blessing and initiation, raises Jesus dripping from the depths, hears the voice that proclaims from heaven, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”

And then the kinsmen go their separate ways. Where we might expect the freshly baptized Jesus to begin his public ministry, there is instead a curious sort of inversion that takes place: Jesus goes into the wilderness, the landscape that had long been home to his locust-and-honey-eating cousin. There is something he needs there, a way that yet must be prepared within him.

Here at the outset of Lent, what can you see of the landscape that lies ahead of you? Might there be another place you need to go, physically or in your soul, before you are ready to enter the landscape that calls you? Is there a space—a season, a terrain, a ritual—of preparation that you need; a place where you can find clarity, and perhaps a ministering angel or two? What might this look like?

Wilderness Blessing

Let us say
this blessing began
whole and complete
upon the page.

And then let us say
that one word loosed itself
and another followed it
in turn.

Let us say
this blessing started
to shed all
it did not need,

that line by line
it returned
to the ground
from which it came.

Let us say
this blessing is not
leaving you,
is not abandoning you
to the wild
that lies ahead,

but that it is loathe
to load you down
on this road where
you will need
to travel light.

Let us say
perhaps this blessing
became the path
beneath your feet,
the desert
that stretched before you,
the clear sight
that finally came.

Let us say
that when this blessing
at last came to its end,
all it left behind
was bread,
wine,
a fleeting flash
of wing.

—Jan Richardson

2016 update: “Wilderness Blessing” appears in my new book Circle of Grace: A Book of Blessings for the Seasons. You can find the book here.

P.S. For previous reflections on Lent 1, please see Lent 1: Discernment and Dessert in the Desert, Lent 1: A River Runs through Him, and Lent 1: Into the Wilderness.

You are welcome to use “Wilderness Blessing” in worship. Thanks for including a brief credit line with this info: © Jan Richardson. janrichardson.com

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

Resources for the season: Looking toward Lent

Blogging also at Sanctuary of Women during Lent…

Posted in art, Gospel of Matthew, lectionary, Lent, mystery | 1 Comment »

The Memory of Ashes

March 6, 2011

Image: Ash Wednesday © Jan Richardson

Readings for Ash Wednesday: Joel 2:1-2, 12-17; Psalm 51:1-17;
2 Corinthians 5:20b – 6:10; Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21

All week the scent of orange blossoms has been coming through the bedroom window. The smell is rooted deep in my memory; I come from generations of citrus growers. I think that even if I had grown up far from the groves whose fragrance infused my childhood, something ancestral in my blood would stir at the scent that has been attending these past days.

Earlier in the week, the scent of orange blossoms was tinged with smoke. There’s a fire blazing to the north of us. It’s just one of more than 60 active wildfires burning around our parched state, but it’s a doozy: about 25 miles north of the Kennedy Space Center, it has scorched around 17,000 acres of land. They’re calling it the Iron Horse Fire, so dubbed by a supervisor at the Florida Division of Forestry who named it after a bar in Ormond Beach that’s especially popular during Bike Week. “The fire is not near the bar,” the Division of Forestry’s website emphasizes. “It is much farther south, but the supervisor figured he would be at the fire instead of the Bike Week events, which started Friday.”

Here on the threshold of Lent, the scent of blossom and blazing offers a vivid point of entry into the coming season; a sort of olfactory invocation for the days ahead. More than any other season of  the liturgical year, Lent draws us into a landscape that is distinctive for the ways that it intertwines extremes and calls our attention to how brokenness and beauty, horror and hope dwell intimately together. We will see this exemplified in next Sunday’s gospel reading, which takes Jesus—and us—into a stark wilderness where Satan comes to visit, but where angels do, too.

Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of this bittersweet season. Ashes are the first sign and symbol of Lent, but they are not the final word. Come Wednesday, we will bear this mark of what has been left behind from the burning, this reminder of the dust and earth from which we rise and to which we will return. Yet even the ash—which in many churches comes from burning the Palm Sunday branches of the previous year—has a memory of its own. Deep within its darkness and dust lies the imprint of green, the memory of life, the awareness of what has gone before and of what may yet be.

Ash Wednesday propels us into a season that inspires us to learn once again that what God creates and graces and blesses may be beset and broken but not destroyed. Life finds its way: ancient memory takes hold, follows the path of the ash, inscribes itself anew, beauty blazing from the wreck and ruin. “We are treated…as dying,” Paul writes in the Ash Wednesday reading from the Epistles, “and see—we are alive; as punished and yet not killed; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing everything.”

And you: here on the threshold of Lent, amid the ashes, what do you possess? As we enter this season that pares our lives down to what is absolutely essential and basic and elemental, what do you hold as most important? Is there anything you need to allow to become ash, that it may be transformed into something new? Beneath what seems dying or destroyed, what life might yet take hold?

Blessing for Ash Wednesday

So let the ashes come
as beginning
and not as end;
the first sign
but not the final.
Let them rest upon you
as invocation and invitation,
and let them take you
the way that ashes know
to go.

May they mark you
with the memory of fire
and of the life
that came before the burning:
the life that rises and returns
and finds its way again.

See what shimmers
amid their darkness,
what endures
within their dust.
See how they draw us
toward the mystery
that will consume
but not destroy,
that will blossom
from the blazing,
that will scorch us
with its joy.

—Jan Richardson

[For previous reflections on Ash Wednesday, please see Upon the Ashes, The Artful Ashes and Ash Wednesday, Almost. To use the “Ash Wednesday” image, please visit this page at janrichardsonimages.com. Your use of janrichardsonimages.com helps make the ministry of The Painted Prayerbook possible. Thank you!]

P.S. I’m posting regular reflections over at my Sanctuary of Women blog during Lent and would be delighted to have your company there as well!

Resources for the season: Looking toward Lent

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

Looking toward Lent

March 5, 2011

The Blessing Cups: Jesus and Mary Magdalene at TeaImage: The Blessing Cups: Mary Magdalene and Jesus at Tea
© Jan Richardson

With Ash Wednesday approaching, it’s time for a little Lenten housekeeping here at The Painted Prayerbook, as has become our custom at this point in the year. As we move into the coming season, I want to let you know about a few offerings that I have available—books, artwork, and other resources that I’ve created to draw you more deeply into the coming days. So have a cup of tea and sit for a spell while I share what’s been stirring in the studio…

A LITERARY LENT: It has been wonderful to hear from folks—men as well as women—who are reading my latest book, In the Sanctuary of Women. Many of them are reading it together in groups, including some who are using it as a way to stay connected across the distance by phone or online. Whether you read it alone or with others, the book offers a space for contemplation and conversation in the company of women from around the world and across the centuries. To order, click In the Sanctuary of Women or the cover below. And I’d be delighted to you have your company over at my Sanctuary of Women blog, where I’ll be posting frequently during Lent.

Published through my small press, Garden of Hollows: Entering the Mysteries of Lent & Easter offers artwork and reflections on the sacred texts and themes of the coming season. To order, visit Wanton Gospeller Press or click the cover below.

I am delighted to share the news that my book Night Visions: Searching the Shadows of Advent and Christmas has recently come back into print. With original artwork, reflections, poetry, and prayers, Night Visions is a companion for the journey from the beginning of Advent to the Feast of the Epiphany. Readers have told me that it works well during Lent, too! To order, visit Books or click the cover.

Be sure to check out the sidebar to the right for more books and other resources that provide good company for the season.

IMAGES ONLINE: Jan Richardson Images is a website that makes all my artwork easily accessible for use in worship, education, and related settings. You’ll find lots of images for Lent and Easter as well as the rest of the year. In addition to individual downloads, we offer an annual subscription that provides unlimited access to images (within the guidelines for use) for a year.

ART PRINTS: The Art Prints pages on my main website offer a variety of prints for Lent and Easter, including the images from Garden of Hollows. You can also order prints at Jan Richardson Images (which includes all the artwork I’ve created for The Painted Prayerbook); go to any image and click “Prints & Products.”

eNEWSLETTER: I periodically send out an e-newsletter, often in connection with the liturgical year. It includes a seasonal reflection, artwork, information about current offerings and upcoming events, and whatever else strikes my creative fancy. I would be pleased to include you in my mailing list and to stay connected with you in this way. You can sign up for the list here.

GRATITUDE: Many kind thanks for visiting The Painted Prayerbook and for the companionship you provide along the path. Your comments, emails, prayers, and presence are gifts for the journey and manna on my way. Know that you are present in my prayers. I wish you a blessed Lent.

Posted in art, books, Easter, lectionary, Lent | Leave a Comment »

Transfiguration Sunday: There and Back Again

February 28, 2011


Jan + Garrison in Iowa

Reading from the Gospels, Transfiguration Sunday, Year A (March 6): Matthew 17.1-9

Gary and I are settling back in after being away recently for a wonderful trip to the Midwest. We seem to be establishing a tradition of leaving Florida in February for colder climes; last year we were in Minnesota in February, and this year it was Iowa, where the temperature actually climbed into the low 60s while we were there! By the time we left, all the snow that you see in this picture had pretty well melted. We were the guests of Iowa Wesleyan College, where I served as this year’s speaker for the Manning Lecture Series and as artist-in-residence for the week. Gary (who also did some concerts around Iowa) and I collaborated on some of the events and greatly enjoyed the time we spent with students, faculty, clergy, and folks from the surrounding community. In the studio, the chapel, the classroom, and the table, we received tremendous hospitality and are grateful to everyone who offered us such a warm welcome.

Our trip capped a great but intense stretch of speaking engagements, which accounts for my absence from The Painted Prayerbook in recent weeks. I have missed you! I am glad for the chance to take some Sabbath time as I settle back in, and am also eager to dive into some creative work that I’ve been itching to get to. I’ll be cooking up some new artwork and reflections here for Lent and look forward to sharing the coming season with you.

As I reenter my life here, absorbing and reflecting on what I received in Iowa,  it seems fitting that this Sunday is the Feast of the Transfiguration. The disciples who went up the mountain with Jesus and down again had to do in a dramatic way what each of us is called to do in our daily lives: to be drawn to those places where we see and know Christ with greater clarity—the mountain, the Midwest—and then to return to the rhythm of our lives, absorbing what we have seen and allowing it to infuse how we perceive and enter into our ordinary days.

As we approach Transfiguration Sunday, how are you navigating that journey in your own life? Where are you letting Christ draw you, that you may glimpse him more clearly? How does this change the way you move through your daily life? Are you open to how Christ might yet surprise and stun you with his appearing?

I have a couple of previous reflections on the Transfiguration and invite you to visit them while I hunker down in my studio and prepare for the coming season. You can click on the images or the titles below to find your way.

In this week, may Christ our Light illumine and transform your daily path. Blessings.

Transfiguration: Back to the Drawing Board

Transfiguration Sunday: Show and (Don’t) Tell

Posted in art, Gospel of Matthew, lectionary, Lent | 3 Comments »

Snowed Under

February 25, 2010


Jan + Garrison in Minnesota

This week finds me settling back in from a splendid trip to Virginia. Many thanks to Deborah Lewis, director of The Wesley Foundation at the University of Virginia, and to Elizabeth Foss, pastor of Wesley Memorial United Methodist Church in Charlottesville, for collaborating on the events of this past weekend and for their excellent hospitality. Between this trip and my recent foray to Minnesota with Gary, this Floridian has gotten a lovely dose of winter.

I’ve quite enjoyed being back in the blogging groove the past few months, but once again I am coming up against certain realities involved in major commitments I’ve made. The recent travels, combined with planning Gary’s and my wedding this spring (wahoo!), looking for a house that we can make a home (we signed the lease yesterday), and finally wrapping up the last few pieces of my new book (the main part of which I sent to the publisher months ago, but the final bits have been lingering…), are making for a pretty wild pace. I say all this simply to let you know that things may be a little sporadic here at The Painted Prayerbook for a bit. Please don’t go too far; though I may not be able to post on a weekly basis just now, I’ll continue to offer new art and reflections as I can.

In the midst of the sporadic-ness, I want to let you know that I still have plenty of resources on hand to accompany you through the days of Lent and Easter. There are lots of images for the season (and the whole year) over at Jan Richardson Images, where you can download individual images or, with an annual subscription, you can have unlimited access to all the images for a year. You can browse previous blog reflections for the season at Painted Prayerbook-Lent and Painted Prayerbook-Easter. Copies of my book Garden of Hollows: Entering the Mysteries of Lent & Easter are available through Amazon.com or directly from me.

For other Lenten offerings, including art prints, I invite you to visit my post Looking toward Lent.

In other news, I want to mention that I’m booking a limited number of retreats and workshops for Fall 2010 through Spring 2011. I travel in whatever direction the Spirit blows, so if you’d like to be in conversation about an event, I’d love to talk with you. You can contact me by leaving a comment below (if you’re contacting me specifically to inquire about scheduling an event, know that I won’t publish the comment but will respond to you directly). I’m particularly working to offer events with Garrison Doles, an amazing musician and creative collaborator who brings many gifts to this kind of setting. You can find out more about his ministry and hear his music at the Song Chapel.

Please know that I’m holding you in prayer in these Lenten days and am grateful for your prayers and good thoughts for me in this wild and wondrous time. Blessings!

Posted in Lent | 8 Comments »

Lent 1: Into the Wilderness

February 14, 2010

Into EarthImage: Into Earth © Jan Richardson

Reading from the Gospels, Lent 1, Year C (Feb. 14): Luke 4.1-13

From time to time I receive requests to create new artwork for a project. I love receiving these inquiries and am always grateful when they come my way. I sometimes find myself intrigued, however, by the assumptions within a request.

“We need it quite soon, but it’s pretty simple,” the lovely person might say.

So you can dive right in and it shouldn’t take you long, I hear between the lines.

I will tell you this: it’s often the pieces that look the simplest that take the longest to create. It seems counterintuitive, I know. It came as something of a surprise to me when I first began to learn it, and I sometimes wrestle with the truth of it still. How can an image that has only a few parts sometimes take so much time and space to make?

The answer lies on my drafting table, in the pile of discarded scraps that grows larger each time I work on a collage. The challenge of creating a piece of art lies not just in deciding what to include but also in discerning what to leave out. Every piece of art involves a process of choosing: not this, not this, not this. I can only find what belongs by clearing away everything that doesn’t.

This is no speedy endeavor.

On an intimate scale, it’s much like the kind of discernment that we see Jesus engaged in as we follow him into the wilderness on the first Sunday of Lent. Still dripping with the waters of the Jordan in which his cousin John has just baptized him, Jesus sets off on a sojourn that continues his initiation into his public ministry. For forty days, Luke tells us, the devil besets Jesus with temptations. Jesus’ adversary is cunning in the way he presents choices designed to appeal to someone with a desire for earthly power: Want to rule the world? the devil asks; this is what you need to do; this is what belongs to you.

The devil’s temptations show that he knows the words of scripture well. Jesus’ responses, however, reveal that he knows more: he understands the heart of the sacred texts. And here in the wilderness, the one who has steeped himself in those texts begins to understand how the ancient words of God are to take flesh in him as the living and incarnate Word of God. Once, twice, and yet a third time: with every temptation, Jesus responds to the devil: not this, not this, not this. With each response he names what does not belong to him; with each answer he gains clarity about what he needs to empty himself of in order to be who he has come here to be.

When he emerges from this wild space, when he has completed this liminal time of fasting and praying and wrestling and waiting, Jesus has a clarity that could not have come otherwise. It has taken a long time, this emptying, this clearing out, this letting go of what doesn’t belong in order to find what does. But in taking the time, in venturing into that place, Jesus has found what he needs. As he enters his public ministry, he possesses a picture that is more complete, more whole. From discerning not this, not this, not this, he can now say, this.

Since I’m telling creative secrets this week, I’ll tell you this one as well: as I worked on this week’s collage, I was thinking of Joan Sauro’s lovely book Whole Earth Meditation, in which she offers an evocative exploration of the connections between the landscape within us and the landscape around us. I wound up going in a different direction with my reflection than I had anticipated—and thus we come to another not-so-secret secret of the creative process (and life): things don’t always go as planned. We may have to empty ourselves even of our attachment to our hopes, our expectations, our desired outcomes; sometimes we have to say not this to what we have most treasured, in order to make way for what truly belongs.

Yet Sauro’s words infuse this collage, are embedded in its landscape, and go with me as I cross the season into Lent: words about entering our inner terrain and finding the presence of God amidst the layers. Go to the place called barren, she writes. Stand in the place called empty. And you will find God there.

The Spirit of God breathes everywhere within you, just as in the beginning, filling light place and dark…green earth and dry. Thus does God renew the face of the earth. God always breaks through at your weakest point, where you least resist. God’s love grows, fullness upon fullness, where you crumble enough to give what is most dear. Your earth.

As we enter into the landscape that the season of Lent offers us, what’s stirring in your own interior terrain? What part of your earth might God be inviting you to open up or allow to give way? Is there something you need to let go of, something(s) to which you need to say not this, not this, not this, in order to make way for this? Is there a wild space—inner or outer—that would help you choose what you need for a more whole life?

May your Lenten path draw you deep into the landscape that God desires for you. Blessings.

[For earlier reflections on this story in Matthew and Mark, please see Lent 1: Discernment and Dessert in the Desert and Lent 1: A River Runs through Him. To use the “Into Earth” image, please visit this page at janrichardsonimages.com. Your use of janrichardsonimages.com helps make the ministry of The Painted Prayerbook possible. Thank you!]

Resources for the season: Looking toward Lent

Posted in art, Gospel of Luke, lectionary, Lent | 10 Comments »

Upon the Ashes

February 12, 2010

Image: Ash Wednesday © Jan Richardson

Readings for Ash Wednesday: Joel 2:1-2, 12-17; Psalm 51:1-17;
2 Corinthians 5:20b – 6:10; Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21

As we approach Ash Wednesday, I’ve found myself thinking about Sojourner Truth.

Born into slavery in New York around 1797 with the name Isabella Baumfree, the girl who would become Sojourner had ten or twelve siblings whom she only knew from stories told by her mother, “Mau-mau Bett.” Their slaveholder had sold away all the children except for Isabella and her younger brother Peter. In 1828, after being sold herself and later escaping, Isabella was emancipated and moved to New York City.

After living there for more than a decade, Isabella experienced a call from the Spirit to travel and lecture. She desired a new name that would reflect her new vocation. Saying that she had left everything behind, and wasn’t going to keep anything of Egypt on her, she went to the Lord and asked him for a new name. “And the Lord gave me Sojourner,” she said, “because I was to travel up and down the land, showing the people their sins, and being a sign unto them. Afterward I told the Lord I wanted another name, because everybody else had two names; and the Lord gave me Truth, because I was to declare truth to the people.” Sojourner Truth became a fiery preacher, orator, and abolitionist.

One day, while preparing for a speech at the town-house in Angola, Indiana, she heard that someone had threatened to burn down the building if she spoke there. “Then I will speak upon the ashes,” Sojourner replied.

They are a curious thing, ashes; they are terrible and remarkable by turns.

Ashes come as a reminder of the ways that humans across history have been horrible to one another, of how we have, with an awful finesse, reduced to literal ashes one another’s homes, buildings, cities, histories, and very bodies.

Ashes can also be a thing of wonder. This day in the Christian year, this day of ashes, tells us that ashes—dust, dirt, earth—are the stuff from which we have been made, and to which we will return. This day, and the season it heralds, seeks to ground us, to make us mindful of the humus, the humility, the earthiness of which our bones and flesh are made. And yet, in the midst of this, the season calls us to open ourselves to the God who brings life from ashes, who works wonders amid destruction, who cries out and grieves in the presence of devastation and terror, and who breathes God’s own spirit into the rubble. It is this God who breathes into us, calling our awful and glorious ash-strewn selves to speak words of life and freedom and healing amid violence and pain. Like Sojourner. Like Jesus.

As servants of God we have commended ourselves in every way, Paul writes in a passage the lectionary gives us for this day:

through great endurance, in afflictions, hardships, calamities,
beatings, imprisonments, riots, labors, sleepless nights, hunger;

and I can hear Sojourner, who knew such conditions so well, calling out in answer,

Then I will speak upon the ashes.

by purity, Paul writes, knowledge, patience, kindness, holiness of spirit,
genuine love, truthful speech, and the power of God;

and I can imagine Sojourner, speaker of Truth, crying out in response,

Then I will speak upon the ashes.

with the weapons of righteousness for the right hand and for the left;
in honor and dishonor, in ill repute and good repute.

I will speak upon the ashes.

We are treated as impostors, and yet are true;
as unknown, and yet are well known;

I will speak

as dying, and see—we are alive;
as punished, and yet not killed;
as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing;

upon the ashes.

as poor, yet making many rich;
as having nothing, and yet possessing everything.

Then I will speak upon the ashes.

On this day of ashes, we do well to remember that we, who are made of such stuff, are capable—every one of us—of inflicting pain and destruction. Thinking we are above it makes us all the more prone to it. Yet this day reminds us, too, that God knows what to do with ashes, knows what can come from them. As we cross into the season of Lent, how will we give our ashy selves to the God who longs to breathe new life into us and into the world? Where is God calling us to be a presence of healing amid devastation? How is God challenging us to stand against the forces that deny freedom, the forces that still, more than a century after Sojourner, seek the silence and captivity of others? What ashes is God calling us to speak upon?

In this season, what will we say?

May God work wonders amid our ashes in these coming Lenten days. Blessings.

[For earlier reflections on Ash Wednesday, please see The Artful Ashes and Ash Wednesday, Almost. To use the “Ash Wednesday” image, please visit this page at janrichardsonimages.com. Your use of janrichardsonimages.com helps make the ministry of The Painted Prayerbook possible. Thank you!]

Resources for the season: Looking toward Lent

Posted in art, lectionary, Lent, sacred time | 18 Comments »

Looking toward Lent

February 12, 2010

With Ash Wednesday just around the corner, it seems a good time to do a spot of housekeeping here at The Painted Prayerbook. I have a few artful offerings for Lent that I want to let you know about, along with some related news.

ORIGINAL ART: The artwork above is a series of charcoals that I did a few years ago for Peter Storey’s book Listening at Golgotha. Peter is a former bishop of the Methodist Church of Southern Africa and served as the chaplain to Nelson Mandela during his years in prison. In this book, Peter offers a powerful series of reflections on the Seven Last Words of Jesus. The original artwork is available for sale (as an intact series), beautifully matted and framed. Great for a church, chapel, or other space for devotion/worship, especially during Lent and Holy Week. For more information, visit The Seven Last Words Series. [Update: I am delighted to share that the series is now permanently installed at Duke Divinity School.]

ART PRINTS: All of the images from The Seven Last Words Series are available as prints; check out the Art Prints page on my website. Prints of The Lenten Series (illustrations from my book Garden of Hollows) are also available on my site, along with plenty of other images. You can also now order prints at janrichardsonimages.com (including prints of all the artwork on this blog); go to any image and click “Prints & Products.”

A LITERARY LENT: Published through my small press, Garden of Hollows: Entering the Mysteries of Lent & Easter offers artwork and reflections on the sacred texts and themes of the coming season. You can read excerpts and order at Wanton Gospeller Press.

IMAGES ONLINE: The site Jan Richardson Images makes all my artwork easily accessible for use in worship, education, and related settings. You’ll find lots of images for Lent and Easter as well as the rest of the year.

eNEWSLETTER: I send out an occasional e-newsletter. It includes a seasonal reflection, artwork, information about current offerings and upcoming events, and whatever else strikes my creative fancy. I would be delighted to include you in my mailing list if you haven’t already subscribed. You can sign up here.

COMING ATTRACTIONS: I’m looking forward to heading to Virginia to offer some events next week (if the weather is willing!) and will head to Washington State and Nevada later this year. If you’re in the vicinity, please come join us! More info at Upcoming Events.

GRATITUDE: Deep thanks to you for visiting The Painted Prayerbook and for the sustenance and companionship you provide along the way. Your comments, emails, prayers, and presence are manna on my path. Know that you are present in my prayers, and I wish you a most blessed Lenten season.

Posted in art, Lent, sacred time | 1 Comment »

Easter 2: The Secret Room

April 13, 2009

blog-thesecretroomImage: The Secret Room © Jan Richardson

Reading from the Gospels, Easter 2: John 20.19-31

In his book The Art of Pilgrimage, Phil Cousineau writes that in every pilgrimage, there is a secret room, a place along the path that gives us insight into the deep mystery of our journey. In describing this hidden room, Cousineau draws on a story that poet Donald Hall tells of friends who purchased an old farmhouse. Cousineau writes,

It was a ‘warren of small rooms,’ and once they settled in and began to furnish their new home they realized that the lay of the house made little sense. ‘Peeling off some wallpaper, they found a door that they pried open to reveal a tiny room, sealed off and hidden, goodness knows why: They found no corpses nor stolen goods.’ For Hall, the mystery of poetry to evoke powerful feelings finds its analogy here, in its ability to be sealed away from explanation, this is the place where ‘the unsayable gathers.’

And so it is on the pilgrim’s path. Everywhere you go, there is a secret room. To discover it, you must knock on walls, as the detective does in mystery houses, and listen for the echo that portends the secret passage. You must pull books off shelves to see if the library shelf swings open to reveal the hidden room.

I’ll say it again: Everywhere has a secret room. You must find your own, in a small chapel, a tiny cafe, a quiet park, the home of a new friend, the pew where the morning light strikes the rose window just so.

As a pilgrim you must find it or you will never understand the hidden reasons why you really left home.

It is the day after Easter Sunday. I savored sleeping in this morning and am now in my writer’s nook at the top of the stairs, gazing out the window as I ponder the season past. I think of the pilgrimage these forty Lenten days led me on, the twists and turns they offered, the questions and challenges they posed, the graces they beckoned me to see.

Where was the secret room?

I think of a day in the week just past, when I went with my sweetheart to the Morse Museum of American Art in Winter Park, not far from where I live. The primary draw of the Morse is its collection of works by Louis Comfort Tiffany, the artist famed for his stained glass designs. I have always liked Tiffany well enough—a poster of one of his windows accompanied me through a succession of dorm rooms and apartments in college—but in more recent years found I had a somewhat limited affinity for this kind of work. I thought it was pretty, in an ornamental fashion, but didn’t go much beyond that.

I had, however, changed as an artist since the last time I had walked through the museum’s doors, had begun to work in ways that—I came to realize—altered the way that I saw Tiffany’s work. And so I found myself in front of one of his windows last week, leaning in close, pulling back, leaning in again. I was stunned by his line work, the loose style so markedly different from the stained glass designs of previous centuries. His lines captivated the part of me that had begun to work in charcoal since I’d last been to the museum, and had become fascinated with how the lay of a line—how it turns this way, then that—can convey a whole world.

And, between the lines, was the remarkable glass, so distinctive of Tiffany, who radicalized the manufacture of stained glass and turned each fragment into an art form in itself. I spent a long moment at a table that offered pieces of Tiffany glass to touch. Every piece a different texture—smooth, coarse, rippled, ridged. A fragment that so looked like flame that its coolness seemed incongruous. I ran my hand over each piece, each a living link with its maker, each an embodiment of his vision and daring, each a window onto the mysterious crucible that gives rise to art, each a threshold beckoning me deeper into my own creative path and reminding me why I set out on it in the first place.

This week’s gospel lection offers us a secret room, and, with it, an invitation to touch, to cross more deeply into Jesus’ story and our own. John tells of a room in which the disciples gather—a locked room, for fear. For secrets. And there, in their midst, Jesus appears, offering his hands and side, offering peace, offering the Holy Spirit, breathing into them (“and God breathed into his nostrils the breath of life,” John means for us to remember). But Thomas is gone, John tells us, and will not believe unless he sees. So Jesus returns a week later, slides through the shut doors of the secret room, shows himself to Thomas. “Put your finger here and see my hands,” Jesus says, as if touching and seeing are one and the same. “Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.”

History has labeled this disciple Doubting Thomas, as if his uncertainty were the most memorable thing about this follower of Jesus who, elsewhere, is the first to step up and say he is willing to die with him (John 11.1-16). Yet Jesus, as is his way, gives Thomas what he needs. In Jesus’ hands, in Jesus’ side, Thomas reaches into a secret room, a place that, though “sealed away from explanation,” as Cousineau writes, makes some kind of sense of the long pilgrimage that Thomas has undertaken with Jesus, to whom he is now able to say, “My Lord and my God!”

And you? Did the pilgrimage through Lent offer you a secret room? Somewhere along the way, did you find a place that offered, not an explanation of your path, but a window onto it, a space within it that enabled you to see it anew, and the one who called you there? Where was it, and what did you find there? How does it illuminate the way before you?

In the weeks to come, may we remember that Easter is not just a day but rather a season. May the gift and challenge of resurrection go with you, and may the path ahead be graced with secret rooms.

[To use the image “Secret Room,” 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, Easter, Gospel of John, lectionary, Lent, mystery, poetry | 8 Comments »

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