Archive for the ‘Lent’ Category

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Lent 5: Testimony to the Mystery

March 12, 2018

Image: Into the Seed © Jan Richardson

Readings for Lent 5, Year B: Jeremiah 31.31-34, Psalm 51.1-12,
Hebrews 5.5-10, John 12.20-33

We work so very hard at letting go, sometimes, trying to train ourselves to release our grip on all that is not God. But what if it is not about giving up but giving in? Falling into dirt, as Jesus says here. Going where grain is supposed to go.

—from Lent 5: Into the Seed
The Painted Prayerbook, March 2009

A lot of life has happened since I wrote those words nine years ago, in a reflection on this week’s reading from John’s Gospel. A lot of life, and a death that alters how I read this passage now.

It goes against all reason—that what falls into earth could live again. That letting go could enable this living. It bears discernment, of course, so that we may know when we are being called to hold on fiercely, to refuse to let part of ourselves die, and when to release our hold in order to let new life rise up in us.

The discernment depends little on reason, though, and as I spiral back around the reflections I’ve written for this week’s lections across the past decade, it’s the presence of paradox in those reflections that still resonates so strongly for me. That tension and relationship between dying and rising, hiddenness and revelation, losing and finding, intention and surrender.

I am here to bear testimony to that paradox, that mystery, and to the presence of the God who seeks us out in the midst of it all: the God who, Jeremiah tells us this week, offers us a new covenant; the God who, the psalmist sings, releases us from the sin that has held us; the God who, Paul writes, saved Jesus from death and who, with love and mercy beyond reason, is ever at work to provide that same gift of life to us.

In this fifth week of Lent, what is the God of paradox and mystery up to in your life? How are Jesus’ words about dying and living sitting with you? Is there something you are sensing an invitation to let go of in order to enter more fully into the life God desires for you? What help do you need in order for this to happen?

For you, for this new week in our Lenten path, I’ve gathered up a collection of reflections I’ve written for this Sunday’s readings across the past ten years. I’m slipping them into your hands with gratitude for the ways you share this path, and with many blessings.

John 12.20-33

Lent 5: Into the Seed
5th Sunday in Lent: Unless a Grain of Wheat Falls

Jeremiah 31.31-34

Day 24: And Remember Their Sin No More

Psalm 51

Day 25: And Cleanse Me
Day 26: My Secret Heart
Day 27: Restore the Joy of Salvation

Hebrews 5.5-10

Day 28: With Loud Cries and Tears

Using Jan’s artwork…
To use the image “Into the Seed,” please visit this page at janrichardsonimages.com. (This is also available as an art print. After clicking over to the image’s page on the Jan Richardson Images site, just scroll down to the “Purchase as an Art Print” section.) Your use of janrichardsonimages.com helps make the ministry of The Painted Prayerbook possible. Thank you!

Using Jan’s words…
For worship services and related settings, you are welcome to use Jan’s blessings or other words from this blog without requesting permission. All that’s needed is to acknowledge the source. Please include this info in a credit line: “© Jan Richardson. janrichardson.com.” For other uses, visit Copyright Permissions.

Posted in art, blessings, Gospel of John, lectionary, Lent, The Psalms | 2 Comments »

Lent 4: Strange Remedies

March 5, 2018

Image: In the Wilderness © Jan Richardson

Readings for Lent 4, Year B:
Numbers 21.4-9; Psalm 107.1-3, 17-22; Ephesians 2.1-10;
John 3.14-21

Look on me and live, [Jesus] says. Turn your gaze, your attention,
your focus to me, and you will be saved by the hand of the God who
sent me, not for the punishment of the world but for the
utter love of it.

—from Lent 4: The Serpent in the Text
The Painted Prayerbook, March 2009

At the beginning of this season, I wrote about the wild language of Lent—the wilderness words that caught my attention as I spiraled back around a decade’s worth of reflections I had written here at The Painted Prayerbook for the first Sunday of Lent. I’ve continued to think about the language of Lent as this season has unfolded. This week, as I revisited the reflections I’ve written for Lent 4 across the years, the vocabulary that grabbed my attention was this: strange remedy.

Strange remedy came up in an early reflection I wrote on this week’s passage from John’s Gospel (“Lent 4: The Serpent in the Text”). In this passage, Jesus makes reference to a curious episode that happens to the people of Israel on their wilderness journey; this episode is described in Sunday’s lection from Numbers. In my reflection on the John passage, I explored the seeming strangeness of both these texts, along with the hope they hold out to us.

The point of the stories, after all, is that God is intent on providing healing for God’s people. God’s desire for healing persists not only when we are sick or broken because of circumstances beyond our control, but also in those times when our own choices have brought about what ails us. We see God’s bent toward healing in the other readings as well: They cried to the Lord in their trouble, and he saved them from their distress, we read in the psalm; he sent out his word and healed them (107.19-20). And to his friends in the church at Ephesus, Paul writes, God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ (Eph. 2.4-5).

I am especially struck by Paul’s words here—that when our brokenness is so severe as to cause a kind of death, God’s pervasive mercy and love, made evident in Christ, can bring us back to life.

When new life comes, when healing arrives, it doesn’t always look like we hope. In the times when healing doesn’t equate with curing, or doesn’t fix the underlying cause of our pain, this can be bitter indeed. In the midst of this, these passages bear witness to a God who ceaselessly, stubbornly works to make a path to wholeness for us.

If there’s anything I have learned on my journey since Gary’s death, it’s that the path to healing often unfolds by weird, inexplicable turns, as the snakebitten people of Israel discovered. This makes some kind of convoluted sense. Because the brokenness that besets us can take such strange forms—be it grief, illness, accident, or any of the other ways that life can unexpectedly and senselessly clobber us—it should perhaps come as no surprise that the means of our healing can take strange forms as well.

Even so, I still can find myself surprised by the strange remedies that present themselves—the peculiar graces that visit, the unforeseen encounters that bring comfort or insight, the particular practices of solace that don’t always make logical sense and might not fit for someone else but offer the mending my heart most needs. I am learning to keep my eyes open for those strange and surprising remedies, to loosen my hold on my expectations of what mending and solace should look like, in hopes of recognizing the remedies when they show up.

Strange remedies. At this place in our Lenten path—which we cross the halfway point of this week—what does this stir for you? How do you keep your eyes and heart open for the healing and life that Christ brings, often in such unexpected ways? Is there a place of brokenness you are living with that might hold a particular invitation for you in this season—a step toward wholeness that might not make sense to others but helps open you to the healing God desires?

As we mark ten years at The Painted Prayerbook, I’ve gathered up a collection of reflections I’ve written for this week’s lectionary readings. I’m passing them along to you with deep gratitude and many blessings.

John 3.14-21

Lent 4: The Serpent in the Text
Day 22: Rather Than Light

Numbers 21.4-9

Day 17: In the Wilderness

Psalm 107.1-3, 17-22

Day 18: O Give Thanks
Day 19: And Saved Them from Their Distress

Ephesians 2.1-10

Day 20: Even When We Were Dead
Day 21: In the Heavenly Places

Using Jan’s artwork…
To use the image “In the Wilderness,” please visit this page at janrichardsonimages.com. (This is also available as an art print. After clicking over to the image’s page on the Jan Richardson Images site, just scroll down to the “Purchase as an Art Print” section.) Your use of janrichardsonimages.com helps make the ministry of The Painted Prayerbook possible. Thank you!

Using Jan’s words…
For worship services and related settings, you are welcome to use Jan’s blessings or other words from this blog without requesting permission. All that’s needed is to acknowledge the source. Please include this info in a credit line: “© Jan Richardson. janrichardson.com.” For other uses, visit Copyright Permissions.

Posted in art, Gospel of John, lectionary, Lent, The Psalms | 3 Comments »

Lent 3: What We Know in the Bones

February 26, 2018

The Temple in His BonesImage: The Temple in His Bones © Jan Richardson

Readings for Lent 2, Year B: Exodus 20.1-17, Psalm 19,
1 Corinthians 1.18-25, John 2.13-22

Christ’s deep desire, so evident on that day in the temple, is that
we pursue the congruence he embodied in himself: that as his body,
as his living temple in the world, we take on the forms that will
most clearly welcome and mediate his presence.

—from Lent 3: The Temple in His Bones
The Painted Prayerbook, March 2009

If you were unfamiliar with the Christian story, and came across four scraps of paper with this week’s lectionary passages written on them, you would have good makings for a map of that story.

I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery (Exodus 20.2).

The heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims his handiwork (Psalm 19.1).

We proclaim Christ crucified…Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God (1 Corinthians 1.23-24).

Jesus answered them, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up” (John 2.19).

This week’s texts take us on a journey in which the God who created the stunning vastness of heaven and earth comes close up to meet us. The passage from John 2 underscores just how close. This gospel text tells us Christ has become a living temple where God and humanity meet in his own being, his own body: the body he lays down for us, the body that rises for us, the body he invites us to be part of so that we may know this God for ourselves.

This constellation of texts bears witness to a God who dwells in mystery but does not stand at an unbridgeable distance from us. Although our sight is decidedly partial for now (through a glass, darkly, as Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 13.12, KJV), this God desires to be known. Even when we reach the limits of our vision and press painfully against the boundaries of our understanding, this knowing finds its way within us: in our hearts, in our bones, in the spaces where we meet God within the mystery.

In this Lenten season, in the midst of the mystery, what do we know in our bones? How do we live in a way that is congruent with this knowing—that gives expression to what we know, and embodies it in this world?

From across the past decade, I’ve gathered up a collection of reflections I’ve written for this week’s readings. I offer them with many blessings as this part of our Lenten path unfolds.

John 2.13-22

3rd Sunday in Lent: Speaking of the Body
Lent 3: The Temple in His Bones

Exodus 20.1-17

Day 11: Who Brought You Out of Slavery
Day 12: Remember the Sabbath Day

Psalm 19

Day 13: The Heavens Are Telling
Day 14: Night to Night Declares
Day 15: A Tent for the Sun

1 Corinthians 1.18-25

Day 16: Christ the Power and Wisdom of God

Using Jan’s artwork…
To use the image “The Temple in His Bones,” please visit this page at janrichardsonimages.com. (This is also available as an art print. After clicking over to the image’s page on the Jan Richardson Images site, just scroll down to the “Purchase as an Art Print” section.) Your use of janrichardsonimages.com helps make the ministry of The Painted Prayerbook possible. Thank you!

Using Jan’s words…
For worship services and related settings, you are welcome to use Jan’s blessings or other words from this blog without requesting permission. All that’s needed is to acknowledge the source. Please include this info in a credit line: “© Jan Richardson. janrichardson.com.” For other uses, visit Copyright Permissions.

Posted in art, blessings, Gospel of John, lectionary, Lent, The Psalms | Leave a Comment »

Lent 2: Secret Medicine

February 19, 2018

Image: Finding the Focus © Jan Richardson

Readings for Lent 2, Year B:
Genesis 17.1-7, 15-16; Psalm 22.23-31; Romans 4.13-25; Mark 8.31-38 or Mark 9.2-9

Christ calls each of us to a path that enables us to find and
follow the presence of the holy in the midst of being human,
not in spite of being human.

—from Lent 2: In Which We Set Our Minds Somewhere
The Painted Prayerbook, March 2009

Spiraling once again around the lectionary readings for the next Sunday in Lent, I’ve been drawn by the thread of hope that weaves through them. I will bless her, and she shall give rise to nations, God says of Sarai in Genesis 17. The poor shall eat and be satisfied, the psalmist sings in Psalm 22. Hoping against hope, he believed, Paul writes of Abraham in Romans 4.

In Sunday’s gospel reading from Mark, the message of hope is couched in grim words. Then [Jesus] began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, Mark writes. But he closes the sentence with these words: and after three days rise again. Peter, it seems, is understandably overwhelmed by the first part of Jesus’ teaching here and fails to grasp the import of this last part. Suffering, rejection, death, he hears. And though, with the benefit of our hindsight, his response to Jesus may seem selfish and misplaced, Peter is bold to take Jesus aside, seeking to persuade him toward what he believes will be a life-giving path.

We know how Jesus responds to Peter; we hear the harshness of his rebuke and the difficulty of the message he goes on to proclaim to the disciples and the surrounding crowd. We see that the hope Jesus brings to us will ask something of us. It will cost.

Throughout his life and teachings, Jesus makes clear that the hope he embodies, the hope he holds out to us, is not passive. Hope is not an idle wish for things to get better. Instead, hope calls us to action. It asks us to align and ally ourselves with the God who is the source of hope, and who calls us to participate with God in working for the wholeness that God desires for us and for the world.

It is easy to become overwhelmed by the forces that live in fierce opposition to this wholeness. I have been contemplating these texts in a week that has held horrifying violence here in Florida, yet another occurrence in the seemingly unending cycles of violence spiraling through our world. In the midst of this, I have found myself thinking of a poem by Rumi, where he says,

There is a secret medicine
given only to those who hurt so hard
they can’t hope.

The hopers would feel slighted if they knew.

At the heart of Jesus’ rebuke to Peter and the hard, hard lesson that follows, there is a message about what it means to hope—to hope against hope, as Paul writes of Abraham; to hope when there seems no cause for hope, to hope in the face of forces that work against hope. We belong to a God who tells us, as Jesus tells his hearers, that what is torn down will be raised up, and what is destroyed will live again. Because we belong to this God, hope lives even when we feel we have lost it, and cannot summon it up in ourselves. Christ knows about the secret medicine that kicks in when hope is at an end. It is part of what he has come to give us.

Hope does not depend on us, but it cannot do without us. By which I mean, hope does not originate with us—it has its beginning in God, who goes on providing it for us with an extravagant stubbornness. It comes as a gift and grace that we cannot manufacture. But hope does need us for its ongoing survival. It asks us to give it legs in this world, to bear it into places of hopelessness, to enter into the rhythms of dying and rising that come as we follow Christ and work with him for the healing of the world.

In these Lenten days, what gives you cause for hope? Where do you place your attention, your mind, your focus, in ways that deepen your capacity to hope and to live out this hope in the world?

As we celebrate ten years at The Painted Prayerbook, I’ve gathered together a collection of reflections I’ve written across the past decade for this week’s lectionary readings. I offer them with hope and with many blessings.

Mark 8.31-38

2nd Sunday in Lent: For the Sake of the Gospel
Lent 2: In Which We Set Our Minds Somewhere
Day 10: Divine Things and Human Things

Reflections Related to Mark 8.31-38:

Blessing in the Shape of a Cross
To Have without Holding

Mark 9.2-9

For reflections on this passage, visit Transfiguration Sunday: In the Turning.

Genesis 17.1-7, 15-16

Day 5: I Will Establish My Covenant
Day 6: I Will Bless Her

Psalm 22.23-31

Day 7: The Ends of the Earth Shall Remember

Romans 4.13-25

Day 8: Who Gives Life to the Dead
Day 9: Hoping Against Hope

Using Jan’s artwork…
To use the image “Finding the Focus,” please visit this page at janrichardsonimages.com. (This is also available as an art print. After clicking over to the image’s page on the Jan Richardson Images site, just scroll down to the “Purchase as an Art Print” section.) Your use of janrichardsonimages.com helps make the ministry of The Painted Prayerbook possible. Thank you!

Using Jan’s words…
For worship services and related settings, you are welcome to use Jan’s blessings or other words from this blog without requesting permission. All that’s needed is to acknowledge the source. Please include this info in a credit line: “© Jan Richardson. janrichardson.com.” For other uses, visit Copyright Permissions.

The Rumi quotation comes from the poem “My Worst Habit” in The Essential Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks with John Moyne.

Posted in art, blessings, Gospel of Mark, lectionary, Lent | 7 Comments »

Lent 1: The Wild Language of Lent

February 13, 2018

Into EarthImage: Into Earth © Jan Richardson

Readings for Lent 1, Year B:
Genesis 9.8-17; Psalm 25.1-10; 1 Peter 3.18-22; Mark 1.9-15

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.

—from Lent 1: Discernment and Dessert in the Desert
The Painted Prayerbook, February 2008

Into the desert, again. Into the wilderness that waits for us, still. Ten years we have traveled through Lent here at The Painted Prayerbook. It is never quite the same path from year to year, never precisely the landscape we explored the last time around. This, of course, is part of the point of Lent: it disrupts what is comfortable, familiar, and known, that we may be startled out of our customary ways of seeing.

As I gathered up the reflections I’ve written for the first Sunday of Lent across the past decade, my eye was drawn to the vocabulary that has emerged as we’ve explored this season—the Lenten lexicon that has taken shape as we’ve journeyed through these weeks again and again.

I began to write down the words that drew my eye as I revisited these reflections. There was wilderness, of course, and desert. There was memory and story and earth.

Pilgrimage, I wrote; sustenance, breath.
Hunger, thirst, graces.

Emptying, angels, sweetness, strength.
Passage, preparing, solitude, beasts.
Comfort, wild, wrestling, solace.
Recognition, wing, clearing, liminal.

There were questions and chaos in the Lenten lexicon,
clarity and knowing,
discernment, treasure, initiation,
essential, sojourn, practice.

There was enough.

And there was this word, shimmering in the midst of them all; the most fundamental word we need to know in this or any season:

Beloved, beloved, beloved.

As I look back over the list, I wonder how this vocabulary, this Lenten lexicon, will arrange itself this time around. How will these words constellate in this season, what path will they create, what map will they make? When I look back on this landscape from the other side of Easter, what story might these words be able to tell me? What new words might arrive to help fill in the gaps, the hollows, the holes?

What are some of the words that inhabit your own Lenten vocabulary, that have emerged in your own journey through this season, year by year? If you make a list, what do you notice? What story—or litany, or poem, or map, or—might these words begin to make?

From across the past decade, I’ve gathered together these reflections for you—a little Lenten library, offered with gratitude and blessing. Deep peace to you as Lent begins.

Mark 1.9-15 (includes reflections on related Gospel readings)

Lent 1: Where the Breath Begins
Lent 1: Beloved Is Where We Begin
First Sunday of Lent: And the Angels Waited
Day 2: Up from the Water
Day 3: Into the Wilderness
Day 4: With the Wild Beasts
Lent 1: A Blessing for the Wilderness
Lent 1: Into the Wilderness
Lent 1: A River Runs through Him
Lent 1: Discernment and Dessert in the Desert

Genesis 9.8-17

I Will Remember

Using Jan’s artwork…
To use the image “Into Earth,” please visit this page at janrichardsonimages.com. (This is also available as an art print. After clicking over to the image’s page on the Jan Richardson Images site, just scroll down to the “Purchase as an Art Print” section.) Your use of janrichardsonimages.com helps make the ministry of The Painted Prayerbook possible. Thank you!

Using Jan’s words…
For worship services and related settings, you are welcome to use Jan’s blessings or other words from this blog without requesting permission. All that’s needed is to acknowledge the source. Please include this info in a credit line: “© Jan Richardson. janrichardson.com.” For other uses, visit Copyright Permissions.

Posted in art, blessings, Gospel of Mark, lectionary, Lent | 12 Comments »

Ash Wednesday: What God Can Do with Dust

February 11, 2018

Image: Ash Wednesday Cross © 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

Did you not know
what the Holy One
can do with dust?

—from The Terrible, Marvelous Dust
The Painted Prayerbook, February 2015

Did you not know what the Holy One can do with dust? When I wrote these words as part of an Ash Wednesday blessing a few years ago, I could not have imagined how much I would need those words for myself, and how soon. Gary died later that year, just as the season of Advent was beginning. In the devastation, the question I had posed in that Ash Wednesday blessing would return to me, coming both to challenge and console. Did you not know what the Holy One can do with dust?

We are entering the season that begins with a smudge. That smudge is a testimony to what survives. It is a witness to what abides when everything seems lost. It is a sign that what we know and love may, for a time, be reduced to dust, but it does not disappear. We belong to the God who well knows what to do with dust, who sees the dust as a place to dream anew, who creates from it again and again.

Life will continually lay us bare, sometimes with astonishing severity. In the midst of this, the season of Lent invites us to see what is most elemental in us, what endures: the love that creates and animates, the love that cannot be destroyed, the love that is most basic to who we are. This season inspires us to ask where this love will lead us, what it will create in and through us, what God will do with it in both our brokenness and our joy.

Here at The Painted Prayerbook, we have traveled through Ash Wednesday and Lent ten times. As Lent approaches once again, I have gathered up an armful of reflections I’ve written here for Ash Wednesday over the past decade. I offer them in blessing and in hope, that in the season that lies ahead of us, we will allow God to create us anew.

Ash Wednesday: A Blessing in the Ashes
Ash Wednesday: The Terrible, Marvelous Dust
Ash Wednesday: The Hands That Hold the Ashes
Day 1/Ash Wednesday: Rend Your Heart
The Memory of Ashes
Upon the Ashes
The Artful Ashes
Ash Wednesday, Almost


FOR A BROKEN HEART: If Valentine’s Day is difficult for you or someone you know, I invite you to visit A Blessing for the Brokenhearted.

Using Jan’s artwork…
To use the image “Ash Wednesday Cross,” please visit this page at janrichardsonimages.com. (This is also available as an art print. After clicking over to the image’s page on the Jan Richardson Images site, just scroll down to the “Purchase as an Art Print” section.) Your use of janrichardsonimages.com helps make the ministry of The Painted Prayerbook possible. Thank you!

Using Jan’s words…
For worship services and related settings, you are welcome to use Jan’s blessings or other words from this blog without requesting permission. All that’s needed is to acknowledge the source. Please include this info in a credit line: “© Jan Richardson. janrichardson.com.” For other uses, visit Copyright Permissions.

Posted in art, blessings, Gospel of Matthew, lectionary, Lent | 11 Comments »

Holy Thursday: Blessing the Bread, the Cup

April 12, 2017

Image: Simply Given © Jan Richardson

Reading from the Epistles, Holy/Maundy Thursday:
1 Corinthians 11.23-26

For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup…
—1 Corinthians 11.26

Holy Thursday, and it is time to come to the table.

Here at the table, there is bread.

Here at the table, there is wine.

Here at the table, there is Christ, offering the gifts to us with beautiful simplicity and astonishing love.

As we linger at the table, as we leave the table, what will we do with what we receive?

Blessing the Bread, the Cup
For Holy Thursday

Let us bless the bread
that gives itself to us
with its terrible weight,
its infinite grace.

Let us bless the cup
poured out for us
with a love
that makes us anew.

Let us gather
around these gifts
simply given
and deeply blessed.

And then let us go
bearing the bread,
carrying the cup,
laying the table
within a hungering world.

—Jan Richardson
from Circle of Grace: A Book of Blessings for the Seasons

For a previous reflection, click the image or title below.


Holy Thursday: Blessing You Cannot Turn Back

Using Jan’s artwork…
To use the image “Simply Given,” please visit this page at janrichardsonimages.com. (This is also available as an art print. After clicking over to the image’s page on the Jan Richardson Images site, just scroll down to the “Purchase as an Art Print” section.) Your use of janrichardsonimages.com helps make the ministry of The Painted Prayerbook possible. Thank you!

Using Jan’s words…
For worship services and related settings, you are welcome to use Jan’s blessings or other words from this blog without requesting permission. All that’s needed is to acknowledge the source. Please include this info in a credit line: “©Jan Richardson. janrichardson.com.” For other uses, visit Copyright Permissions.

Posted in art, blessings, lectionary, Lent | 3 Comments »

Palm Sunday: Blessing of Palms

April 5, 2017

Image: The Way of Blessing Shall Become Our Own Way
© Jan Richardson

Reading from the Gospels, Palm Sunday: Matthew 21.1-11

“Blessed is the one who comes
in the name of the Lord!”
—Matthew 21.9

This is the week we remember once again the moment when Jesus enters Jerusalem, moving with intention and deliberation into what waits for him there.

In some respects, the final stretch of Jesus’ path has been laid out for him. We know what will happen to him after he enters the city. We know the terrible road he will walk to the cross. Yet Jesus is no helpless victim here, no passive participant. He is not dragged into Jerusalem, nor does he slink into the city on the sly. Jesus does not cease to make his own road as he chooses to walk with courage and clarity.

This week invites us to consider how we are moving through our own journey—through Lent as well as through life. Are we allowing ourselves to be swept along by circumstances, traveling our road by default? Or are we seeking to walk with intention and discernment, creating our path with some measure of the courage and clarity by which Christ walked his, even in the midst of forces that may lie beyond our control?

There is a time for stillness, for waiting for Christ as he makes his dancing way toward us. And there is a time to be in motion, to set out on a path, knowing that although God is everywhere, and always with us, we sometimes need a journey in order to meet God—and ourselves—anew.

This is a week to ask, how do we meet God in motion? How do we move toward the One who is already making his way toward us? Whatever circumstance we may find ourselves in, how do we participate in creating our path? What road is calling to us and has our name written on its stones? Will we go? 

Blessing of Palms

This blessing
can be heard coming
from a long way off.

This blessing
is making
its steady way
up the road
toward you.

This blessing
blooms in the throats
of women,
springs from the hearts
of men,
tumbles out of the mouths
of children.

This blessing
is stitched into
the seams
of the cloaks
that line the road,
etched into
the branches
that trace the path,
echoes in
the breathing
of the willing colt,
the click
of the donkey’s hoof
against the stones.

Something is rising
beneath this blessing.
Something will try
to drown it out.

But this blessing
cannot be turned back,
cannot be made
to still its voice,
cannot cease
to sing its praise
of the One who comes
along the way
it makes.

—Jan Richardson
from Circle of Grace: A Book of Blessings for the Seasons

Using Jan’s artwork…
To use the image “The Way of Blessing Shall Become Our Own Way,” please visit this page at janrichardsonimages.com. (This is also available as an art print. After clicking over to the image’s page on the Jan Richardson Images site, just scroll down to the “Purchase as an Art Print” section.) Your use of janrichardsonimages.com helps make the ministry of The Painted Prayerbook possible. Thank you!

Using Jan’s words…
For worship services and related settings, you are welcome to use Jan’s blessings or other words from this blog without requesting permission. All that’s needed is to acknowledge the source. Please include this info in a credit line: “©Jan Richardson. janrichardson.com.” For other uses, visit Copyright Permissions.

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

Lent 5: The Lazarus Blessing

March 31, 2017

Image: Rise Up, Lazarus (Death Has No Power Here)
© Jan Richardson

Reading from the Gospels, Lent 5, Year A: John 11.1-45

He cried with a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!”
—John 11.43

You can imagine that this text, which has long been one of my favorites, has new layers for me in the wake of Gary’s death. Lazarus compels my attention not only as I think about my beloved and carry my questions about life, death, and resurrection in connection with his dying, but also in connection with my living.

When we suffer an agonizing loss, something of us goes into the grave. As we wrestle with our grief, we will be visited by questions about what new life waits for us. We will find ourselves faced with a choice: will we gather the graveclothes more tightly around ourselves, or will we respond to the voice of Christ, who stands at the threshold and calls us to come out?

The choosing is not to be rushed. We need to give the weeping and wailing their due, the tears and the anger their place. It is only in reckoning with death—including the death that has taken place within us—that we can begin to discern what new life lies beyond the tomb of our heart.

In this Lenten week, I want to share a blessing I wrote several years ago as I reflected on the story of Lazarus. This was a pivotal blessing for me. It opened my eyes to what a blessing can do—how it can meet us where we feel most lifeless and call us to enter our lives anew.

At the time, I wrote about being struck that Jesus does not go into the tomb to pull Lazarus out. He does not enter his realm to haul him to this side of living. Lazarus has to choose whether he will loose himself from the hold of the grave: its hold on him, his hold on it. Only when Lazarus takes a deep and deciding breath, rises, returns back across the boundary between the living and the dead: only then does Jesus say to the crowd, “Unbind him, and let him go.” Not until Lazarus makes his choice does the unwinding of the shroud begin, and the graveclothes fall away.

That, too, is part of what a blessing can do. It can stir in us the power to rise up and choose life anew. It can help us begin to imagine what that new life might be like. A blessing can help us breathe into the life that waits for us here, within this life.

On this day, as we keep company with Lazarus and hear the voice of Christ calling to us, what will we choose? What might we need to let go of, to loose ourselves from, so that we can move with freedom into the life to which Christ calls us?

Lazarus Blessing

The secret
of this blessing
is that it is written
on the back
of what binds you.

To read
this blessing,
you must take hold
of the end
of what
confines you,
must begin to tug
at the edge
of what wraps
you round.

It may take long
and long
for its length
to fall away,
for the words
of this blessing
to unwind
in folds
about your feet.

By then
you will no longer
need them.

By then this blessing
will have pressed itself
into your waking flesh,
will have passed
into your bones,
will have traveled
every vein

until it comes to rest
inside the chambers
of your heart
that beats to
the rhythm
of benediction

and the cadence
of release.

—Jan Richardson
from Circle of Grace: A Book of Blessings for the Seasons

A bonus blessing: For a song that will bless your ears and your soul, click the player below to hear Gary’s wondrous song “Rise Up,” which was inspired by this story. It’s from Gary’s CD House of Prayer. (For my email subscribers: if you don’t see the player below, click here to go to The Painted Prayerbook, where you can view it in this post.)

Using Jan’s artwork…
To use the image “Rise Up, Lazarus (Death Has No Power Here),” please visit this page at janrichardsonimages.com. (This is also available as an art print. After clicking over to the image’s page on the Jan Richardson Images site, just scroll down to the “Purchase as an Art Print” section.) Your use of janrichardsonimages.com helps make the ministry of The Painted Prayerbook possible. Thank you!

Using Jan’s words…
For worship services and related settings, you are welcome to use Jan’s blessings or other words from this blog without requesting permission. All that’s needed is to acknowledge the source. Please include this info in a credit line: “©Jan Richardson. janrichardson.com.” For other uses, visit Copyright Permissions.

Posted in art, blessings, Gospel of John, lectionary, Lent | 8 Comments »

Lent 4: Mysteries of the Mud

March 25, 2017

Image: Mysteries of the Mud
© Jan Richardson

Reading from the Gospels, Lent 4, Year A: John 9.1-41

“He put mud on my eyes.
Then I washed, and now I see.”
—John 9.15

He could simply have touched him. Or spoken a single word. Instead, when Jesus encounters a man who has been blind since birth, he spits on the ground, turns the dirt to mud, and spreads the mud on the man’s eyes. Jesus tells him to go and wash in the pool of Siloam.

The man goes. Washes. And sees.

Appearing midway in our Lenten journey, this story reminds us that this season is a time for getting close to the things of the earth. Ash, wilderness, waters of birth, wellspring, mud: the images that have accompanied us these past few weeks impress upon us what an elemental fellow Jesus is. Throughout his ministry we see him touching the world around him, turning to the things of earth to help us see the things of heaven.

This week’s gospel reading underscores it for us: Jesus is no sterile savior. He is not interested in remaining tidy and removed. With a beautiful and earthy economy of gestures, Jesus reveals himself as one who is willing to fully inhabit the messiness of our world and of our lives. He is ready to enter into the muck with us. He engages the muck as a place where holiness happens: where sludge becomes sacramental, and through grimy eyes we begin to behold the face of Love, beholding us right back.

How might the mucky places, the thick places, the earthy places become the very places that Christ uses to help you see more clearly? Are there places or practices that contain something of Siloam for you—spaces where you can wash away what would hinder you from seeing, and allow your vision to become clear? How might you take yourself to your Siloam in this season, this day, this moment?

Blessing of Mud

Lest we think
the blessing
is not
in the dirt.

Lest we think
the blessing
is not
in the earth
beneath our feet.

Lest we think
the blessing
is not
in the dust,

like the dust
that God scooped up
at the beginning
and formed
with God’s
two hands
and breathed into
with God’s own
breath.

Lest we think
the blessing
is not
in the spit.

Lest we think
the blessing
is not
in the mud.

Lest we think
the blessing
is not
in the mire,
the grime,
the muck.

Lest we think
God cannot reach
deep into the things
of earth,
cannot bring forth
the blessing
that shimmers
within the sludge,
cannot anoint us
with a tender
and grimy grace.

—Jan Richardson
from Circle of Grace: A Book of Blessings for the Seasons

Using Jan’s artwork…
To use the image “Mysteries of the Mud,” please visit this page at janrichardsonimages.com. (This is also available as an art print. After clicking over to the image’s page on the Jan Richardson Images site, just scroll down to the “Purchase as an Art Print” section.) Your use of janrichardsonimages.com helps make the ministry of The Painted Prayerbook possible. Thank you!

Using Jan’s words…
For worship services and related settings, you are welcome to use Jan’s blessings or other words from this blog without requesting permission. All that’s needed is to acknowledge the source. Please include this info in a credit line: “©Jan Richardson. janrichardson.com.” For other uses, visit Copyright Permissions.

Posted in art, blessings, Gospel of John, lectionary, Lent | 7 Comments »

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