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Inviting Epiphany

December 30, 2008

wisewomenalsocame
Wise Women Also Came © Jan L. Richardson

I’m working on a reflection for the gospel lection for Epiphany, but in the meantime, I offer you this festive trio to get the celebration under way. Wise Women Also Came was one of the first collages I did when I started to discover, many years ago, that there was an artist lurking in me. I created this as my Epiphany (i.e., belated Christmas) card the year I graduated from seminary. I made it out of plain construction paper; this was before I had discovered the wondrous world of art papers. (A trip to The Japanese Paper Place, now simply called The Paper Place, while visiting my sister in Toronto changed all that; you could say that walking into its stunning space was, well, an epiphany.)

These wise women made their way onto the cover of my first book, which I was writing during the same time that I was getting to know my inner artist. They also made an appearance in Night Visions, my first book to wed my writing and my artwork. This time a poem accompanied the women:

Wise Women Also Came

Wise women also came.
The fire burned
in their wombs
long before they saw
the flaming star
in the sky.
They walked in shadows,
trusting the path
would open
under the light of the moon.

Wise women also came,
seeking no directions,
no permission
from any king.
They came
by their own authority,
their own desire,
their own longing.
They came in quiet,
spreading no rumors,
sparking no fears
to lead
to innocents’ slaughter,
to their sister Rachel’s
inconsolable lamentations.

Wise women also came,
and they brought
useful gifts:
water for labor’s washing,
fire for warm illumination,
a blanket for swaddling.

Wise women also came,
at least three of them,
holding Mary in the labor,
crying out with her
in the birth pangs,
breathing ancient blessings
into her ear.

Wise women also came,
and they went,
as wise women always do,
home a different way.

Next week, in the wake of an intense season of travels and other endeavors, I’ll resume working on a new book. It’s something of a sequel to Sacred Journeys, the book I was writing when these wise women took shape. Though I rarely find writing easy (when folks ask me if I enjoy writing, I usually say, “I enjoy having written”), I’m looking forward to reentering the rhythm of working on a book in a focused fashion. It seems an opportune time to revisit these wise women as I seek a blessing for the path, and the book, ahead. I wonder who will show up this time, and what epiphanies they will have in store.

Who have been the wise women in your life? What epiphanies have they instigated? Here at the ending of the year, what wisdom do you want to gather up from the past twelve months and take with you into the coming year? What blessing, what gifts, do you need to receive for the path ahead? What gifts do you need to offer, that only you can give?

Peace to you in this time of turning.

[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, Christmas, Epiphany, holidays, mystery, sacred time, writing | 6 Comments »

Something Old, Something New

July 23, 2008


Something Old, Something New © Jan L. Richardson

While I was at St. John’s University in Minnesota last week, I made a couple of visits to the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library (known in those parts as the HMML). The Benedictine monks of St. John’s founded the HMML to preserve the medieval manuscript heritage of Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, and it’s always a favorite destination for a girl with a blog called The Painted Prayerbook. This summer the HMML is home to a tasty exhibition of original folios from The Saint John’s Bible, the first Bible to be written and illustrated entirely by hand in more than five hundred years. Featuring the Wisdom Books section of The St. John’s Bible, the exhibition marks the completion of five of the planned seven volumes of this contemporary manuscript. By the time that Donald Jackson and his team of scribes and artists complete their lavish, monumental work, the Bible will have absorbed about ten years of their lives.

A group was touring the exhibition during one of my visits to the museum. As I took in the folios, with the gold dancing on their pages, I tuned an ear to the comments that the group’s HMML guide offered. After her presentation, she fielded a number of questions. “Why,” one person asked, “in this age of high-quality printing technology, would someone spend the time to create an entire Bible by hand?” As the guide responded, she spoke about the value of recovering ancient practices of bookmaking as a sacred art, and of the beauty that emerges in fashioning something by hand. She pointed out that contemporary technology has played a significant role in The Saint John’s Bible; a designer used a computer to plan the entire layout of the pages before the team began to lay the first strokes of ink, paint, and gold leaf on the vellum sheets.

It’s a treasure that draws from what is old and what is new.

We hear about such treasures in this week’s gospel lection, Matthew 13.31-33, 44-52. Jesus, who is in a parable-telling mood at this point in the gospel, offers a series of images that describe what the kingdom of heaven is like. He speaks of a mustard seed that grows into a tree, yeast that a woman mixes with flour, a man who discovers treasure hidden in a field, a merchant who finds a pearl of great value, and a net filled with fish. Jesus closes the litany of images by saying, “Therefore every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like the master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.”

The scribe about whom Jesus speaks is a rather different sort of scribe than those who have been laboring over The Saint John’s Bible. Jesus’ scribe is one versed in Mosaic Law, a person who knows and draws from the wealth of the law and also recognizes new treasure when it appears. Yet the scribes of The Saints John’s Bible, and the pages they have created, embody what Jesus’ kingdom-images evoke. Each reminds us of how the holy, which so often seems hidden, emerges when we stretch ourselves into searching for it, seeking it, laboring toward it. The bakerwoman kneading in her kitchen, the man who sells all that he has to buy the field, the merchant who gives up everything to purchase the pearl of great price, the scribe trained for the kingdom of heaven, the householder who brings forth treasure old and new: each of these has given themselves, devoted themselves, to a particular process by which treasure emerges. They know what skills it takes, what vision, what devotion. Each trained in their particular art, they possess in their bones the knowledge that tells them what ingredient to use, what tools old or new to employ, what treasure lies before them.

Offering these images, Jesus recognizes there are things that are worth a long devotion; there is treasure worth giving ourselves to for a decade, a lifetime. Such treasure might not have a usefulness that is obvious, or readily grasped. In a world where technological shortcuts abound (and are useful at times, to be sure)—bread machines, metal detectors, faux pearls, computer printers—something happens when we take the long way around, when we hunt for the holy that often loves to hide in work that takes time, takes the development of skill, takes commitment, takes the long view.

I think of when I was first learning calligraphy a few years ago. There was no getting around the need for practice. Over weeks and months, as I covered page after page with ink, shaky lines steadily grew more sure, and awkwardness began to give way to art.

This type of long laboring and searching reveals something about our own selves. Submitting ourselves to a process of practicing brings secret parts of ourselves to the surface; it draws us out and unhides us, and the holy that dwells within us. “The kingdom of God is among you,” Jesus says in Luke 17.21. Among us, and meant to be uncovered, to become visible, to offer sustenance and grace for the life of the world. Like bread. Trees. Pearls. Pages. Treasure born of what is old and what is new.

What treasure have you found, or long to find, in the hidden places of your life? What searching, what seeking might God be challenging you toward, to uncover what’s been buried? Is there anything in your life that invites you to encounter the holy in a process that takes time, practice, skill, devotion? What of yourself do you find in that, and what do you find of God?

May this week bring a hidden gift your way. Blessings.

[To use the “Something Old, Something New” 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, medieval, monastic stuff, mystery, Ordinary Time, writing | Leave a Comment »

In the Weeds

July 15, 2008


In the Weeds © Jan L. Richardson

Reading from the Gospels, Proper 11/Ordinary 16/Pentecost +5: Matthew 13.24-30, 36-43

I’m lingering in Minnesota for a few days in the wake of a great retreat with the Saint Brigid’s community. As I was running some errands yesterday with my friend Mary, the founder of Saint Brigid’s, we passed some wheat fields—not a typical sight in my usual landscape. It was an interesting bit of convergence, given our gospel lection for the week. Matthew offers us a tale of wheat and weeds, with Jesus weaving these agrarian images into a parable about the kingdom of God.

Matthew lets us in on Jesus’ explanation of this parable, and it seems pretty straightforward at the surface. Jesus offers an interpretive equation in which, not surprisingly, wheat=good and weeds=bad. I’m curious, however, about how Jesus has the householder respond to the laborer who asks him whether they should gather the weeds. The householder tells him to allow the weeds and the wheat to grow together until harvest time, at which point the laborers will gather the weeds and burn them. Removing the weeds too soon would cause harm to the growing wheat.

Jesus’ parable has set me to pondering how weeds and wheat grow together in my own life. I have found myself thinking about my creative process, in particular the challenges that I experience as an artist and a writer. I’ve long been aware that part of my ongoing work is to cultivate practices that support the work. There is part of me that needs a measured rhythm of life—like orderly rows of wheat, say. Yet that orderly part of me regularly grapples with the part that needs a strand of something that’s a bit wilder, something less domesticated.

Something weedy.

I sometimes grow dismayed by what I allow to creep into my creative life: commitments that distract me, weariness, or plain old resistance to the process. Though being an artist and writer lies at the heart of who I am, I sometimes wrestle with how the work brings my inner self to the surface, confronting me with the raw, unformed stuff I carry around inside me. Some days it’s easier to let the weeds grow, as if they could provide a bit of wild shelter from the work of cultivating my interior crop.

My spiritual director has challenged me to think about the ways I see those times of distraction and discouragement, those occasions when I skirt the demands of the drafting table or the blank page in favor of something else. Where I have tended to view those times as wasteful, extraneous to what I’m supposed to be about in this world, she invites me to see them as part of the process, integral to the creative crop. There’s something about spending time among the weeds that serves to clarify my vision and sharpen my desire. Weeds don’t make for a steady diet, and eventually I get hungry for what will sustain and satisfy, and will do whatever is necessary to find my way to that sustenance. In the fullness of time, an interior apocalypse comes around: the weeds fall away, and burn in the fire that comes in times of focused creating. The longed-for crop flourishes, and feeds.

What’s growing in the landscape of your life? How do you discern the difference between the weeds and the wheat? What do you do with the weeds? How might they be part of the work of cultivating your landscape?

Blessings to you in the wild and weedy places.

[To use the “In the Weeds” 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, Ordinary Time, writing | 5 Comments »

Out of the Dark

June 17, 2008


© Jan L. Richardson ◊The Painted Prayerbook◊

In 1941, a young Jewish woman named Etty Hillesum began to keep a journal. Hitler’s armies had invaded her homeland of The Netherlands nine months before she took up her pen. As the Nazi forces wielded increasing control over nearly every aspect of her life and the life of her community, Etty continued to write, filling a series of eight exercise books over the next nineteen months. “If I have one duty in these times,” she observed, “it is to bear witness.”

Etty bore witness not only to what was happening in the world around her but also in the world within her—the one place the Nazis could not invade. Amid the mounting terrors that the Nazis were inflicting, Etty documented and reflected on the dailiness of her life. She wrote of the complexities of her relationships with family and friends, her work as a Russian tutor, her passionate appetite for reading (among her favorites were the works of the poet Rilke as well as the Gospels). She wrote of her hungers, her longings, her prayers. Her diaries weren’t a form of escapism; rather, they convey her conviction that the exterior and interior worlds are not separate from one another. Etty believed that doing one’s inner work is crucial to the thriving of a society. She wrote that if we refuse to look into our own shadows, if we resist going into the dark places within ourselves and our world, our shadows eventually spill out in hatred and violence—as her own homeland was experiencing.

Etty recognized both her capacity for hatred and the need to let it go. On a February day, she notes the martyrdom of a young man; she comments on how he had played the mandolin, and had a wife and child. She runs into a friend and talks with him about the martyred man. Her friend asks, “What is it in human beings that makes them want to destroy others?” Etty’s response reminds him that they, too—the two of them—are among the human beings of whom he speaks. “I see no other solution,” she tells him, “I really see no other solution than to turn inwards and to root out all the rottenness there.”

Etty wrote with a sense of her own frailty—she describes occasions of anxiety, illness, and depression—as well as a keen understanding of the brokenness around her. In the midst of this, Etty evinces a stubborn willingness to enter the darkness and its mysteries. There she finds the presence of God and the riches of her own soul.

One spring morning she wrote,

I went to bed early last night and from my bed I stared out through the large open window. And it was once more as if life with all its mysteries was close to me, as if I could touch it. I had the feeling that I was resting against the naked breast of life, and could feel her gentle and regular heartbeat. I felt safe and protected. And I thought: how strange. It is wartime. There are concentration camps. I can say of so many of the houses I pass: here the son has been thrown into prison, there the father has been taken hostage, and an 18-year-old boy in that house over there has been sentenced to death. And these streets and houses are all so close to my own. I know how very nervous people are, I know about the mounting human suffering. I know the persecution and oppression and despotism and the impotent fury and the terrible sadism. I know it all.

And yet—at unguarded moments, when left to myself, I suddenly lie against the naked breast of life and her arms round me are so gentle and so protective and my own heartbeat is difficult to describe: so slow and so regular and so soft, almost muffled, but so constant as if it would never stop.

That is also my attitude to life and I believe that neither war nor any other senseless human atrocity will ever be able to change it.

In 1942, Etty Hillesum was sent to the labor camp at Westerbork, where she held a position that enabled her to travel back and forth to Amsterdam. Her position offered the possibility of escape, and on one occasion, friends tried to kidnap her to prevent her return to Westerbork. Etty resisted, believing she was called to remain with those who were suffering. At Westerbork she continued to tend her inner terrain, acknowledging both the beauty and the struggle that she found. In one of her letters from the camp, she wrote,

When I think of the faces of that squad of armed, green-uniformed guards—my God, those faces! I looked at them, each in turn, from behind the safety of a window, and I have never been so frightened of anything in my life as I was of those faces. I sank to my knees with the words that preside over human life: And God made man after his likeness [Genesis 1.27]. That passage spent a difficult morning with me.

On September 7, 1943, Etty was put on a train to Auschwitz, along with her mother, father, and one of her brothers. None of them returned.

Etty flung a postcard from the train as they left Westerbork; a farmer found it and put it in the mail. On the postcard Etty had written, “We left the camp singing.”

Etty has been constant with me as I’ve pondered this week’s gospel lection, Matthew 10.24-39. Her words and her life have provided both commentary and challenge as I’ve prayed with Jesus’ words about shadows and darkness. With her own life she continues to teach me about how everything that is hidden eventually becomes revealed, about how we are called to proclaim in light what God tells us in the darkness. She persists in telling me what it means not to fear those who can kill the body but not the soul, and how we find our lives by losing them.

With her eloquent, raw, searing, haunting words, Etty reminds us that the shadows may hold fear and terror, but beneath that, deeper than that, more enduring than that, they contain the presence of God, who dwells in darkness as well as in light. She bears witness to the God who is shrouded in mystery yet longs to be known by us and to know us in all our brokenness and our beauty.

So how do we sort through what lies in the shadows of our own souls, our society, our world? How do we listen for the voice of God in the darkness and receive the revelations that Christ has for us there? How do we bring to light what we find in the shadows? Who or what helps us navigate the connections between the inner and outer realms? How does God call us to bear witness to, to “tell in the light,” what we find there?

Blessings to you in darkness and in daylight.

[Quotations from Etty: The Letters and Diaries of Etty HIllesum, 1941-43. Edited by Klaas A. D. Smelik, 2002.]

Posted in art, books, Gospel of Matthew, lectionary, Ordinary Time, writing | 4 Comments »

Stories and Circles

June 7, 2008


Stories and Circles © Jan L. Richardson

Reading from the Gospels, Year A, Proper 5/Ordinary 10/Pentecost +4: Matthew 9.9-13, 18-26
(Year B, Proper 8/Ordinary 13/Pentecost +4: Mark 5.21-43)

Okay, so can I just say that there are some weeks when the creative process kicks me up one side and down the other? This has been one of those weeks.

It has to do with circles.

For many days I have been pondering this week’s gospel lection. I love this passage, which Matthew, Mark, and Luke each include in some fashion in their gospels. I particularly love it for the way it intertwines the story of the healing of the long-bleeding woman who reaches out to Jesus with the story of a young girl, the daughter of a leader of the synagogue (or “ruler,” in Matthew’s version), whom Jesus is on his way to heal.

The story of the woman occurs in the middle of the story of the young girl. It’s possible to read the woman’s tale as something of an interruption of the girl’s, but there is such resonance between them that it makes a lot more sense to read them as the intertwined stories they are. A number of folks have written about the connections between these stories, teasing out the details of the literary structure and Jesus’ work of healing and restoration in both cases. These commentators have noted the detail that Matthew omits but that Mark and Luke include in their tellings: The girl, they say, is about twelve years old—the same number of years that the woman has been bleeding. It’s a detail that further underscores the links between these stories.

Pondering this passage in the context of lectio divina, I have found myself reflecting in particular about how the story of the woman is contained within the story of the girl. The girl’s story holds the woman’s story, not only in terms of literary structure, but also in the mysterious way that happens in the realm of story. Their healing is bound together.

A couple of months ago, I began doing some focused work with a gifted listener. In our first meeting I told her I wasn’t in the midst of a crisis, and I didn’t sense there was anything huge that was waiting to be unearthed. I was there, I said, because I needed to tell some stories. I’m at a point in my life where I’ve accumulated a few. Some of them are particularly present with me these days, and I’m curious to look more closely at how they connect, what they hold, and what they have to tell me as I discern the path ahead. In talking with this listener, I have found myself deeply aware of how each story I tell her contains another story, and another. Stories that may have happened years apart in chronological time are near neighbors in the space of the soul. The stories of the girl I was contain the stories of the woman. And the stories of the woman hold the stories of the girl.

In her book Writing for Your Life, Deena Metzger offers this quote about stories:

Stories move in circles. They don’t move in straight lines. So it helps if you listen in circles. There are stories inside stories and stories between stories, and finding your way through them is as easy and as hard as finding your way home. And part of the finding is the getting lost. And when you’re lost, you start to look around and listen. (A Traveling Jewish Theatre, Coming from a Great Distance)

Moving in circles in a mindful fashion makes for great soul-work but not for easy blog entries. Though I’m not a terribly linear person at any time, I do value being able to achieve some coherence, which has been elusive this week both in my artwork and in my writing. The deeper a text connects with my story, the more challenging it sometimes is to articulate the connection. Sitting at my drafting table and wrestling with the collage, sitting at my computer and wrestling with the words, I have felt a little lost. But I’m pausing in the circling, finally, to offer some scraps from the path, along with a few questions that I’ve brought with me:

How do your stories move in circles? What are the stories that are most present to you? How do the stories of your past and present contain one another? How do those stories pull you into the path ahead? Is there anyone who hears your stories, someone who helps you look around and listen?

A blessing on your circling.

[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, Gospel of Matthew, lectionary, Ordinary Time, writing | 6 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 »

Lent 5: Unbinding Words

March 7, 2008


Unbinding Words © Jan L. Richardson

For the entire season of Lent I have been looking forward to this week, because it gives us John 11.1-45 for our Gospel reading. The raising of Lazarus is a Big Story. It takes place at a pivotal place in John’s narrative. The action has begun to intensify; Jesus has just narrowly escaped stoning, and he will soon make his triumphal, if short-lived, entry into Jerusalem. The primary goal of the story is to display Jesus’ power: to demonstrate, as a friend of mine once observed, that Jesus isn’t much impressed with death.

John conveys his point with a richness of texture and detail that makes this a particularly compelling text with which to do lectio divina. The story is dense with movement and meaning, and it offers an extravagance of entry points for reflection.

I am intrigued by the web of relationships among the participants in this text. There are Mary and Martha, whose story is bound together with the unbinding of their brother, and who foreshadow the presence of women at another tomb that lies not too distant. I am curious about the friendship that these siblings shared with Jesus, how their home in Bethany seems to have been for Jesus a particular place of hospitality, comfort, familiarity, and, as John points out, love.

There is Thomas, seemingly destined to forever carry the title “Doubting Thomas,” who ought to be better known as the one who, in this story, demonstrates his willingness to die with Jesus.

There is Jesus, whose presence in the story is marked by waiting and weeping.

And then there is Lazarus. Though the story hinges largely on him, for most of it he is a passive background figure. We never hear his voice, and it is only at the end of the story that he finally becomes really interesting, when he is faced with the choice of whether or not to come out of the tomb.

This story is one of my favorites, not just because it’s a Big Story but because of the way that so many stories come together within it. This is not just Almighty Jesus at the height of his powers, showing off what he is capable of; this is Jesus reaching into the depths of who he is, pouring himself out on behalf of those with whom he is most intimately in relationship. Jesus enacts Lazarus’ raising, but he does so in the context of a community. Jesus calls Lazarus forth, but he calls upon those around Lazarus—sisters, kinfolk, neighbors—to unbind him and let him go.

Despite my fascination with such details that this story offers, and despite the fact that I’ve been looking forward to it for all of Lent, it’s taken me a long while to get my act together on doing the artwork and writing for this reflection. There are a variety of reasons for this. Perhaps it’s best simply to tell you a small story.

I live and work in a studio apartment that’s about 300 square feet. I have one closet. After living here for nearly a decade, the closet has gotten pretty full. My decision to clean it out this week owed to a couple of factors: I was looking for something that I thought was in it, and I am getting myself situated to begin working full-time on a new book. I suspect many writers would tell you that there is no time when cleaning seems more compelling and, in fact, absolutely essential than when there is a new writing project at hand. As a result, my apartment is the tidiest it’s been in a long time. This periodic impulse derives partly from my resistance to writing, but I’ve learned that it’s also part of the process, kind of like a dog who turns around in circles before finally settling down. I experience a strong connection between my external and internal space. Clearing and cleaning and sorting is a way of wreaking some sort of order amid the chaos that attends the writing process.

I had not done a purge of my wardrobe in many years, and, as a result, I wound up with a startlingly large pile of garments needing to be ushered into their next life. I’m not a clothes horse; I don’t even particularly like shopping for clothes, mostly because most clothing stores around here offer a sea of sameness that induces lethargy and saps my will to Try Things On. Despite this, I had managed to amass a sizable collection of clothes that I hadn’t worn in years. I had had some of them since college. A number of the garments held sentimental attachments for me, and I subjected my sweetheart to stories of my two favorite sweaters, received as gifts in college and worn for years, and to lamentations over a few pairs of Birkenstocks that were worn beyond the point of repair but that I could hardly stand to throw away.

This small story is simply a way of saying that I have spent a fair bit of time this week thinking about what I have clothed myself in, what attachments they have held for me, and what I need to let go of. I anticipate you figured out a while back that I’m not talking just about literal clothes. Sorting through the stacks has provided fertile opportunity to wrestle with deeper matters of the patterns with which I garb myself, and to reckon with layers of habits, practices, and routines, not all of which serve me, or my community, well.

The raising of Lazarus is indeed a Big Story. It unfolds, however, in the context of patterns of relationships, choices, habits, and personalities that influence how each character participates in and responds to Lazarus’ raising. Our own lives are built on these same details. We each garb ourselves in routines and practices that carry us through our relationships, our work, our hungers, our lives. Those routines and practices influence how we receive and respond to God’s call. We may be swathed in layers of habits that may have once fit us, habits we may once have found beautiful, habits we may yet be attached to long past their usefulness but which now insulate and shroud us from the presence of God.

The season of Lent beckons us to reckon with our most entrenched habits as individuals and communities: to sort through them and to recognize that Christ, in all his humanity and all his divinity, has power even over them. This season reminds us that the miraculous and the mundane are intimately intertwined. We are called to wrestle with the very details that shape our lives together, that new life may emerge.

So I ask you some of the questions I have been carrying for myself this week: In your daily living, what patterns are life-giving and help you notice the presence of God? Which habits keep you bound? What helps you hear the voice of Christ who stands at the threshold between death and life? What will help you choose to come forth, and to help someone else do the same? Are there people who can help with the unbinding?

May you find the presence of God in every detail.

[To use the “Unbinding Words” 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 John, lectio divina, lectionary, Lent, writing | 4 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 »

The Inner Library, Revisited

January 26, 2008

initial-i1.jpgthink it was Michelle Brown who first got me pondering the idea of an inner library, which I wrote about on Wednesday. In her book The Lindisfarne Gospels: Society, Spirituality, and the Scribe, Brown makes mention of a painting that appears in the eighth-century Codex Amiatinus. The earliest surviving copy of a complete Bible in Latin, the Codex Amiatinus contains a thought-provoking painting of Ezra, a priest and scribe of the Israelites.

We find the tale of Ezra in the biblical books of Ezra and Nehemiah and also in the books of 1 and 2 Esdras, which are in the Apocrypha. Ezra lived during the time of the Israelites’ exile in Babylonia and was responsible for leading a group of them back home. This priestly scribe had particular renown for his devotion to the law of Moses. 2 Esdras contains a wonderful exchange in which God calls Ezra to rewrite and restore the law that has been destroyed:

Then I answered and said, ‘Let me speak in your presence, Lord. For I will go, as you have commanded me, and I will reprove the people who are now living; but who will warn those who will be born hereafter? For the world lies in darkness, and its inhabitants are without light. For your law has been burned, and so no one knows the things which have been done or will be done by you. If then I have found favor with you, send the holy spirit into me, and I will write everything that has happened in the world from the beginning, the things that were written in your law, so that people may be able to find the path, and that those who want to live in the last days may do so.’ (2 Esdras 14.19-22, NRSV)

I love how the author of 2 Esdras clearly depicts Ezra’s act of writing as a sacred call. Ezra’s remembrance and restoration of the law of Moses is, like the rebuilding of the Temple, an integral part of the reconstruction of the people of Israel.

It is this sacred scribe who appears among the pages of the Codex Amiatinus, laboring over a page as he sits beside a cabinet filled with holy books. (Take a gander at the Ezra painting here.) As with so much medieval art, there’s a lot happening in this image that our 21st-century eyes may not readily read. Michelle Brown places this bookish portrait of Ezra in the wider context of a Celtic monastic tradition that viewed the contemplation, study, and scribing of the scriptures as a way of drawing closer to God. “The act of copying and transmitting the Gospels,” she writes, “was to glimpse the divine and to place oneself in its apostolic service…. As such these books are portals of prayer, during the acts both of making and studying.” (Brown, 398.)

Brown goes on to write,

In an insightful discussion of the Ezra miniature in Ceolfrith’s Codex Amiatinus, Jennifer O’Reilly has drawn attention to the patristic [referring to the early church fathers] concept of the ‘inner library’ and the necessity for each believer to make him or herself a library of the divine Word, a sacred responsibility which Cummian [a seventh-century Irish bishop-theologian] referred to as ‘entering the Sanctuary of God’ by studying and transmitting Scripture. Books are the vessels from which the believer’s ark, or inner library, is filled. They are enablers of direct, contemporary Christian action, channels of the Spirit, and gateways to revelation, for ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God’ (John 1.1). (Brown, 398-9.)

The painted Ezra invites us to cultivate a sacred inner library not merely for the sake of filling our interior shelves, like homeowners who decorate their dwellings with pretty books they have bought by the yard but which they never intend to read. He challenges us instead to fashion a library whose contents inspire and sustain us to embody the Word of God in this world.

What are the books that circulate in your inner library? Within the Bible and beyond it, what texts have opened you to the presence of the God who lingers in their lines? Where have you found words that helped you to read and to create your own life?

Posted in art, books, lectionary, monastic stuff, writing | 1 Comment »

The Painted Prayerbook

January 8, 2008

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Some years ago, while browsing through the savory bookstore at the Washington National Cathedral, I happened upon Roger Wieck’s book Painted Prayers: The Book of Hours in Medieval and Renaissance Art. I was vaguely familiar with Books of Hours, mostly from seeing individual images that had been lifted from them for Christmas cards or book illustrations, but this was my first real introduction to this kind of book. Called the “medieval bestseller,” the Book of Hours was a popular prayerbook that enabled lay people to keep a similar rhythm of prayer as the monks, nuns, and priests who prayed the Liturgy of the Hours—the eight times of prayer that helped them remember the presence of God throughout the day and night.

In the days before the printing press, scribes and illuminators created these exquisite books by hand. They were often lavish creations that employed paints, inks, and dyes crafted from such materials as plants, flowers, and—yes—crushed bugs, as well as costly stones and minerals including lapis lazuli and gold. The contents of the Book of Hours varied. Virtually all of them contained a section of prayers called the Hours of the Virgin (with illuminations of the life of Mary, the mother of Jesus), the Hours of the Cross (with illuminations depicting the events around Jesus’ crucifixion), and the Hours of the Holy Spirit (with an illumination of the descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost).

As a writer and artist who creates books for reflection and prayer, I was enchanted by Wieck’s descriptions of these remarkable prayerbooks and by the wealth of color illustrations that he included. I began to cast about for more information on Books of Hours and, as I discovered the wondrous resources available, was soon thanking my lucky stars that I live in an age where color reproductions in print and on the web are so readily available.

One of the things that particularly struck me about these prayerbooks was how frequently the illuminated artwork (“illuminated” refers to the use of gold in an illustration) had an architectural context: in any given Book of Hours, most of the scenes are framed in a fashion that gives them the appearance of taking place in an arch, a doorway, a window. This kind of framing creates an entrance, a passageway that beckons the reader to cross into the scene being depicted. The passage, however, doesn’t go just one way: this kind of depiction also challenges readers to allow the characters to cross through the frame into their own world, and to ponder how the stories embedded in Books of Hours—stories of biblical characters and saints—might unfold in the reader’s own landscape.

This kind of artwork, with its two-way passage, underscores how the Book of Hours was a threshold book. Usually of a size that was small enough to carry in a pocket or purse, such a book’s owner could open it anywhere and, in that place, open themselves to the presence of God. The book offered a thin place, a sacred, illuminated space where heaven and earth met.

Fittingly, Wieck calls these books “portable cathedrals.”

My fascination with and research into Books of Hours eventually led me to other kinds of illuminated manuscripts that offer their own unique thresholds. Illuminated Psalters, Gospel books, Apocalypses, and other dazzling genres: they each have quickened my imagination and deepened my understanding of how a book can offer a threshold, a thin place, an invitation to go deeper into the mystery of God. For me, the bookly intertwining of words and images is particularly compelling and intriguing, both as a reader/viewer and as an artist/writer.

I share all this because this is the kind of stuff that’s been on my mind as I’ve been redesigning this blog in recent days. I’ve pretty much been lying low, blog-wise, the past couple of weeks, in the wake of the intensity of doing the daily writing and art-making for The Advent Door (I think I’ve nearly recovered!). Doing the Advent blog stirred some ideas and imaginings for what this blog could become.

I loved reflecting on the season’s lectionary readings in a way that intertwined image and words; I especially loved creating the abstract collages and seeing where they took me. One of the main things I envision doing with this newly redesigned/revamped/renamed blog is offering an artful reflection on a lectionary reading for each week, as I did during Advent. More broadly, this blog will be a place where I’ll contemplate the intersections of art and writing and faith, and a few other things besides.

A blog is different from a printed or handcrafted book, but it shares some common ground in the ways that it can invite us into a reflective, contemplative, sacred space. My hope is that, in the spirit of the medieval and Renaissance books that offered places of worship, respite, and challenge on the journey, the artful pages of this blog will invite you to notice some thin places along your own path.

With thankfulness for the generations of artists and scribes whose skills far exceed mine but whose books continue to inspire me and invite me into places of wonder and worship, it seems fitting to call this blog The Painted Prayerbook. Thank you for opening its pages. I look forward to sharing the journey with you.

(Today’s artwork is a [triplicated] detail from an original mixed-media piece titled At Her Prayers: Mary Magdalene with a Book of Hours; it’s part of a series inspired by medieval Books of Hours. To see the series, visit The Hours of Mary Magdalene. For a related series, check out The Advent Hours.)

Posted in art, books, monastic stuff, mystery, writing | 11 Comments »

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