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Trinity Sunday: A Spiral-Shaped God

May 12, 2008


A Spiral-Shaped God © Jan L. Richardson

Some years ago, at a retreat center in Ontario, I led a retreat in which we explored some of the riches that come to us from Celtic Christian traditions. When I saw that our meeting room had a smooth linoleum floor, an idea stirred. After tracking down several rolls of masking tape, I returned to the gathering space and got to work. When I finished a couple hours later, the center of our space held a circle with a triple spiral inside, large enough to use for walking prayer and meditation.

The symbol of the triple spiral is particularly prevalent in Celtic lands, where, in Christian times, it came to signify the Trinity. Evoking the energy, interconnection, and mystery of the triune God, the triple spiral graces such works as the remarkable insular Gospel books of the early medieval period, including the Book of Durrow and the Book of Kells.

On Trinity Sunday, we both celebrate God’s triune nature and also acknowledge the great mystery that it holds. Throughout the centuries, theologians have sought to define just how it is that God, Christ, and the Holy Spirit dwell together and with all of creation. Symbols of the Trinity abound, evidence of our desire to describe a being that comprises a community within itself. Attempts to convey the nature of the Trinity in images have occasionally produced some curious artwork, as in this image from a medieval Book of Hours that depicts three fellows sharing a single crown, and this image, added to a medieval English Psalter, that shows Abraham adoring a three-headed Trinity.

In their commentary on Trinity Sunday, the authors of Handbook of the Christian Year counsel us that rather than approaching this day with an emphasis on “the Trinity as an abstract concept, idea, or doctrine,” and seeking to explain or define it, it rather “seems more in keeping with the character of worship and of the Christian Year to treat Trinity Sunday as a day in which we praise and adore the infinitely complex and unfathomable mystery of God’s being to which we point when we speak of the Holy Trinity.” They go on to write,

Because our celebration of the Easter cycle is based upon the mighty acts of the triune God, and because we are entering upon the Sunday-to-Sunday half of the year when the emphasis is wholeheartedly upon each Sunday as the Lord’s Day, whose celebration is also based upon the mighty acts of the triune God, it is appropriate that we pause on this transitional Sunday to give ourselves over to the adoration and praise of the being—as distinct from the acts—of the triune God.

It is sometimes difficult, of course, to separate the doing of the Trinity from the being of the Trinity, for it is part of the nature of the Trinity to be in action, to work in relationship within itself and in cooperation with creation. This is one of the reasons that the Celtic symbol triple spiral speaks to my imagination: it evokes the God who both exists in a dynamic wholeness within itself yet also reaches out (or is it in?) to embrace us.

Historically, Celtic Christians offered no systematic theology by which they sought to define the nature and work of Trinity, but evidence of their experience of the triune God abounds. Beyond their artistic and symbolic depictions of the Trinity, they left a remarkable body of prayers and poetry that offer us an incarnate experience of the Trinity. In their poems and prayers, Celtic Christians moved from the abstract to the actual; for them, the triune deity was not a theological concept but rather was deeply embedded in daily life. In the Celtic imagination, God, Christ, and Spirit are intertwined with one another and with all of creation.

The Carmina Gadelica, a collection of prayers, poems, and blessings that Alexander Carmichael gathered in the Scottish islands and highlands in the 19th century, offers a feast of examples of this rich relationship with the Trinity, as in this prayer for the baptism of a child:

The little drop of the Father
On thy little forehead, beloved one.

The little drop of the Son
On thy little forehead, beloved one.

The little drop of the Spirit
On thy little forehead, beloved one.

To aid thee from the fays,
To guard thee from the host;

To aid thee from the gnome,
To shield thee from the spectre;

To keep thee for the Three,
To shield thee, to surround thee;

To save thee for the Three,
To fill thee with the graces;

The little drop of the Three
To lave thee with the graces.

With an intent both poetic and practical, this baptismal prayer serves as a graceful commentary on, and response to, the gospel reading for Trinity Sunday. In Matthew 28.16-20, we read the words that are, according to Matthew, Jesus’ final words to his disciples. In this passage that we often call the Great Commission, Jesus tells them to “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you.” Jesus’ words here are about the closest thing we have to an articulation of the Trinity in the scriptures. Jesus never uses the term “Trinity,” and he offers nothing like a doctrine of its nature. His words here, however, perhaps provide doctrine enough: he lets us know that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit exist in an inextricable relationship that propels us to be in relationship with the world, to live in service and to cultivate community. “And remember,” Jesus tells them at the last, “I am with you always, to the end of the age.” I am with you, he says: that being thing again, invariably bound together with the doing of the Trinity, an endless spiral of action and existence in which it dwells, and calls us to dwell as well.

In the Celtic triple spiral, there is a space where the three spirals connect. It is both a place of meeting and of sheer mystery. Its vast, vibrant emptiness reminds me that, in this life, we will never know all the names of God. Even as the Trinity evokes, it conceals. We will never exhaust the images we use to describe the One who holds us and sends us, who enfolds us and impels us in our eternal turning.

This week, as we travel toward Trinity Sunday, I’ll be holding that image of the triple spiral and the community in whose company I walked its path: inward, outward, journeying ever around the mystery at its center. Those walking companions remind me of how we are to be a living sign of the Trinity who dwells in eternal, intertwined relationship within itself and with all creation. As individuals and as communities, we are beckoned to times of spiraling inward, to attend to our own souls. We are propelled, in turn, into times of spiraling outward, to attend to the world beyond us. In all our turnings, the presence of God persists. With you always, Jesus said.

How do you experience the God who exists as a community and invites us to intertwined lives? How does this God become incarnate in the rhythm of your days?

Blessings on your spiral-shaped path.

[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, books, Gospel of Matthew, lectionary, mystery, sacred time | 17 Comments »

A Postscript to Pentecost

May 11, 2008

Happy Pentecost to you! On this occasion of Pentecost’s unusual confluence with Mother’s Day, I’ve found myself thinking about the frequency with which Mary, the mother of Jesus, appears front and center in artful depictions of Pentecost. In the first chapter of Acts, the author makes a point of noting that “certain women, including Mary the mother of Jesus,” were among those who gathered in the upper room, devoting themselves to prayer. The text implies her prayerful presence at Pentecost, and artists across the centuries highlighted her among the gathered assembly. Because of her presence and leadership among the disciples, along with her role as the mother of Christ, Mary became known as Queen of the Apostles as well as Mother of the Church.

The artful images of the Pentecostal Mary illuminate an intriguing resonance with the story of the Annunciation. In Luke’s gospel, we read of how the angel Gabriel tells Mary that the Holy Spirit will come upon her, and the power of the Most High will overshadow her. As with the Annunciation, paintings of Pentecost, such as this one in the St Albans Psalter, typically depict a woman open to the Spirit who appears—as so often in Christian iconography—in the form of a dove.

In much the same way that many medieval artists portrayed Mary reading at the Annunciation, they often depicted her in a similar fashion at Pentecost, as in this page from a 15th-century French Book of Hours. Another French Book of Hours depicts Mary kneeling at a prie-dieu as she reads, a motif that often appeared in artwork of the Annunciation.

As a blissfully incurable lover of books, I take great delight in these images of the literary, Pentecostal Mary who remained steeped in the Word throughout her life. These images also challenge me to ponder how I’m opening myself to the God who comes to us as both Word and Spirit. What do they stir in you?

On this day and all the days to come, may the Spirit breathe through the mothers and others who care for the children of the world.

(Artwork: Annunciation to Mary [detail] from The Advent Hours © Jan L. Richardson.)

Posted in art, books, holidays, lectionary, sacred time | Leave a Comment »

Pentecost: Fire and Breath

May 5, 2008


Fire and Breath © Jan L. Richardson

In my junior year of high school, I landed in the hospital several times because one of my lungs kept collapsing. It wasn’t due to an injury; each collapse was spontaneous, owing to a genetic predisposition not uncommon among tall, skinny girls. (It often comes accessorized with a mild heart murmur, something I didn’t know until a doctor picked it up in a routine exam a few years ago.) Normally a really healthy kid, I was concerned about the inordinate level of excitement it stirred in my doctor’s office. After he had his nurses come and listen to my chest, my doctor explained that I’d have to go to the hospital to get my lung reinflated. I imagined something like a bicycle pump, a quick procedure that would have me out in time to take a major test the next day. Instead, I spent the next five days getting intimately acquainted with a chest tube and the oddities of morphine.

The trip to the hospital provided only a temporary fix for my lung. When a partial collapse the next month was followed by a complete collapse the month after that, I knew the next step would be more drastic. The chest tube was put back in, and this time, they poured tetracycline down it. A recently developed alternative to surgery, tetracycline served to form scar tissue to keep the lung intact and prevent it from collapsing again.

Painkillers and local anesthesia only do so much to dull the sensation of acid flowing over your innards. Mostly I remember unbelievable pressure on my chest, the sensation that I could not breathe, would never do it again, that my body would not remember how. But in the wake of the fire came breath: breath that came without assistance, breath that sustained itself and did not seep out. In time I came to understand the experience as a gift, one marked by the presence of God, who did not inflict it upon me but used it as an occasion of transformation, an experience of initiation. With the fire and the breath came knowledge: I would never be in my body in the same way. It altered how I experienced my own body, and it changed how I would engage people whose bodies are vulnerable. A good gift for a girl who would grow up to be a pastor.

That initiation of fire and breath has been much on my mind as the day of Pentecost approaches. A defining day in the life of the early church, Pentecost finds its roots in the Jewish tradition, where it is called Shavuot or the Festival of Weeks. Falling fifty days after Passover, Shavuot is a harvest festival and also commemorates the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai. Acts 2.1-21 tells us it is on this festival day that the followers of Jesus are “all together in one place” when the Spirit appears. It arrives as a rushing wind, filling them, in-spiring them, causing them to draw breath and speak. The scene at Pentecost offers a brilliant display of how in Greek, as in Hebrew, the word for Spirit, wind, and breath is the same: pneuma (In Hebrew, ruach).

Along with the wind comes fire, a symbol that stirs our collective memory of the God whose transforming presence has so often been marked by flames. Think of Moses and the burning bush, the column of fire that led the people of Israel through the wilderness, the temple fire that consumed the sacrificial offerings. “For the Lord your God is a devouring fire,” Deuteronomy 4.24 tells us. In contemporary culture, we most often experience fire as a contained, controlled, gentle force. Yet the fires of Pentecost are not the tame flames of birthday candles or a cozy winter’s hearth; the fires of Pentecost are a sign of the God who resists our every attempt to domesticate the divine and to control how the holy will work.

For the followers of Jesus, the day of Pentecost becomes an occasion of profound initiation. With the gift of spirit and flame, the community that Jesus had formed is now fired, prepared, propelled into a new stage of its journey. Like a vessel in the furnace of a kiln, the followers of Jesus receive the transformation they need. They are no longer a group of believers but rather a catalyzed community, a body that, enlivened by the Spirit, will endure and continue the work of Christ.

As those followers knew, we can’t always plan our moments of initiation. If we cannot control God, it follows that we cannot control the ways that God beckons or, sometimes, seemingly flings us across a new threshold. We can work to make ourselves available when it happens, but we don’t always get to choose our initiations.

In her book Reinventing Eve, Kim Chernin describes initiation this way:

Initiation is not a predictable process. It moves forward fitfully, through moments of clear seeing, dramatic episodes of feeling, subtle intuitions, vague contemplative states. Dreams arrive, bringing guidance we frequently cannot accept. Years pass, during which we know that we are involved in something that cannot easily be named. We wake to a sense of confusion, know that we are in dangerous conflict, cannot define the nature of what troubles us. All change is like this. It circles around, leads us a merry chase, starts us out it seems all over again from where we were in the first place. And then suddenly, when we least expect it, something opens a door, discovers a threshold, shoves us across.

At Pentecost, initiation occurred not only at the individual level (“and a tongue rested on each of them”) but also at the corporate level. The outpouring of the Spirit upon the whole community reminds us that we are not on an individual journey but a shared one. God calls us, compels us, to attend to the Spirit in one another.

The celebration of Pentecost beckons us to keep breathing. It challenges us to keep ourselves open to the Spirit who seeks us. The Spirit that, in the beginning, brooded over the chaos and brought forth creation; the Spirit that drenched the community with fire and breath on the day of Pentecost: this same Spirit desires to dwell within us and among us. Amidst the brokenness and chaos and pain that sometimes come with being in community, the Spirit searches for places to breathe in us, to transform us, to knit us together more deeply and wholly as the body of Christ, and to send us forth into the world.

As we approach Pentecost, what occasions of initiation do you remember? Sought or unbidden, how did those experiences alter you, transform you, change who you are in this world? How did they deepen your understanding of yourself, your community, and how God desires to breathe through you? How do you continue to open yourself to the work of the Spirit in you and in those around you?

Blessings to you in these days of celebration. May we keep breathing. May we blaze.

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

Posted in art, lectionary, sacred time | 8 Comments »

Ascension/Easter 7: A Blessing at Bethany

April 30, 2008


Ascension © Jan L. Richardson

Reading from the Gospels, Ascension Day: Luke 24.44-53

These days I’m at work on a new book that’s something of a sequel to the first book I wrote (if you don’t count the book about animals that I wrote and illustrated when I was about eight, in which my drawing of a horse looks very much like my drawing of a dog). Working on this sequel has set me to thinking about who I was when I was writing the first book. I began that book, Sacred Journeys, during my final year in seminary, stayed in Atlanta an extra year to work on it, and finally completed it a year and a half after moving back to Florida to take my first pastoral appointment.

The span of time I spent on that first book included one of the happiest years of my life—my final year in Atlanta—and one of the most difficult years of my life—my first year in Orlando. In Atlanta I had an amazing community. Based largely within the seminary I attended, these friends nourished and stretched and sustained me. They were part of my daily rhythm of life. They mediated the presence of Christ to me.

Leaving the community I had found in Atlanta was a source of deep grief. I knew no one when I moved to Orlando. Though I was clear this was where I needed to be, this clarity provided an incomplete comfort. I remember trying to figure out how to appear competent as a pastor and carry grief at the same time. During that first year, I received an anonymous letter (and if you’re a pastor, you know how much we love getting those letters from people who feel strongly enough to write but not strongly enough to put their name to it) from someone who suggested both that I share more about myself in my sermons and also that I use more humor. “Honey,” I thought at that point in my journey, “it’s one or the other.”

The sorrow ran its course. Time and focused work did their usual healing, and I found a new community in Orlando. Different from the one I had in Atlanta, but nourishing, creative, and amazing in its own ways: a community that reminds me of the infinite forms that the body of Christ can take in this world.

In the midst of remembering the loss of community, and the finding of one, I’ve been pondering the gospel lection for Ascension Day. Having lingered for forty days (a good biblical number) following his resurrection, during which he engaged in such acts as eating and wound-showing to demonstrate that he wasn’t a ghost, Jesus prepares to take his final leave of those who have been his companions on his earthly path. He shares his final words with them—crucial words, words of call and of promise. And then, Luke tells us, Jesus leads them “as far as Bethany,” where he will depart from them.

I am struck by Luke’s mention of Bethany as the site of Jesus’ ascension. The gospels mention Bethany a number of times. It is a place to which Jesus withdraws on more than one occasion, and we know the town most memorably as the home of Mary, Martha, and Lazarus, who are particular friends of Jesus. As the site of the raising of Lazarus and two accounts of Jesus’ receiving the gift of a woman’s anointing, Bethany stands as a place of healing, restoration of life, hospitality, and friendship. Likewise, at Bethany the fullness of Jesus’ divinity and his humanity come into sharp focus: in his raising of Lazarus, Jesus had displayed his power over death, and in his friendship with Mary, Martha, and Lazarus, he revealed himself as someone who took solace and delight in their human company.

For Jesus’ companions who witness his ascension, Bethany conjures memories that Jesus means for them to draw upon as they begin to live without him. Bethany was a place where hospitality, friendship, and the miraculous intertwined in the community around Jesus. The fact that he chooses it as his place of departure suggests that he intends for them to remember that these gifts will remain with them—and not only these gifts, but also his own spirit.

In depicting Jesus’ ascension, medieval artists often painted Jesus with only his feet showing (one can almost see his toes wiggling), just barely visible as he departs, as in the St Albans Psalter or this thirteenth-century German Psalter. They wanted to emphasize his bodily departure from the earth. Yet, as Gail Ramshaw points out in Treasures Old and New, such a depiction does not suggest that “Christ has gone away from the church. The church fathers,” she goes on to write, “taught just the opposite: that as Christ went to God, his body became available to all the church.” And not only available to the church, but also enfleshed within it and by it, a point these same medieval artists emphasize by their attention to those who remain as Jesus leaves. Though Jesus’ departure poses the risk of profound disruption among his followers, his ascension becomes an opportunity for the community not merely to reorganize and refashion itself but to become the very body of Christ in the world.

Luke writes that it is as Jesus is blessing the disciples that he begins to leave them. He does not raise his voice in a lamentation over his departure, he does not offer any further words of wisdom and instruction, he does not fling last-minute advice their way. He blesses them. Where the disciples might have been justly distraught, Luke tells us that instead they worshiped Jesus “and returned to Jerusalem with great joy; and they were continually in the temple blessing God.” Jesus’ disciples recognize that his leaving is part of his blessing. Having called them into relationship with him and one another, having lived and journeyed with them, he frees them to live into their ongoing call. They, in turn, respond to Jesus’ blessing by offering blessings of their own, in the temple and beyond. They respond to his blessing by becoming his body.

We may grieve—and rightly so—the changes and leave-takings that come with being in community. This relationship stuff is risky business. Yet Jesus’ ascension reminds us there is something deeper at work in such times, something that not only carries us through the changes but also uses them to transform us and to bless the body of Christ. In the midst of every loss and change, the presence of Christ persists, shaping his community anew and calling us to blessing and joy.

Where have you found a blessing in the midst of loss? How have you experienced—and offered—the body of Christ among the changes in your life? Having received the blessing of Christ, how do you offer a blessing in return?

May you journey, along with those first disciples, with great joy and blessing.

[To use this artwork, 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, Easter, Gospel of Luke, lectionary, sacred time | 3 Comments »

Feast of Saint Patrick

March 17, 2008

stpatrick.jpg
Saint Patrick: Deer’s Cry © Jan L. Richardson

It seems auspicious that Holy Week this year begins with the feast of St. Patrick. Though his feast falls during Lent by happenstance, Patrick offers a powerful example of someone who, in every season, accepted the challenge that Lent poses us: to stretch beyond the familiar borders of the world we know, and to meet God there.

The story of Patrick is deeply entwined with the story of Ireland, so much so that it was only in recent years that I learned that Patrick’s story didn’t begin there. The boy who would become a saint was born in Britain at the end of the fourth century. As a youth he was kidnapped and taken to Ireland as a slave, where he tended flocks and began to spend his time in prayer. In a work titled “Patrick’s Declaration on the Great Works of God,” also known as the Confessio, Patrick writes that as he prayed among the flocks, “more and more, the love of God and the fear of him grew [in me], and [my] faith was increased and [my] spirit was quickened….” After six years, Patrick escaped from captivity and returned to Britain and to his parents, who, he tells us, “begged me—after all those great tribulations I had been through—that I should go nowhere, nor ever leave them.” Yet Patrick goes on to write,

…it was there, I speak the truth, that ‘I saw a vision of the night’: a man named Victoricus—’like one’ from Ireland—coming with innumerable letters. He gave me one of them and I began to read what was in it: ‘The voice of the Irish.’ And at that very moment as I was reading out the letter’s opening, I thought I heard the voice of those around the wood of Foclut, which is close to the western sea. It was ‘as if they were shouting with one voice’: ‘O holy boy, we beg you to come again and walk among us.’ And I was ‘broken hearted’ and could not read anything more. And at that moment I woke up. Thank God, after many years the Lord granted them what they called out for.

Patrick eventually went back to Ireland, returning as a bishop to the land that had been the place of his bondage. For Patrick and his fifth-century contemporaries, Ireland was the edge of the known world. In returning there, he considered himself to be living out Christ’s call to take the Gospel to the ends of the earth. He writes, “We are [now] witnesses to the fact that the gospel has been preached out to beyond where any man lives.” Though Patrick was not the first Christian to set foot in Ireland, he was among the earliest, and his tireless, wide-ranging ministry was pivotal in the formation and organization of the church in that land.

Like all good saints, Patrick has attracted good legends. One story relates that as he and his companions made their way to Tara to see Loegaire, the High King of Ireland, the king’s men tried to ambush them. Patrick sang a prayer, known as a lorica (”breastplate”—a prayer of encompassing and protection), and he and his companions took on the appearance of deer, thereby eluding their attackers. The prayer, which became known as Patrick’s Breastplate or Deer’s Cry, most likely dates to at least two centuries later. It endures, however, as one of the most beautiful and powerful prayers of the Christian tradition, and it conveys something of the spirit of Patrick that continues to permeate Ireland and the world beyond. The prayer reads, in part,

Christ with me, Christ before me, Christ behind me;
Christ within me, Christ beneath me, Christ above me;
Christ to right of me, Christ to left of me;
Christ in my lying, Christ in my sitting, Christ in my rising…

(This excerpt, along with the quotes from Patrick’s Confessio,
come from Celtic Spirituality, translated and introduced
by Oliver Davies.)

Enter “Deer’s Cry” into your search engine and you’ll find a variety of translations of the entire prayer. My favorite translation is by Malachi McCormick of the Stone Street Press. In a charming edition which, like all his books, is calligraphed, illustrated, and hand-bound by his own Irish self, Malachi offers his English translation alongside the old Irish text. I happened upon Malachi’s Deer’s Cry as a seminary student many moons ago and was immediately taken by his elegant and painstaking work. His wondrous books provided the initial inspiration when I founded Wanton Gospeller Press several years ago, and one of my great delights in the wake of that has come in exchanging correspondence with Malachi. I invite you to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day by visiting Malachi’s site at Stone Street Press, purchasing a copy of Deer’s Cry, and picking up a few other books while you’re at it.

A blessed Feast of St. Patrick to you, and may God encompass you with protection on this and all days.

Bonus round: My sweetheart, Garrison Doles, has an amazing song inspired by the life of St. Patrick. It incorporates the ancient prayer of encompassing known as “St. Patrick’s Breastplate” or “Deer’s Cry.” Click this audio player to hear “Patrick on the Water” (from Gary’s CD House of Prayer).

[To use the “St. Patrick: Deer’s Cry” 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, Celtic, Lent, monastic stuff, sacred time, writing | 4 Comments »

Palm Sunday: Where the Way Leads

March 14, 2008

Image: Where the Way Leads © Jan Richardson

At the opening of her book To Dance with God, Gertrud Mueller Nelson tells the story of an afternoon she spent absorbed in a project at her sewing machine. Her daughter Annika, three years old at the time, dug into the basket of scraps that sat at her mother’s feet. Annika pulled out several long, bright strips of discarded fabric, gathered them up, and slipped away. Gertrud writes than when she went to find Annika, “I tracked her whereabouts to the back garden where I found her sitting in the grass with a long pole. She was affixing the scraps to the top of the pole with great sticky wads of tape. ‘I’m making a banner for a procession,’ she said. ‘I need a procession so that God will come down and dance with us.’ With that she solemnly lifted her banner to flutter in the wind and slowly she began to dance.”

This week we celebrate Palm Sunday, remembering the day when the crowds of Jerusalem offered a procession to celebrate the one who came to live, and walk, and work, and dance among us. Matthew gives us the Gospel lection for Palm Sunday this year. Matthew 21.1-11 tells the familiar story of how Jesus sends two disciples ahead to the village to bring back a donkey for Jesus. (An art historical note here: Matthew’s claim that Jesus rode a donkey and a colt, which probably stemmed from a not-entirely-precise reading of the Isaiah prophecy that he quotes, produced some unusual medieval depictions of Jesus riding two animals at the same time. Not saying he couldn’t have done it, but I think he already had enough going on that he would have avoided that particular balancing act.) Matthew goes on to tell of the crowds: they line the road with cloaks and branches, they go ahead of Jesus, they follow after him, they shout Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest heaven! And to those in Jerusalem who ask, “Who is this?” these same crowds say, “This is the prophet Jesus from Nazareth in Galilee.”

It is a scene of jubilation, this procession in honor of the prophet. For those who know the rest of the story, however, there is an eerie note to the cries of the crowd. The way of palms will lead to the way of the passion, a path marked by shouts of accusation and a collective demand for Jesus’ death, a path traced in blood.

Amid the hosannas of the festive crowd, I keep hearing a voice that echoes from the other end of Jesus’ story. It belongs to John the Baptist. It is a lone voice, a ragged, fiery, locust-and-honey-drenched voice, a voice that raised its cry long before the crowds began to do so. Early in his Gospel, Matthew tells us of John, and he turns to the prophet Isaiah for words to describe him:

This is the one of whom the prophet Isaiah spoke when he said,
“The voice of one crying out in the wilderness:
‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.'”
(Matthew 3.3, quoting Isaiah 40.3, NRSV)

John had indeed prepared the way for his kinsman Jesus, whom he recognized long before anyone else, even, as Luke tells us, leaping for joy in the womb when his pregnant mother Elizabeth heard the pregnant Mary’s voice. By the time that Matthew tells of a cloak-and-branch-strewn road, John is gone, dead at Herod’s command. What would the Baptist have thought of where this way, so well prepared, was taking Jesus? A prophet steeped in the stories of his prophetic forebears, John would have been well acquainted with the evils that can be visited upon a prophet. Yet he would have known, too, that evil never has the final word.

In the same Isaiah passage that Matthew quotes to describe John the Baptist, the prophet goes on to say this:

A voice says, “Cry out!”
And I said, “What shall I cry?”
All people are grass,
their constancy is like the flower
of the field.
The grass withers, the flower fades,
when the breath of the Lord
blows upon it;
surely the people are grass.
The grass withers, the flower fades;
but the word of our God will
stand forever. (Isaiah 40.6-8)

The word endures. The Word endures. We who stand among the Palm Sunday crowds know that the Word will soon be beaten, mocked, and killed. We know, too, that that is not the end of the tale.

But we have not yet moved on to that part of the tale. This week’s Gospel lection beckons us to linger alongside the road, to lift our voices in celebration, and to ask ourselves a few questions. I find myself wondering, what is the way that I am preparing for Christ? Am I clearing a path by which he has access to my life? Am I keeping my eyes open to the variety of guises that Christ continues to wear in our world? Taking a cue from Annika, what am I lifting up, that God might come down and dance with me?

On the cusp of Palm Sunday, on the threshold of this Week of Weeks: blessings to you, and a pair of dancing shoes.

[To use the image “Where the Way Leads,” 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, lectio divina, lectionary, Lent, sacred time | 5 Comments »

Ash Wednesday, Almost

February 5, 2008

Image: Ash Wednesday © Jan Richardson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Feast of the Presentation/Candlemas

February 2, 2008

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 Blessing of the Candles © Jan L. Richardson

In the rhythm of the Christian liturgical year, today 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 (see yesterday’s post) makes an appearance among the Candlemas legends. One of those legends reflects a lovely 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, but in a culture in which the bond of fostering was sometimes stronger than the bond of blood, this notion reveals something of the deep esteem that Brigid 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 Day, 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?

[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!]

Posted in art, Celtic, monastic stuff, sacred time | 1 Comment »

Feast of Saint Brigid

February 1, 2008

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© Jan L. Richardson  ◊The Painted Prayerbook◊

Today marks the Feast of St. Brigid of Kildare, the 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 St. Brigid of Kildare Monastery.

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

St. Brigid artwork © Jan L. Richardson from the book In Wisdom’s Path: Discovering the Sacred in Every Season.

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

Transfiguration Sunday: Mum’s the Word (Maybe)

January 30, 2008

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Perhaps like Mary with the child in her womb.

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

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

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

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

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

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