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Knock, Knock

February 18, 2008

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Recently, in opening a book that I hadn’t looked at in a few years, I came across this scrap of paper. The book in which I found it is a large one that I keep tucked beside my drafting table, in one of those nooks that I’ve had to carve out as a reader who lives in a small space. I was a little perplexed as to how the scrap got there; normally I don’t use charcoal-laden paper as a bookmark, and I hadn’t opened the book since sometime before I had charcoaled those words in the first place. I think the scrap must have fallen off my drafting table at just the right angle to wedge itself between the pages.

Here in the season of Lent, it was a curious piece to come across, with its stark, ashy letters and its mention of sackcloth. This was an early practice piece from a series I did a couple of years ago. Inspired by medieval illuminated Apocalypses, I created a series of a dozen pieces that incorporated charcoal drawing and lettering. It was the first time I had combined letters with my charcoal work, and it took—well, let’s just say it took a loooooong time to work out the challenges that came in doing the layouts for those pieces. (See the results at The Intimate Apocalypse.)

As I worked on designing the lettering style (typically called a hand) for this series, I went through some old issues of a wondrous magazine called Letter Arts Review. Looking at LAR tends to be a mixed experience for me. It’s a source of inspiration and a way of cultivating my visual vocabulary. At the same time, I don’t think I’ve ever gotten through a whole issue without feeling stabs of envy at the amazing work that others have done.

I’m learning to engage envy as I (try to) engage any other difficult emotion: as a signal, an invitation, a message that there’s something here I need to work on. I find that envy offers a couple possible messages. When I feel envious of the work of others, it might be an invitation to stretch into a new direction in my own work. At the same time, envy may be challenging me to become more clear about my own direction, my sense of creative vision, my own call. In this case, envy over another person’s work beckons me to go deeper into my own work.

The creative process is, of course, a form of practice. Dealing with envy and other challenging emotions that emerge along the path of our practice is, in itself, a form of practice; it’s part of the process of honing our focus and wrestling with what distracts us. If I give it some attention, try to listen to what it has to tell me, envy can deepen my practice; if I ignore it or if I obsess over it, it can sabotage my practice.

There’s a poem by Rumi that I keep returning to as I continue to learn what it means to practice. In Coleman Barks’s version of Rumi’s poem “The Sunrise Ruby” (from The Essential Rumi), the poet writes about how giving ourselves to a daily practice is like knocking on a door:

Keep knocking, and the joy inside
will eventually open a window
and look out to see who’s there.

But here’s the catch: we need to be knocking on our own door, not someone else’s. We can visit other doors, peek across their thresholds for inspiration and guidance, and converse with those who dwell inside. If, however, I’m going to move deeper into the work that I’m here to do—if, as Rumi writes, I’m going to find what dwells on the other side of the door—I need to cultivate the particular practices that will work for me, not for someone else.

How do you discern which door to knock on? What practice or practices help you discover and move deeper into the work that is yours to do?

A blessing upon your knocking.

Posted in art, Lent | 1 Comment »

Lent 2: In Which We Get Goosed

February 13, 2008

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Of Water and Spirit © Jan L. Richardson

This afternoon I headed down to church for the first session of a writing class I’m offering over the next six weeks. Called The Story of You, it invites folks to do some written storytelling about their lives. In this kind of class I operate on the notion that chronology is just one of the ways—and sometimes the least interesting way—to tell our lives. Instead, we’re exploring ways we can write our stories around various themes such as traditions, travels, food, relationships, and other things that we have built our lives around over the course of years.

In preparing for the class, I’ve been doing some noodling on my own life and what I’ve shaped it around. (I’m sure being 40 has something to do with this noodling as well.) I’m aware that, like most folks, there are certain episodes in my life that I might like to revisit, but I’m really clear that I wouldn’t want to go back to any part of it for any length of time. Return to 15, or 25, or even 35? I’m grateful for those times, but, hoo, boy.

I find myself wondering if Nicodemus had something of the same thing on his mind. This week’s Gospel lection, John 3.1-17, invites us to listen in on his nighttime conversation with Jesus. Nicodemus is perplexed to hear Jesus talk about being “born from above.” “How can anyone be born after having grown old?” he asks. “Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born? …How can these things be?”

It’s hard to tell, of course, just how these words sounded on Nicodemus’s lips, but the way I imagine it in my head, his note of incredulity conveys that he’s asking not only how can anyone be born again but why would anyone want to? Having grown old, why on earth would someone desire to go back to the beginning?

This passage reminds me of one of the things that I really like about Jesus: he doesn’t strike people dead for asking questions. I find that quite an endearing quality in a deity. We encounter lots of questions in the season of Lent; the lectionary presents them to us nearly every week, from the prophet Joel who asks, on Ash Wednesday, “Why should it be said among the peoples, ‘Where is their God?'” to Jesus’ own cry on Good Friday, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Many of the Lenten questions are directed specifically toward Jesus, and he receives them and uses them in his ministry. He recognizes that questions are a form of spiritual practice: they remind us that we are in progress, and they invite us to lean into and stretch beyond the limits of what we know. Though Jesus may appear impatient with the questioning Nicodemus, he does not silence him or shut him out.

I suspect that Jesus’ willingness to engage folks in this way had something to do with the fact that he was born to a woman who was willing to ask questions. How can this be? Mary had asked the audacious angel. Gabriel hears her out, and Mary’s question gives way to conception.

For both Mary and Nicodemus in these stories of birth, the answer to How can this be? doesn’t depend on what we can see with our eyeballs or know with our rational minds. It’s a Spirit thing. “The Holy Spirit will come upon you,” the angel tells Mary. “Very truly, I tell you,” says Jesus to Nicodemus, “no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit.”

In responding to Nicodemus’s question, Jesus interrupts our tendency to think that chronology has the final power over our lives. He claims, rather, that there’s something more than linear time, with its physical progression from birth to death, at work in us. There is another way of being that is open to us.

Jesus chooses the image of birth as a way to describe the passageway that he offers to us. His choice of the metaphor of birth offers a dizzying wealth of implications to sort through. In this context, I’m particularly drawn to the fact that such a metaphor implies that there is a process involved in what Jesus is talking about. Birthing involves gestation, and labor, and the beginning of perpetual change. When we are born, we achieve a new state, but not a static one.

Physically, we don’t enter the world as adults (let the laboring women say hallelujah); likewise with spiritual birth. The fact that we don’t start out full-formed in our faith ought to check any impulse to be overly judgmental about where we—and others—are on the journey. I’ve seen parts of this amazing lectionary passage used more as a bludgeon—BELIEVE! BELIEVE! BELIEVE OR BE DAMNED!—than as a doorway of invitation. Seeking to grow up, and to grow deep, we should ever seek out those who are wiser, those who are more practiced in this growing thing than we are, even as we hold the spiritual door open for others. This passage compels us toward humility and hospitality, those twins.

From conception to delivery and beyond, the process of birth is intimate work. A lot of it happens in the dark, figuratively as well as literally. So it seems especially appropriate that Nicodemus and Jesus have this conversation at night. So much easier, sometimes, to talk in the shadowed hours, when the questions that the day has kept at bay can now steal forth, and the people who might judge are not present to see, and in the cloistering dark we can speak of what is intimate and eternal.

“The wind blows where it chooses,” Jesus says to Nicodemus in that nighttime visit, “and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” Perhaps it was this quality of the Spirit that inspired Christian folk in Celtic lands to choose the wild goose as an image of the Holy Spirit. Unpredictable, untamed, the goose flies in formation with its companions, offering strength that makes the arduous journey easier. Like a midwife, or someone who holds our questions in the dark. I thought of that ancient Celtic image as I created the collage for today; it borrows from a quilting pattern called Wild Geese.

So how’s that birthing and growing thing going for you? How do you deal with the sometimes wild unpredictability of the process? In this season of Lent, do you have a practice that helps you reflect on where you are, and where you have been? What questions are visiting you in the dark?

Blessings to you as you live into the birthing. May you have a good goose along the way.

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

Posted in art, lectionary, Lent | 1 Comment »

The Red Circle

February 10, 2008

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© Jan L. Richardson  ◊The Painted Prayerbook◊

During Advent I wrote about how sometimes, when insomnia comes to visit, I’ll try to charm it with a volume of poetry. (“Sleeping with Killian”) It’s not that I find poetry so dull that it bores me to sleep. Rather, there’s something about it that beckons my brain to step off its madly spinning hamster wheel and burrow down for the night. With its rhythms, images, and connections that don’t always depend on logic or linear thought, poetry offers a landscape that often lies closer to the dreaming world than to the waking one.

On a recent night, lying wakeful in the wee hours, I turned to Jane Hirshfield to do the insomnia-charming honors. Revisiting her collection The October Palace, I found myself struck by her poem “A Plenitude,” in which she references a story that Vasari tells in The Lives of the Artists. Vasari relates how Pope Benedict IX, in search of someone to create several paintings for St. Peter’s, dispatched an assistant to collect samples from various artists. The candidates included Giotto di Bondone, the Italian painter who was a harbinger of the Renaissance. Of the visit to Giotto, Vasari tells this:

…having gone one morning to Giotto’s shop while the artist was at work, [the courtier] explained the pope’s intentions and how he wanted to evaluate Giotto’s work, finally asking him for a small sketch to send to His Holiness. Giotto, who was a most courteous man, took a sheet of paper and a brush dipped in red, pressed his arm to his side to make a compass of it, and with a turn of his hand made a circle so even in its shape and outline that it was a marvel to behold. After he had completed the circle, he said with an impudent grin to the courtier: ‘Here’s your drawing.’ The courtier, thinking he was being ridiculed, replied: ‘Am I to have no other drawing than this one?’ ‘It’s more than sufficient,’ answered Giotto. ‘Send it along with the others and you will see whether or not it will be understood.’ (From The Lives of the Artists by Giorgio Vasari, translated by Julia Conway Bondanella and Peter Bondanella. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.)

Giotto got the job.

The image of Giotto’s crimson Ο particularly grabbed me because of a small, abandoned collage that has been lying on my drafting table the past couple of weeks. It began, and finally ended, with a red circle on a gold background. After a long struggle to develop it, I gave up and turned my attention in another direction. A collage artist, however, is reluctant to throw anything away, and I did like that red circle, so I kept it around, hoping it might become the basis for another piece. Now, after reading Hirshfield’s poem and Vasari’s story, I’m thinking maybe I stalled out because I was trying too hard to add to something that was already complete. I’ve become aware that though I’m no Giotto, there’s something very satisfying in the spareness of that circle. It’s sufficient.

Contemplating Hirshfield’s poem, and Vasari’s story, and that red circle, I’ve been reflecting on the amount of time and energy we give to explaining, justifying, or selling who we are. We catalog and calculate our qualities in order to impress others and persuade them to hire us, or love us, or include us in their circle.

There are plenty of situations that call for demonstrations of competence and expertise. Walking into a doctor’s office, a daycare, a church, you want to know that this person is qualified to care for your body, your child, your soul. But in a culture that sometimes pushes us to accumulate credentials and qualifications without developing the character that will sustain our expertise, it can be disarming to encounter someone who bows to simplicity instead of doing backflips to win us over.

One of the clearest glimpses I’ve had of the power of a gesture like Giotto’s came at a gathering of clergy that I attended early in my ministry. The design team had invited a potter to be the artist in residence during our conference and to offer a few words at our opening session. In a room full of clergy who live and minister in a system that has its own complicated culture of credentials and rewards, the potter stood before us, a small piece of pottery cupped in her hands. Gazing into the Ο of her bowl, she began to tell us what she had come to offer. Watching her, listening to her, I had the sense that we were encountering a woman whose life and creative work had worn away the impulse to impress, to prove, to convince. In her years of working with clay, the clay had also worked on her. Shed of pretense, the potter held out to us what she had to give.

It was more than sufficient.

In a culture that bases so much on evaluation and competition, there’s often little room to squeeze around the need to demonstrate and display who we are. Whether we’re selling ourselves for a job, a promotion, a membership, a mate, we live with the pressure to appear polished. That’s not wholly a bad thing. Yet, in the midst of that, is there any place where we might trace a red circle of our own? Is there a gesture, an unadorned offering we can make that arises from the core of who we are? How do we discern where to offer that? Where can we do that with a sense of trust it will be understood? Where might we be called to make that kind of offering, knowing others may not readily understand it, but need it? What support and sustenance will help us do this?

Wishing you a red circle day.

Posted in art, books, Lent | 5 Comments »

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 »

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