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The Domestic God

February 4, 2009


The Domestic God © Jan L. Richardson

Reading from the Gospels, Epiphany 5, Year B: Mark 1.29-39

So we had a lovely little celebration on Saint Brigid’s feast day last Sunday. I invited my sweetheart Gary and our friend Linda over for tea that afternoon. Like me, Linda is an oblate of Saint Brigid of Kildare Monastery. We three had time for a cup of jasmine tea, a slice of cappuccino cheesecake (Brigid would’ve loved cheesecake if she’d known of it), and a few strawberries before the next phase of our celebration: a conference call with a bunch of other folks from the Saint Brigid’s community. Scattered across a physical distance that stretches from California to the Dominican Republic, we joined together for a feast day liturgy that brought us close across the miles.

Then Linda and Gary and I had more cheesecake.

I don’t do a huge amount of entertaining. This owes to a combination of factors including my need for copious amounts of solitude (especially with a book deadline coming up this summer) and the fact of my wee living space, which tends to discourage the gathering of more than, say, a half dozen folks at once (and that’s if some of them sit on my futon). My cozy studio apartment has an efficiency kitchen that Gary calls my yoga kitchen, as getting something out of the tiny refrigerator that sits under the sink sometimes involves doing contortions. Since I’m not wildly domestic, my two-burners-and-a-toaster-oven arrangement suits me okay, most days.

Still, when I get my act together to invite even a friend or two over for a cup of tea or a meal, I love sharing my home and receiving the gift of a loved one’s presence in my quiet space. At times such an occasion feels like a miracle. In the cup, in the conversation: sustenance and grace.

I sometimes tend to overlook the ordinary miracles that unfold in the domestic realm. So often do I take it for granted that on a daily basis, several times a day, there will be something to fill my hunger, and that I will be able to reach for it. But this week, with Saint Brigid’s festive tea lingering with me (along with the stories of the domestic provisioning for which she was especially known, including wondrous feats involving bacon and butter and beer) and with this Sunday’s gospel lection on my mind, I’m paying particular attention to what’s going on the everyday sphere of home, looking to see where the mundane gives way to the miraculous.

This Sunday’s gospel leads us straight into a home, that of Simon (Peter) and Andrew (Matthew and Luke refer to it solely as Simon/Peter’s house). Jesus has come straight from the synagogue, where he cast out the unclean spirit of last week’s reading. Once inside the house, he learns that Simon’s mother-in-law is in bed with a fever. He goes to her, takes her by the hand, lifts her up. In his gesture of reaching toward the woman, touching her, Jesus crosses with great intention into her condition, her realm, her world.

Here we see the domestic Jesus, the intimate Jesus. Crossing from the house of worship into the home of Simon, standing at the bed of a woman whose body has been disordered by illness, Jesus conveys with his outstretched hand that there is no sphere that he does not control, no suffering that is beneath him to heal, no place where he does not desire wholeness and peace. He makes clear that his power is present in every realm, the home no less than the synagogue. He extends his healing to all, the woman in the grip of a fever no less than the man in the clutch of an unclean spirit.

There is no place, no person, unworthy of a miracle.

In response to her healing, Simon’s mother-in-law begins to serve Jesus and his companions. Where other stories of healing sometimes end with the recipient offering a verbal testimony to what Jesus has done (as we will see in next week’s gospel), this story does not ascribe any words to the woman. Whatever she may have said, if anything, the act of her serving Jesus and his companions, her ministering to them in this basic, bodily way, provides eloquent testimony in the vocabulary that she has at hand. That her act falls squarely in the realm of what society sometimes, wrongfully, denigrates as “women’s work” does not minimize its grace. Rather, it unveils the holiness present—and sometimes hidden—in the everydayness of domestic life.

In her commentary on this passage in The Women’s Bible Commentary (Carol Newsom and Sharon Ringe, eds.), Mary Ann Tolbert points out that the word denoting the woman’s action, rendered in the NRSV as serve (from the Greek root diakoneo, related to the word for deacon), is the same word used to describe what angels do for Jesus at the end of his forty days in the wilderness. The choices of some translators, however, have elevated the service of the angels over that of the woman; for instance, translating the action of the angels as “ministering” to Jesus—a more overtly sacramental act—and the woman’s action as “serving” him, which gives a subservient cast to her gift. “The author of Mark,” Tolbert observes, “by using the same word for the action of the angels and the action of the healed woman, obviously equated their level of service to Jesus. What the angels were able to do for Jesus in the wilderness, the woman whose fever has fled now does for him in her home.” Tolbert goes on to note that the door of the woman’s house “becomes the threshold for healing for all in the city who are sick.”

What Jesus later says of a woman who blesses his body with an anointing, we can say of this woman who blesses his body with her domestic gesture: she has done what lay in her power (Mark 14.8, New English Bible). Can the same be said of us? In the places in which our lives unfold, what lies in our power to do? What ordinary miracles hide out in the rhythm of our days, beckoning us to see them or to help enact them? What miracles might Christ be inviting our participation in, as a response and witness to his presence? What’s going on in your home, and how might Christ be wanting to show up within it?

Wherever you live, may Christ bless you there.

jan-linda
With Linda on Saint Brigid’s Day

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

Posted in art, Epiphany, Gospel of Mark, lectionary, monastic stuff | 12 Comments »

Feast of the Presentation/Candlemas

February 1, 2009

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Blessing of the Candles © Jan L. Richardson

Reading from the Gospels for Feast of the Presentation: Luke 2.22-40

The beginning of February offers us another lovely feast day on the heels of today’s Feast of St. Brigid. In the rhythm of the Christian liturgical year, tomorrow marks the Feast of the Presentation of Jesus, also called the Feast of the Purification of Mary. This day bids us remember Mary and Joseph’s visit to the Temple to present their child Jesus on the fortieth day following his birth, as Jewish law required, and for Mary to undergo the postpartum rites of cleansing. Luke’s Gospel tells us that a resident prophet named Anna and a man named Simeon immediately recognize and welcome Jesus. Taking the child into his arms, Simeon turns his voice toward God and offers praise for the “light for revelation” that has come into the world.

Taking a cue from Simeon, some churches began, in time, to mark this day with a celebration of light: the Candle Mass, during which priests would bless the candles to be used in the year to come. Coinciding with the turn toward spring and lengthening of light in the Northern Hemisphere, Candlemas offers a liturgical celebration of the renewing of light and life that comes to us in the natural world at this time of year, as well as in the story of Jesus. As we emerge from the deep of winter, the feast reminds us of the perpetual presence of Christ our Light in every season.

With her feast day just next door, and with the abundance of fire in the stories of her life, it’s no surprise that St. Brigid makes an appearance among the Candlemas legends. One of those legends reflects a splendid bit of time warping that happened around Brigid. The stories and prayers of Ireland and its neighbors often refer to Brigid as the midwife to Mary and the foster mother of Christ. Chronologically, this would have been a real stretch (seeing as how Brigid was born in 454 CE), but in a culture in which the bond of fostering was sometimes stronger than the bond of blood, this creative image of Brigid reveals something of the deep esteem that she attracted. In the Carmina Gadelica, a collection of prayers, legends, and songs that Alexander Carmichael gathered in Scotland in the 19th century, he conveys this story of Brigid as an anachronistic acolyte:

It is said in Ireland that Bride [Brigid] walked before Mary with a lighted candle in each hand when she went up to the Temple for purification. The winds were strong on the Temple heights, and the tapers were unprotected, yet they did not flicker nor fail. From this incident Bride is called Bride boillsge (Bride of brightness). This day is occasionally called La Fheill Bride nan Coinnle (the Feast Day of Bride of the Candles), but more generally la Fheill Moire nan Coinnle (the Feast Day of Mary of the Candles)—Candlemas Day.

On this Candlemas Eve, where do we find ourselves in this story? Are we Mary, graced by the light that another sheds on our path? Or are we Brigid, carrying the light for another in need?

A blessed Candlemas to you!

[To use the “Blessing of the Candles” 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!]

[For my other reflection & art related to Luke 2.22-40/The Presentation, visit this post.]

Posted in art, Celtic, Epiphany, lectionary, monastic stuff, mystery, sacred time | 7 Comments »

A Habit of the Wildest Bounty: Feast of St. Brigid

January 31, 2009


Saint Brigid © Jan L. Richardson

Tomorrow brings one of my favorite days of celebration: the Feast of Saint Brigid of Kildare, beloved holy woman of Ireland. Born in the middle of the fifth century, Brigid became a pivotal figure in the development of Irish Christianity. We know few concrete details of her life, but the surviving stories offer a compelling depiction of a woman renowned for her hospitality and for the monasteries she established, the most famous being the one at Cill Dara (Kildare), the Church of the Oak.

Many of the tales of Brigid’s life read much like those of other female saints: her saintly qualities were evident from an early age; she forsook marriage in order to follow Christ in a monastic way of life (she even caused her eye to burst in order to avoid being married off; don’t try this at home!); she was a wonder-worker who brought healing and justice; she exercised miraculous influence over the weather, animals, and the landscape. “She stilled the rain and wind,” the final line of the Bethu Brigte, a medieval account of Brigid’s life, tells us.

In her charming book St. Brigid of Ireland, Alice Curtayne describes Brigid as someone who found the poor “irresistible” and ministered to them with “a habit of the wildest bounty.” Her lavish generosity sometimes put her at odds with her family and, later, her monastic community, which occasionally had to do without as she gave their bounty to guests and strangers.

There is a strong domestic quality that pervades Brigid’s wonderworking, a homeliness to the miraculous that runs throughout her tales. Most of her recorded miracles are feats of provisioning by which she secures an abundance of fare for daily sustenance as well as for festive occasions. In Brigid’s presence, butter is replenished; the bacon she slips to a dog miraculously reappears in the pot; a stone turns to salt; water becomes milk, or beer, or, in one instance, an aphrodisiac. Her plenitude consciously echoes Christ’s miracles of provisioning—water into wine, a few loaves and fish into a feast—and embodies the abundant generosity of God. There is a gracefulness that shimmers in the utterly mundane quality of the material of Brigid’s miracles, underscoring the dignity of the daily tasks to which the women of her day—and women across centuries—devoted so much of their lives.

Those who wrote Brigid’s Lives, however, were keen to portray her as much more than a wonderworking dairymaid. Within the workaday landscape of her legends, signs of the mystery and power of God flicker and flash with a brilliance that illuminates the saint and sparks the imagination. Fire is a persistent symbol in her stories, and in one of the earliest prayers to Brigid, known as “Ultán’s Hymn,” the writer addresses her as a “golden radiant flame.”

The symbol of fire illuminates and underscores Brigid’s role as not only a worker of domestic miracles but also a woman of transcendent power. In her stories she appears as a charismatic leader who wields influence in monastic, civic, and natural realms; she is ever at ease among kings and bishops; she brings healing to body and soul; she displays gifts of exhortation; she has prophetic dreams and sees far into the hidden reaches of the heart. Brigid possesses a sense of justice that prompts her to secure the freedom of prisoners and slaves.

The Annals of Ulster variously give the date of Brigid’s death as 524, 526, and 528. According to one of her early biographers, Brigid was buried in the abbey church she established at Kildare, and she continued to work miracles after her death. Tradition tells that she was moved from Kildare and laid to rest in Dunpatrick alongside two other great saints of Ireland, Patrick and Columba. Her physical grave remains a mystery, but the landscape of Ireland continues to testify to her presence, with forms of the name Brigid appearing in the names of towns, holy wells, and churches. Legends, prayers, rituals, and celebrations (some of which echo the festivities of Imbolc, a major springtime celebration in the ancient Celtic year) continue to expand and sometimes complicate her story, adding their threads to the mysterious tapestry of Brigid’s legacy.

Brigid lent her name to a modern-day monastery that has been a significant part of my own journey for nearly a decade. Founded at the turn of this millennium by Mary Stamps, a remarkable woman who possesses a wondrous share of the spirit of the groundbreaking Irish saint, St. Brigid of Kildare Monastery draws from both Methodist and Benedictine traditions. For more information about this unique community, visit Saint Brigid of Kildare Monastery.

A blessed Feast of Saint Brigid to you, and may you possess Brigid’s habit of the wildest bounty!

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

Posted in art, Celtic, monastic stuff, mystery, sacred time | 6 Comments »

Epiphany 4: In the Realm of the Spirits

January 30, 2009


I Know Who You Are © Jan L. Richardson

Reading from the Gospels, Epiphany 4, Year B: Mark 1.21-28

There once was a time when I didn’t give much thought to what it meant to confront evil and suffering in the realm of the spiritual world. I’m mainline Protestant, after all. Spiritual warfare, as some call it, was something best left to the charismatics and others who dealt in such things.

Then I began to live and work within systems and organizations that have given me cause to think again about the notion that evil can cohere as a force, can organize and inflict itself in discrete ways. In my professional ministry and in my personal ecosystem, the years have afforded plenty of occasions to witness the ways in which chaos that exists in the spiritual world can manifest itself in the physical realm. It’s stunning, how a single individual in spiritual disarray can distribute pain and discord among an entire body of people. And the reverse: how the diffuse chaos that often lurks so easily within a system can erupt in acts of harm against particular individuals.

In this Sunday’s gospel lection, Mark tells a story that provides a vivid example of a person who has become overwhelmed by a force that is contrary to the purposes of God. In describing what harbors within the man whom Jesus encounters, Mark uses the Greek term pneumati akatharto: an unclean spirit. The uncleanness that akatharto (from the word akathartos) denotes has to do not with physical untidiness but rather with how the spirit exists in a state actively antagonistic to God, a state that the spirit has inflicted upon the man. Akathartos is the opposite of katharos (related to our word catharsis): ritually pure, clean.

Intriguing, isn’t it, that this encounter takes place in a synagogue? It underscores what I have seen time and again: that places meant for worship and seeking after God often attract the most chaotic folks. That which is opposed to God is often most drawn to those places devoted to God. Such folks are like this man who, amid the chaos, nonetheless experiences a point of vivid clarity: he—or, rather, the spirit in him—recognizes Jesus. “I know who you are,” he cries out, “the Holy One of God.”

Jesus will say, just a few verses later, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick” (Mark 2.17). It’s one thing, however, to know and seek healing for our sickness, and to minister to others who recognize their own need. More challenging to reckon with are those folks living, often without awareness, in the grip of forces opposed to God who are yet drawn toward the holy. It can take a long time before their deep, underlying hunger for God breaks through and overtakes their desire to inflict chaos in the places of sacredness.

In his healing of the man, Jesus offers a model for how we can reckon with the forces that work against God’s desire for wholeness. Jesus responds to the spirit with the calm authority that receives particular comment in this passage, both by Mark and by those who witness Jesus’ teaching and healing in the synagogue. Jesus addresses the spirit from the core of who he is. He is not exhibiting a display of magic or seeking to dazzle the crowd with a show. Rather, Jesus demonstrates his willingness to confront and call out what is contrary to God. Acting from that fiercely calm and centered place, he releases the man from the force that has tormented him.

The healthy spiritual practices of the Christian tradition give us tools to do the necessary work at the level of spirit. These practices cultivate within us the grounded, centered authority that enabled Christ to confront the unclean spirit, they help keep us clear amid chaos, and they deepen our ability to respond to the ways that disorder becomes manifest in the world. These practices, however, are not enough in themselves. As Jesus points out in the gospels, and as Paul addresses in his letters, it’s possible for us to become puffed up about our own spiritual prowess.

The desert mothers and fathers of the early church recognized this. They had a lively understanding of the ways that spiritual disorder takes form in the physical realm. They sometimes described these forms as demons, who particularly loved to hide out in the very practices that these desert folk sometimes became proud of—extreme fasting, prayer, and the like. This story comes from the desert tradition:

[Amma Theodora] also said that neither asceticism, nor vigils nor any kind of suffering are able to save, only true humility can do that. There was an anchorite who was able to banish the demons; and he asked them, ‘What makes you go away? Is it fasting? ’ They replied, ‘We do not eat or drink.’ ‘Is it vigils? ’ They replied, ‘We do not sleep. ’ ‘Is it separation from the world? ’ ‘We live in the deserts.” ‘What power sends you away then?” They said, ‘Nothing can overcome us, but only humility.’ ‘Do you see how humility is victorious over the demons?’

In my own spiritual practice, I have taken to opening my day by offering the prayer known as St. Patrick’s Breastplate, also called Deer’s Cry (for its association with the legend that St. Patrick prayed it when he and his companions were in peril, and the prayer caused them to take on the appearance of deer and thereby elude their attackers). Though the prayer originated sometime after St. Patrick, it is an old, old prayer of encompassing—what the Celtic folk call a lorica—that in a poetic and profound way calls upon God to protect us from the forces that seek to work against God. I’m particularly fond of the version that Malachi McCormick offers in his book Deer’s Cry. Published by his small press, The Stone Street Press, Deer’s Cry offers Malachi’s translation of the prayer (alongside the Old Irish version), handwritten with his charming calligraphy. I gradually committed the prayer to memory some time ago. I pray it not as some kind of magic charm but rather as a reminder that I go into my day, and into the world, in the encompassing of God, who bids me rely completely on the power of God rather than on my own devices. It’s a prayer that, honestly prayed, cultivates humility, an awareness of how we are entirely dependent upon God. It’s this humility that in turn fosters the type of calm, centered authority by which Jesus acted in confronting the unclean spirit.

This gospel story reminds us not to give more power to the presence of evil than is warranted; obsessing over chaos can breed it. Rather, the story challenges us to confront evil where we find it. The demons—by whatever form or name we know the presence of disorder—fight hardest when we, like Jesus, look them in the face. But this is what depletes evil of its power. It cannot bear being named, challenged, called out.

Where do you personally witness the forces that work against God? What do you think about those forces, and how do you reckon with them? How do you seek God’s protection against them? Are there ways you feel called to confront the presence of chaos? What practices help keep you centered in, and reliant upon, the power of God?

May you go with the encompassing of Christ, who does not abandon us to chaos but instead accompanies in every realm. Blessings.

[Amma Theodora story from The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, translated by Benedicta Ward, SLG.]

[To use the “I Know Who You Are” image, please visit this page at janrichardsonimages.com. Your use of janrichardsonimages.com helps make the ministry of The Painted Prayerbook possible. Thank you!]

Posted in art, books, Epiphany, Gospel of Mark, lectionary, monastic stuff | 4 Comments »

The Hospitality of the Book

January 28, 2009

blog-womananointsjesus
A Woman Anoints Jesus © Jan L. Richardson

Ooohhhh, you really should check out the January 15 episode of Krista Tippett’s Speaking of Faith radio show. Titled “Preserving Words and Worlds,” the episode highlights the remarkable work of the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library (HMML), which is based at Saint John’s Abbey and University in Collegeville, Minnesota. The HMML is committed to preserving manuscript culture, not only through its work in a variety of locations around the world (including places where texts are in peril because of war), but also through its involvement in the creation of The Saint John’s Bible, the first Bible to be written and illustrated by hand in more than five hundred years. You can listen to the show and take in related features by visiting this delicious page.

At the Speaking of Faith blog, the January 15 entry from online editor Trent Gilliss included a link to a short video about the making of The Saint John’s Bible. A reader of the blog left a comment in response, offering the perspective that “the money would be far better spent feeding the hungry and homeless around the world” and that the Benedictines are “being selfish without realizing it.”

Typically I don’t take that kind of bait in cyberspace, but this was a day I felt drawn to respond to that view, which I encounter frequently in the church—the view that art and justice are two different things and that we have to choose between them (with justice being the “right” choice). What follows is a comment that I left in response. I know it’s longish, but it was a good opportunity to remind myself of why I do what I do, and why people of faith should give a damn about art (and justice, though I can’t conceive of those two being separate).

Comment: Deep thanks for your “Words and Worlds” show and for highlighting the remarkable work of the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library. For a number of years I’ve had occasion to travel to Saint John’s, and have followed with particular interest the HMML. I am fascinated by the crucial work it does both in preserving the sacred texts of many cultures and civilizations and also in supporting the creation of a new manuscript for a new time in the form of The Saint John’s Bible.

I was struck by the comment left by the writer who thought the money would be better spent feeding the homeless and hungry. I’m not certain whether the writer was referring to money spent on The Saint John’s Bible or to the work of the HMML in general, or both together, but the comment illuminates a tension that has long pervaded the church regarding art and justice. I am concerned by how frequently we in the church talk about art and justice as two different things that we have to choose between, rather than as being part of the same impulse: our response to a God of grace and creativity who has placed us in a world that is both broken and beautiful.

The Christian tradition and the Bible itself both developed and survived in large measure because of people across the centuries who gave themselves to transmitting the sacred stories in a variety of creative forms, not just in texts but also in other media including drama, music, and liturgy. In particular, the stunning array of visual art created over the centuries not only helped proclaim the gospel to those who could not read it (as well as those who could) but also was understood to be a gift in return to God: a lavish offering, an act of praise in response to the God who has lavished love, grace, and care upon us.

The fact that we live in the 21st century, when hunger, homelessness, and a host of other injustices continue to inflict deep suffering around the world, does not diminish—and is not separate from—our need for beauty and the sustenance and hope it provides. I find myself thinking of the story in Mark 14.3-9, in which, as Jesus sits at table, a woman comes and anoints him with outrageously expensive oil. Mark tells us that some at the table were angry and said, “Why was the ointment wasted in this way? For this ointment could have been sold for more than three hundred denarii, and the money given to the poor.” Jesus, however, receives her lavish act with grace and gratitude. “Let her alone,” he tells those who scold the woman; “why do you trouble her? She has performed a good service for me. For you always have the poor with you, and you can show kindness to them whenever you wish, but you will not always have me. She has done what she could; she has anointed my body beforehand for its burial. Truly I tell you, wherever the good news is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in remembrance of her.”

In saying that we would always have the poor with us, Jesus wasn’t suggesting that we should neglect to work for an end to poverty. Rather, he recognized that lavish acts of generosity, grace, and beauty, such as the woman offered to him, must be part of our response to Christ, alongside our work for justice. Jesus knew that choosing justice at the expense of beauty is just another form of poverty.

I am an ordained minister as well as an artist and writer. I understand my call and my work as a minister to be about feeding people not only in body but also in soul. One kind of feeding cannot long do without the other. I could not work for justice in this world without the creative acts that others have offered across the centuries and in our present time, not only because I could not live without the sustaining hope and beauty they offer, but also because they remind me that God desires us to give lavishly, generously, wantonly from the depths of who we are, and who God has created us to be. Such extravagant acts can seem wasteful. By his response to the anointing woman, however, Jesus reminds us that such gestures of grace bring healing to the body of Christ, and to the whole world.

One of the many gifts of The Saint John’s Bible is that through its related exhibitions, books, prints, cards, and website, not to mention radio and TV shows that have featured it, people are coming into contact with the Bible who might not otherwise encounter it. The Saint John’s Bible also beckons those who think we are oh-so-familiar with the Bible to engage it in a different, deeper, and renewed way. The work of Donald Jackson and his team reminds us that the Bible is not obsolete but rather is a living, dynamic text that invites us to continue not merely to read it but to lavish our attention upon it: to grapple and wrestle with it, to question it, to discern how it still speaks to and challenges us in this time, and to illuminate it, even as it illumines us.

The monks of Saint John’s, and the host of others who participate in the work of the HMML, including the artists, calligraphers, and financial contributors who are making The Saint John’s Bible possible, are offering the world something that is precisely the opposite of selfish. In preserving the sacred texts of the past, in employing ancient methods to offer a sacred text that speaks to us in the present, in drenching us with this audaciously lavish gift, they are offering, in fine Benedictine (and Christian) tradition, a profound act of hospitality.

Amid the brokenness of the world, to which we are called to minister, these folks have given us a rare gift that reminds us that God desires beauty. They bear witness to the fact that recognizing and offering beauty is part of what heals the brokenness. They remind us that God is not yet done with the work of creating, and that God calls us to offer our creative gifts for the healing and feeding of the world.

And that is good news indeed.

Posted in art, books, medieval, monastic stuff | 7 Comments »

Epiphany 3: Hooked

January 24, 2009


The Willing Catch © Jan L. Richardson

Reading from the Gospels, Epiphany 3, Year B: Mark 1.14-20

Thomas Merton, the famed Trappist monk of the 20th century, once took a picture that he titled “The Only Known Photograph of God.”

The picture was of a meat hook.

I keep thinking of this stark image, and Merton’s title, as I ponder this Sunday’s gospel lection, in which Mark offers his version of Jesus’ call to the kindred fishermen Simon and Andrew. “Follow me,” Jesus says, “and I will make you fish for people.” His invitation stirs the unsettling question: if fish are food, a catch intended for consumption, then what is it that we people are to God, once we fall into the net of the divine?

Long before the arrival of Jesus, the Jewish tradition had taken pains, in the form of the story of Abraham’s near-sacrifice of his son Isaac, to make clear that Yahweh doesn’t require human sacrifice. The God of Israel presents other conditions for right relationship, as we read, for instance, in Micah 6, where the question arises: “With what shall I come before the Lord, and bow myself before God on high?…Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?” “…and what does the Lord require of you,” comes the response, “but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly before your God?”

I wonder if the people of Israel ever wondered if human sacrifice might be easier, after all, than all this justice and kindness stuff.

It can feel consuming, being in relationship with God: it requires so much more of our very selves than simply offering a sacrifice that’s detached from us. And for all that it asks of us, our participation in God doesn’t offer much in the way of earthly security, as Mark reminds us: this lection begins with a mention of the arrest of John the Baptist, who would soon meet his earthly end in the context of a meal.

It’s challenging at times to reconcile the seeming paradox that giving ourselves to a God of love and mercy does not always protect us from heartache and suffering; in fact, it sometimes does just the opposite. Called to engage the world, we find ourselves drawn more deeply into the pain and despair present there—along with (thank God) the delight. In each place Christ calls us to notice and to embody the presence and love of God: to be the living body of Christ, who spoke of his own self as food, as sustenance.

As Merton recognized, it can leave us feeling like we’re on the meat hook of God, the way that God claims and hungers for our deepest selves and sends us into the world to be Christ’s body, to offer his sustenance. Given what a consuming, demanding, and sometimes perilous prospect it can be to share fully in the life of Christ, one might well wonder: what compels us to follow him?

What lures you to Christ? What is it about him that beckons you, calls to you, compels you not only to follow him but also to reach out in invitation to others? What is it about Jesus that hooks you?

In a culture that too often tries to scare and threaten us into a relationship with Christ, may we see clearly who he is and embody his fierce and sustaining love in a desperately hungry world. Blessings.

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

Posted in art, Epiphany, food, Gospel of Mark, lectionary, monastic stuff | 6 Comments »

Midnight Oil

November 4, 2008


Midnight Oil © Jan L. Richardson

Well, my suitcase has just barely finished cooling off from my recent trip to Seattle, and already I’m packing again. This week I’m heading to Toronto, with joyous cause: my sister is getting married. I have received official approval from the Canadian government to perform the wedding, learning along the way that the wheels of bureaucracy turn at about the same speed across international borders. I am grateful to the folks who provided support and endorsement in the process, including a couple of officials in The United Church of Canada, the denomination that served as the “governing authority” that, per Canadian requirements, sponsored my application. The wedding will be small and sweet. I’m working to resist the urge to ask my Canadian-transplant sister, when it comes time in the ceremony, “So, you take this man, eh?”

So I have matrimony on my mind, which coincides well with this week’s gospel lection. Matthew 25.1-13 offers the Parable of the Ten Bridesmaids, which has sometimes been referred to as the Parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins, owing to the pronounced distinction that the parable makes between the two groups. As was the case with the Parable of the Wedding Banquet that we visited just a few weeks ago, this lection offers a setting that calls to mind my wedding anxiety dreams, which generally fixate on some aspect of not being ready for the big event. With its emphasis on being prepared, our story at hand does little, on the surface, to alleviate my lurking anxieties.

This is a tale to leave procrastinators quaking. Jesus’ story provides little solace for those of us who struggle with being prepared and timely. There seems to be no help here for the five bridesmaids who lack the oil necessary to trim their lamps. The five wise bridesmaids certainly don’t offer any aid. These bridesmaids may be well stocked with oil for their lamps but they seem dramatically lacking in grace toward those who find themselves oil-poor.

Fortunately, Jesus has plenty to say elsewhere about grace, and I don’t think that’s the primary issue he’s trying to tackle in this parable, though grace does surface in a roundabout manner. With this story of the bridesmaids, Jesus beckons his hearers to give thought to their own role in their relationship with the divine. He lifts up the necessity of taking personal responsibility, a quality not always embraced these days. The good news in this parable, and in the Christian faith, is that we do not have to look to someone else to mediate our relationship with Jesus, nor does our inclusion in the body depend on access to special secrets. This parable implies that wisdom comes not in having hidden knowledge; even the wise bridesmaids didn’t know what time the bridegroom would show up. Rather, wisdom lies in discerning and cultivating what is ours to offer. The wise bridesmaids may seem graceless, but providing for everybody isn’t the bridesmaids’ job here. It’s one occasion where taking care of everyone else isn’t a woman’s responsibility. The wise women of this story instead call us to attend to that which will deepen our relationship with God and hone our ability to receive God’s ever-present grace.

The wise bridesmaids do what is necessary to provide light. In the context of the teaching that Jesus is doing here about the kingdom of heaven and the end of days, it’s good to remember that, at its Greek root, the word apocalypse means to reveal, to uncover, to unhide. The bridegroom is meant to be seen when he finally arrives (as is the bride, who, though some of the most ancient manuscripts of Matthew include a reference to her, for the most part is curiously absent from this story). The bridesmaids, these women, are the ones who provide the light by which the celebrants may see the groom.

Later in this chapter Jesus will become quite specific about the sorts of actions that provide light for the world—the radical stuff of feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, visiting prisoners. Jesus means for these light-bearing bridesmaids to inspire and model for us what it means to perceive the presence of Christ among us and to minister to him in the infinite and surprising variety of forms that he takes. This parable, in fact, offers a powerful resonance with the gospel stories of the women who, seeing Jesus and recognizing who he is, anoint him with oil in a lavish fashion.

We have to be cautious with this text, however, lest it tempt us to think Jesus’ point is all about work—that our invitation to the party depends on what we do. All ten bridesmaids, after all, were invited to join in the celebration. And all ten fell asleep, so, though Jesus admonishes his hearers to stay awake, it wasn’t solely for somnolence that the unwise bridesmaids were denied entrance. Evidently what makes the wise bridesmaids wise is that they know what it takes to make a party. We need light, that we may see one another and know one another. We need light so that we may recognize the one who beckons us to join in the feast, not because he wants only to put us to work but also because of the sheer fact that he desires our company and delights in our presence.

When I was in seminary, I heard Jim Wallis, one of the founders of the Sojourners community, tell a story about a colleague living in a village in Central America. She worked in a community that was marginalized in all kinds of ways. She poured herself into her work for social justice, laboring with great might to bring change to this village. One day, some of the people of the village came to her, asking her why she worked so hard, why she didn’t join them in their fiestas or sit with them in their porches in the evening.

“There’s too much work to do!” the laboring woman replied. “I don’t have enough time.”

“Oh,” the people of the village said. “You’re one of those.”

“One of who?” the woman asked.

“You are one of those,” they responded, “who come to us and work and work and work. Soon you will grow tired, and you will leave. The ones who stay,” they said, “are the ones who sit with us on our porches in the evening and who come to our fiestas.”

Jim Wallis said that his colleague took the story to heart, that she became a party animal, and that she was still there.

There is work to do: flasks to be filled, lamps to be lighted, long nights ahead that call for labor and readiness instead of rest. Especially with Advent approaching, it’s a good time to ask ourselves what it is we’re getting ready for, and how, and why. It’s a good time, too, to ponder how, and whether, we are seeking sustenance for our own selves. We cannot find or fashion light merely by our own efforts; it comes not solely with labor but by opening ourselves to the light of Christ that we find as we linger with one another.

This is the place where I would normally ask what practices help you cultivate your openness to the God who calls us to the celebration—what are you doing to keep your oil flask full? But I find myself thinking of the fabled story from the desert fathers, the one where Abba Lot goes to Abba Joseph and recites the list of practices by which he’s seeking the presence of God: praying, meditating, fasting, etc. “What else can I do?” he asks. Old Abba Joseph stands up and stretches his hands toward heaven. His fingers, the story says, become like ten lamps of fire. “If you will,” Abba Joseph says to Abba Lot, “you can become all flame.”

And so I want to ask, not just how are we keeping our oil flasks full, not just how we’re taking care of our lamps, but how might we ourselves become all flame? What are we burning for? How do we become people who do not merely carry well-provisioned lamps but who are vessels of living light, illuminated by the one who called himself the Light of the World?

On this dark November night, this prayer: For one another, with one another, may we blaze.

Blessings.

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

[Abba Joseph story from The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, translated by Benedicta Ward, SLG.]

Posted in art, Gospel of Matthew, lectionary, monastic stuff, Ordinary Time | 2 Comments »

Taxing Questions

October 14, 2008


Taxing Questions © Jan L. Richardson

Reading from the Gospels, Year A, Proper 24/Ordinary 29/Pentecost +18: Matthew 22.15-22

I’ll not make too much of the fact that this week’s gospel lection, Matthew’s famous “render unto Caesar” passage, falls during a week that has also included doing the paperwork for my quarterly sales tax payment. The timing is a mild coincidence that could tempt me to rant a bit about how I’d be happier to render unto Caesar if he didn’t it make it so *!@?!# difficult, and didn’t provide so many convoluted disincentives to those who work to be conscientious about our rendering. But, like I said, I’m not gonna rant.

The point of this passage, which also appears in Mark and Luke’s gospels, isn’t really about paying taxes, anyway. Each of these three evangelists makes a point of stating that Jesus’ questioners are seeking to entrap him with their queries. Luke adds a couple of details in his version, noting that the religious leaders sought to “trap him by what he said, so as to hand him over to the jurisdiction and authority of the governor.” Luke goes on to say that Jesus “perceived their craftiness” as they asked him, “Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not?”

I know these questioners. I’ve met them, these folks who have learned the knack of asking questions that aren’t really questions but rather are a litmus test. I think of the friend years ago who, upon learning of my call to ordained ministry, began to barrage me with a series of questions organized around other topics that I (a woman pursuing ordination) must be equally wrong about: What did I think about homosexuality? Fornication? The inerrancy of scripture? Or the member of a church I once served, who walked into my office one morning with bagels and tea; his hospitality proved short lived, as he then set upon me with what amounted to arguments with question marks tacked onto the end.

There’s a kind of violence to this form of encounter in which someone, whether through intention or through an unconscious ingrained pattern, approaches us with an inquisitiveness that harbors a weapon. In these hands, questions transmogrify into snares, cudgels, tools for distancing and defining and diminishing. Thinking they already know the answer, such questioners aren’t really interested in engagement but in finding confirmation of their assumptions and fodder for their prejudices.

With his craftiness detector on, Jesus recognizes a loaded question when he hears it. And he doesn’t exactly choose to turn the other cheek here. He, too, possesses a certain level of cunning; he responds to the question, but he cuts through their assumptions about how he will answer it. Given choices of A or B, Jesus will always come up with an inventive C.

I’m intrigued by his ability to do this—by his capacity to receive every question that every person poses to him, by his ability to recognize when he’s being baited, by his ingenuity in coming up with an unexpected response. Most of all I’m intrigued by the remarkable grounding that helps him to achieve this. This takes an intense clarity, a deep sense of who one is and what one is called to do. Faced with those who approach us with assumptions and ulterior motives, having this kind of clarity and grounding offers some hope of responding as Jesus did. It takes, too, cultivating an imagination that sees beyond limited and limiting choices and the assumptions that underlie them.

Where do we get this kind of grounding, clarity, and imagination? I found myself thinking of one example during a phone conversation last night with the St. Brigid’s community. We were reflecting on the practice of praying the Psalms, using as our starting place Kathleen Norris’s splendid essay on “The Paradox of the Psalms” in her book The Cloister Walk. As we talked about the gifts and challenges of praying the Psalms, I remembered a story that Robert Benson relates at the opening of his book Between the Dreaming and the Coming True. He tells of being in a class with “a man with his well-worn, heavily marked Bible open before him, playing a game of ‘trap the teacher.’ He should have known better,” Benson observes, “than to try to trap this particular teacher. Those who pray the Psalms by heart do not rattle very easily.” Benson continues,

The teacher was finishing up a series of talks on praying the Psalms that she had been giving to a community of about sixty of us. I do not now remember the man’s question. I remember only that it had a ‘Well, that is all very well and good, but the God of Abraham [and, therefore, of judgment and vengeance, one got the feeling] is going to make sure that the good guys get into heaven and the bad guys don’t, no matter what’ edge to it. It was asked in a spirit that was not exactly in keeping with the spirit of our prayer community, which was to be together for two years.

Hazelyn McComas looked at him for a minute and then said softly, and with fire in her eyes, ‘I cannot answer that. But I can say this: We Christians are awfully hard on each other and on ourselves, too. And we seem to be especially that way about things that may not really matter.’

In recounting the rest of McComas’s response, Benson solidifies his depiction of her as a woman who was able to respond in much the same way that Jesus did when posed with a taxing question. Recognizing its intent, she neither dismisses it nor gives in to the assumptions that framed it. She finds another way, a true response that rises from the depths of who she is.

Benson recognizes the life of prayer that provides the deep well from which McComas responds to her questioner. She has, he says, “spent a life seeking for glimpses of and listening for whispers of God within the ancient prayers of the Chosen People.” I love his observation that “Those who pray the Psalms do not rattle very easily.”

It’s one thing to know the surface of the scriptures, and another thing entirely to enter the Bible as a place where God meets God’s people—an approach that runs through Hazelyn McComas’s teaching. Entering the biblical text with the desire to meet God enables us to frame our questions, and to respond to the questions of others, in a dramatically different way. When we travel the scriptural landscape as a pilgrim open to the presence of God in every place, rather than as a tourist who thinks we know everything about a place because we’ve visited it a few times, we cultivate a humility that fosters the kind of clarity and imagination that fueled Jesus’ response to his interrogators.

Jesus, of course, prayed the psalms.

I’m not wanting to turn this into a reflection specifically about praying the psalms, but Matthew’s text got me thinking about Robert Benson’s story, and Hazelyn McComas’s, and about my own story of attraction and resistance toward the psalms, those ancient prayers that have sustained the people of God for millennia and that lie at the heart of the monastic tradition to which I feel so drawn. And all these stories are part of the larger story of my own searching and hungering to meet God in the scriptures and elsewhere, and to sink my roots deep into a landscape that helps me grow into someone who can recognize and ask the questions that matter, and resist the ones that don’t.

So what kinds of questions are you receiving these days, and how do you respond? What questions are you asking, and where are they coming from? Are there ways that you try to box Jesus in, thinking you know how he’s going to act in your life? Are there ways that you allow yourself to be boxed in by others or by your own self? What practices help you meet God, in our sacred texts and elsewhere? How do you cultivate an openness to the surprising, imaginative, unexpected ways that God might be wanting to act in your life? What’s option C?

What are you rendering to God?

In these days, may we be people of remarkable imagination. Blessings.

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

Posted in art, Gospel of Matthew, lectionary, monastic stuff, Ordinary Time, The Psalms | 3 Comments »

Feast of St. Francis

October 4, 2008


Saint Francis © Jan L. Richardson

Happy Feast of St. Francis! As I mentioned on the Feast of St. Clare, the hospitality of Franciscans has been a pivotal gift in my life, and I owe them much for helping to preserve my vocation and to sustain me when I made a flying leap into ministry beyond the local church. In particular, it was my Franciscan friend Brother David who helped to inspire that leap and gave me a place to land. I had met him when I was serving as a pastor. Shortly afterward, he established a Center for Art and Contemplation at the retreat center where he worked and where, thanks to the good graces of the Franciscans and not a few other folks, I would become artist-in-residence for some years.

David and his brothers at San Pedro Center gave flesh to the wonders and challenges of Franciscan life and to the spirit of St. Francis. Born in Italy in the 12th century, Francis gave up the riches of his family in order to embrace a life of radical devotion to God and to God’s creatures. He took as spouse the one whom he called Lady Poverty, and a community began to gather around him; they became known as the friars minor (“lesser brothers”). Their rhythm of life included preaching missions (Francis traveled widely, journeying even to Egypt), periods of fasting and prayer, and service to those who lived on and beyond the margins of the society, notably those living with leprosy. It was during a period of fasting and prayer prior to the Feast of Michaelmas that Francis, secluded on a mountain with Brother Leo, received the stigmata—the wounds of Christ.

We know St. Francis in large part for The Canticle of the Creatures, which he began during a time of intense illness. Of his desire to write the canticle, he said to his brothers, “I wish to compose a new hymn about the Lord’s creatures, of which we make daily use, without which we cannot live, and with which the human race greatly offends its Creator.” His praises include, famously, “Sir Brother Sun” and “Sister Moon and the stars” as well as “Brother Wind,” “Sister Water,” and “Brother Fire.” He counted mortality among God’s familiar and familial creatures; on his deathbed, Francis added verses that included the line, “Praised be You, my Lord, through our Sister Bodily Death, from whom no one living can escape.”

Francis left behind a handful of other writings that testify to his deep and simple love of God. With World Communion Sunday coming up tomorrow, it seems fitting to include this portion from A Letter to the Entire Order, which Francis wrote in 1225-1226:

Let everyone be struck with fear,
let the whole world tremble,
and let the heavens exult
when Christ, the Son of the living God,
is present on the altar in the hands of a priest!
O wonderful loftiness and stupendous dignity!
O sublime humility!
O humble sublimity!
The Lord of the universe,
God and the Son of God,
so humbles Himself
that for our salvation
He hides Himself
under an ordinary piece of bread!
Brothers, look at the humility of God,
and pour out your hearts before Him!
Humble yourselves
that you may be exalted by Him!
Hold back nothing of yourselves for yourselves,
that He Who gives Himself totally to you
may receive you totally!

And in the Earlier Rule that Francis wrote for his community, he pleaded,

Therefore,
let us desire nothing else,
let us want nothing else,
let nothing else please us and cause us delight
except our Creator, Redeemer and Savior,
the only true God,
Who is the fullness of good….

Therefore,
let nothing hinder us,
nothing separate us,
nothing come between us.

On this day of celebration, and all the days to come, may it be so. Happy Feast!

(Quotations from Francis of Assisi: The Saint, ed. by Regis Armstrong, O.F.M. Cap., et al.)

Artwork: detail from “St. Francis” © Jan L. Richardson. To use this image, please visit this page at janrichardsonimages.com. Thank you!

Posted in art, medieval, monastic stuff, Ordinary Time, sacred time | 2 Comments »

For What Binds Us

August 31, 2008


For What Binds Us © Jan L. Richardson

Reading from the Gospels, Year A, Proper 18/Ordinary 23/Pentecost +12: Matthew 18.15-20

If you have arrived here via The Text This Week, welcome! For my new reflection on this passage, please visit Where Two, Where Three.

Writing this, I’m sitting on the porch of a house on an island off Savannah, Georgia. Inside the house are the women with whom I spend each Labor Day weekend. From time to time I can hear their voices from where I sit; they are in the kitchen fixing dinner, or watching the game on TV, or talking at the table. These women are some of my closest friends from seminary. I have loved them nearly half my life. The seven of us are scattered across the Southeast: Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, North and South Carolina. We cross paths rarely during the rest of the year, but, in a tradition that began while we were still in school nearly two decades ago, we gather annually for several days of talking and eating and talking and eating and reading and napping and eating and did I mention talking?

Each of us is engaged in some kind of ministry. Most of us serve in settings beyond the local church, but all of us are connected with a congregation. And so, whenever we’re together, much of our talking has to do with church, and with all that comes from being part of a community still learning to be the body of Christ. Our stories reveal our awareness of the possibilities and painfulness that come with those relationships. We know how these communities can both call forth and stir up all that we are capable of as humans; we have seen the glory and the gore that come in attempting to be the church.

In our gospel lection for this Sunday, Jesus speaks to the challenge and the wonder of being in community. He recognizes that being his follower, being part of his body, will not relieve us of brokenness. Jesus is clear that being Christian doesn’t mean avoiding conflict, and that discord should not be allowed to fester and infect the entire body. He lays out a plan that requires his followers to engage a brother or sister who has done harm. His plan is one that seeks to preserve the dignity of the one perceived to have done wrong and to restore his or her relationship with the community.

Jesus’ blueprint for dealing with conflict is an ambitious one. It places a lot of trust in a church’s ability to discern what constitutes a sin and to deal with one another in ways that are both forthright and loving. I appreciate that he thought his followers could be this mature.

We Christians haven’t always been so good at this. In the presence of brokenness among the body, we have often either avoided making a direct response, or we have inflicted punishment that precludes ongoing relationship.

To engage one another in the way that Jesus describes in our gospel lection poses challenges on several fronts, not least of which is that we don’t always agree on what constitutes a sin. For another, we each have our own sins to reckon with, and times when we act out of our brokenness rather than our lovingness. It’s often so much easier to point toward what we see as sinful in another’s life than to deal with the ways that we ourselves bring harm to the body of Christ. Jesus knows this, too. It wasn’t so many chapters ago that he said, “Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye?” (Matthew 7.3)

Dealing with the sources of conflict in the church requires such profound humility on our part. We find this kind of humility in this story of Abba Moses, a desert father who spent much of his earlier life as a robber:

A brother at Scetis committed a fault. A council was called to which Abba Moses was invited, but he refused to go to it. Then the priest sent someone to say to him, ‘Come, for everyone is waiting for you.’ So he got up and went. He took a leaking jug, filled it with water and carried it with him. The others came out to meet him and said to him, ‘What is this, Father?’ The old man said to them, ‘My sins run out behind me, and I do not see them, and today I am coming to judge the errors of another.’ When they heard that they said no more to the brother but forgave him. (Benedicta Ward, The Sayings of the Desert Fathers.)

Being people of humility and forgiveness doesn’t mean doing away with discernment; after all, Abba Moses also cautioned, “Do not put confidence in him who does wrong to his neighbour, do not rejoice with him who injures his neighbour.” The health of the community requires us to be vigilant about rooting out the sources of harm. Yet Christ calls us to do so with a spirit that acknowledges our own brokenness and shortcomings and seeks to restore relationships wherever possible.

Engaging one another around the most difficult challenges of living together means that we have to know each other. It compels us to see one another with a clarity by which we not only recognize one another’s shortcomings but also know each other’s stories. This clarity grows elusive in a culture where face-to-face connections are becoming more difficult to form and maintain. It requires effort and intention to seek and sustain such seeing. My days with the women of this Labor Day group remind me how much the effort is worth. These women call me to remember what is possible among people who know one another this well, who know the questions to ask, who know how to challenge and sustain and accompany and love one another into being.

Jesus recognized the power of this kind of knowing. For all the challenges of conflict in a community, the power of concord is stronger. “Truly I tell you,” Jesus goes on to say in this passage, “if two of you agree on earth about anything you ask, it will be done for you by my Father in heaven. For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.” Where we find a place of connection amid conflict, where we gather in the name of the one who calls us to be his body, where we give ourselves to knowing one another: that is not only astounding, it is a miracle that moves heaven and earth.

Jesus underscores this by telling his followers what he has recently told Peter: that what they bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and what they loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. Jesus’ phrase about binding and loosing come from the rabbinic tradition, in which rabbis had the power to discern whether a questionable action would be permitted under the law. Yet in the context of this passage about our life together as followers of Christ, his words about binding and loosing prompt me to ponder what connects us, those threads that seem so strong and slack by turns. I think of Jane Hirshfield’s poem “For What Binds Us,” how she describes the scars that grow from our loving of one another, how those scars become cords that create “a single fabric that nothing can tear or mend.”

So, on this September day, what binds you? What holds you together with others? What do you fashion from the scars you carry? What do you long for in your relationships? What are you willing to do to find or create it? Who can help?

In your binding and loosing, in the conflict and concord that come in your loving: blessings.

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

Posted in art, Gospel of Matthew, holidays, lectionary, monastic stuff, Ordinary Time | 1 Comment »

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