The Advent Door

One of the things that intrigues me about medieval artwork is the way that it has its own stories to tell. In depicting biblical scenes (which provided the material for so much artwork in the Middle Ages), medieval artists sometimes incorporated visual stories that we don’t find in the Bible. Though without an actual scriptural basis, the symbolic text the medieval artists gave us can engage the imagination, raise questions, and illuminate a given story beyond what the written text provides. It works something like an artful midrash that invites us to imagine the worlds between the words.

Here’s my favorite example. In many medieval (and Renaissance) depictions of the Annunciation—that moment when the archangel Gabriel comes to Mary to ask her to become the mother of Jesus—Mary is depicted reading. (The chronic reader in me loves this.) Usually she’s depicted with a book that indicates that she’s at her prayers when Gabriel shows up. Sometimes, in a wonderful bit of anachronism, it’s a Book of Hours that Mary is reading. (The Book of Hours was a popular prayerbook in the Middle Ages. Often lavishly illustrated, Books of Hours always included a section of prayers in honor of Mary, with artwork that illustrates scenes from her life…including the Annunciation, in which the artists depict her reading…a Book of Hours…it’s kind of like one of those time-twisting Star Trek episodes I wrote about earlier.) Other times, her book is open to Isaiah, specifically to a passage from the Hebrew text that the lectionary gives us for this week, in which the prophet says this to King Ahaz:

Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Look, the young woman is with child and shall bear a son, and shall name him Immanuel. (Isaiah 7.14)

The Christian tradition came to interpret this passage as a foretelling of the birth of Jesus, God-with-us, to Mary. In depicting her reading this very text, the medieval artists did some intriguing time-twisting of their own, opening an imaginative portal between the sign given to King Ahaz and the miracle given to Mary.

(Okay, here’s a weird thing: though I should probably turn off my e-mail when I’m trying to write, and I often do, I just received an e-mail from a friend containing several ultrasound pictures, of a gestational sort; there’s a bit of online technology I’ve never experienced before. Intriguing that it should come through while I’m pondering Mary and the Annunciation.)

Though the image of Mary reading at the moment of the Annunciation doesn’t appear in the biblical text, I love this artful notion of the reading, praying Mary. It reveals something of the medieval view of Mary, and it offers evidence of a kind of visual lectio divina the artists did as they pondered Mary’s story. In depicting her with a prayerbook or with the sacred text of her tradition, the artists conveyed the compelling idea that Mary was already steeped in the word before the Word became steeped in her.

This image of Mary challenges me to ponder what texts—written or otherwise—I’m immersing myself in. What words, what images do I give my attention to: on the page, in conversation, in the course of my daily life? In a culture that inundates and sometimes assaults our eyes and ears with messages in all manner of forms, how do we read in a way that keeps us attuned to the sacred?

Am I, like the medieval Mary, steeping myself in the word in a way that helps me notice when a divine messenger shows up with an outrageous invitation? That’s what the word angel means in the original Greek: one who comes with a message. How do I cultivate an openness to that message, to the Word that longs to find a home in me, in us?

How lovely that the lectionary offers us the Magnificat during a week that contains a day of celebration in honor of Mary. Today is the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, which commemorates the appearances of Mary to a man named Juan Diego between December 9-12, 1531, in Mexico. Known by various names including the Mother or Patroness of the Americas and La Virgen Morena (The Brown-skinned Virgin), Our Lady of Guadalupe is a culturally unique and passionately beloved manifestation of Mary.

According to the legend, Our Lady of Guadalupe made her appearance to Juan Diego about a decade following the arrival of the Spanish conquistadores, who brought with them, among other things, the practice of Roman Catholicism. An early convert to the new faith, Juan Diego was walking from his village toward what is now Mexico City when, on a hillside, the Virgin appeared to him and, speaking in Diego’s native language of Nahuatl, told him to take a message to the bishop that a sanctuary should be built on that site. Diego made several visits to Bishop Zumárraga, who was naturally skeptical of this peasant man. Finally the bishop asked for a sign. The Virgin provided one. Sending Juan Diego to the top of Tepeyac Hill, Mary told him to pick the roses he would find there. Gathering the out-of-season blooms in his tilma (cloak), he set out once again to see the bishop. When Juan Diego opened his tilma in the presence of Bishop Zumárraga, the stunning December roses spilled forth, but Mary had one more miracle in store: to the amazement of those present, the empty tilma bore an image of the Virgin.

The Lady received her sanctuary.

In the succeeding centuries, controversies have attended the Virgin of Guadalupe, including disputes over the authenticity of her appearances and of the image on the tilma, which still survives. Her role as an indigenous manifestation of Mary receives much attention; emerging from the encounter of native Mexican religion with the Catholicism of the conquistadores, she is perceived by some as a sort of syncretistic, Christianized goddess. Whatever her origins and meanings, Our Lady of Guadalupe persists as a powerful presence of hope and a beloved sign of Mary’s love for the Americas.

In a bookstore several years ago, I picked up a small volume titled Felicidad de México. Published in 1995 to commemorate the centennial of the coronation of the Virgin of Guadalupe, the book is in Spanish, which I understand muy poquito and read just barely enough to be dangerous. I got it for the pictures. Filled with wonderful images of Mary, the pages offer many versions of the apparition of Guadalupe. In these depictions, the blue-cloaked Mary wears a crown, hovers above an angel-held crescent moon, and shimmers in a penumbra of sunlight with rays like knife blades. Always, there are roses.

The depictions of Our Lady of Guadalupe resonate vividly with the image of the celestial woman who appears in Revelation 12. Garbed with the sun, with a crown of stars and the moon beneath her feet, the woman cries out in travail as she gives birth to a male child “who is to rule all the nations.” At her feet, a dragon waits to devour her child. The visionary John tells of how the child is saved and of how, in a particularly evocative scene, the woman flees into the wilderness, where God has prepared a place of sanctuary and nourishment for her.

Across the centuries, many have interpreted this vision of the heavenly woman to be an image of Mary, who brought forth Christ. Despite its resonance with the mother of Jesus, this passage from Revelation 12 doesn’t appear in the Revised Common Lectionary, in any season. (For now, I’ll save my thoughts on mainstream religion’s tendency to leave the Book of Revelation in the hands of those who have badly misused it.) In the Roman Catholic tradition, the woman makes her appearance in the lections for the Feast of the Assumption.

Despite its absence from the Revised Common Lectionary, Revelation 12 is a good passage to visit during this Advent season. Historically, Advent—from the Latin adventus, which means coming or arrival—has been a time not only to reflect on the birth of Christ, his first coming, but also to anticipate his second coming. My experience in the mainline church is that we give a lot of happy attention to the first sense of Advent, and much less attention to the second sense. Not without reason; it’s a tricky topic. It’s challenging to talk about endings, especially The Big End. Christianity uses the word eschatology to refer to Final Things, a word that, while useful, tends to sap the poetry right out of the subject.

I spent a lot of time thinking about Final Things last year when I decided to set out on an artful pilgrimage through the strange pages of Revelation. (Hello, my name is Jan, and I’m an eschatologist…) It was something of a continuation of a journey that had begun years ago in a seminary class on Revelation, a remarkable course taught by a team of professors from the fields of worship, preaching, storytelling, and drama. It was the first occasion I’d had to hear Revelation all the way through, from beginning to end, rather than hearing fragments of it, usually picked out by people using it to manipulate or inspire fear. The book is bizarre, and it is beautiful. In its wide visionary sweep, it offers some of the most powerful poetry of the Christian tradition (some of the canticles I wrote about yesterday come from Revelation) and some of the most hopeful images of a God who longs to be in relationship with us and to set creation right.

My artful apocalyptic pilgrimage was also fueled by my research into medieval manuscripts. In the Middle Ages, the Book of Revelation received the fascinated and fascinating attention of commentators, scribes, and artists who created some of the most compelling illuminated manuscripts that remain from this period. 13th-century England produced an especially intriguing collection of illuminated Apocalypses. In these versions of the book of Revelation, the artists sometimes depicted the visionary John as a pilgrim, complete with a walking staff. From page to page, he appears at the margins of the artwork, sometimes peering through a doorway or window into the unfolding apocalyptic scenes. Suzanne Lewis, in her book on the 13th-century Apocalypses (titled Reading Images), comments on how these illuminated manuscripts invited the reader/viewer to accompany John on his journey to the holy Jerusalem that appears at the end of Revelation. In a period when the Crusades made it unsafe to undertake a physical pilgrimage to the Holy Land, the illuminated Apocalypses offered what the medieval writer Hugh of St. Victor called a perigrinatio in stabilitate: a pilgrimage in place.

Inspired by the seminary class and the medieval manuscripts, I began my creative pilgrimage through the pages of Revelation, with a piece of charcoal for a pilgrim’s staff. (To see its results, visit Art of the Apocalypse.) As I went through this intense experience of artful lectio divina, I was struck by how the themes of Revelation persist in our daily lives. Birth, loss, hope, tribulation, desire, devastation, resurrection, destruction, redemption: all these themes and more are writ large in the pages of Revelation, but they form the text of our own lives as well. In some sense, we are living the Apocalypse daily, continually making a pilgrimage both toward and with the God who stands at the beginning and ending of time and in every place between.

On this feast day of the beloved Lady of Guadalupe, here at this midpoint of Advent, I’m giving some thought to where I am in this journey through the season, and through my life. At this place on the path, I find myself feeling both comforted and challenged by the images that centuries of faithful folks have offered of the mother of Jesus, the mother of God. John’s vision of the celestial woman, and Juan’s vision of the Lady of Guadalupe, are both cosmic and intimate, awe-inspiring and inviting. They call to mind the words of the medieval German mystic Meister Eckhart, who wrote, “We are all meant to be mothers of God, for God is always needing to be born.”

In these Advent days, where are you seeing signs of the coming of the Christ who was, and who is, and who is yet to come?

Yesterday’s collage got me thinking about my friend Daniel Nevins. Daniel is an artist in Asheville, North Carolina, and his work in this world is to create amazing paintings. Ranging from small, icon-like artwork to nearly daunting expanses, his work is involved and intimate, textured with folklore, myth, and poetry. One critic has observed that with their intricate layering, the surfaces of Daniel’s paintings possess a memory of their own.

Leaves are a recurring motif in Daniel’s artwork. Tiny leaves, leaf after leaf in patterns that aren’t always immediately visible to the eye. I first became familiar with Daniel’s artwork through reproductions, and I assumed that he painted the leaves as he painted everything else on the surfaces of his artwork. The first time I visited his studio, I discovered otherwise. Daniel cuts out the leaves—hundreds, thousands—by hand. He adheres them to the surface of the wood on which he works, and only then does he begin to paint them. To see the texture of the leaves, you have to get up close.

Thinking of Daniel’s leaves, I found myself wondering, what would it be like to read a text this way? To get this close, closer, close enough to see the textures, to perceive the intricacy of detail and the layers of memory that a text holds?

I pick up the lectionary readings for this week and look again. I read for the images, lift them from the text, bring them close to my mind’s eye. From Isaiah, the Psalter, Paul’s letter to the Romans, Matthew’s Gospel: my eye takes in the bark of the Jesse root, the leaves of the shoot, the lips of the judge, the fur of the wolf. Wool of lamb, spots of leopard, muzzle of cow. Arc of the mountains, blazing of sun, brightness of moon, that rain-drenched mown grass. Scrub of wilderness, clothing of camel’s hair, locusts and honey, water for baptizing. A way. Vipers. Stones. Ax. Wheat and chaff. Fire.

What do those images stir? What among them is familiar and resonant with my life and its landscape; what is foreign? What is appealing; what is fearsome? What layers of memory do the images open? What passageways do they carve between the text on the page and the text of my own life?

I look at the lectionary readings again, this time for the words that connect with what is less tangible. Spirit, wisdom, counsel, knowledge, righteousness, prosperity, deliverance. Peace, glory, encouragement, hope, welcome, truth, mercy. Power, repentance, crying out, confessing, wrath, winnowing, threshing.

What do these words stir, what connections and memories and associations? What invitations do they carry?

I can’t remain forever at this close range; closer, and closer, I eventually go cross-eyed, lose my focus, let go whatever clarity I had. But perhaps that’s the point?

I think of Annie Dillard and pull out my copy of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. I look at its yellowed pages and wonder that I’ve reached the point where a gift from an old boyfriend could be showing such age. (It’s just too much acid in the paper, I’m sure.) Dillard has a brilliant chapter on seeing. She draws from Marius von Senden’s book Space and Sight, in which he describes the experiences of some of the first people to have cataract surgery. For those who had been blind since birth, and whose brains had not learned what to do with the images that their eyes offered them, the experience was initially (and, for some, permanently) terrifying. Others took up the work of learning how to see. One man, newly sighted but still bereft of depth perception, practiced tossing his boot and trying to gauge its distance from him. Another, a girl, “was eager to tell her blind friend that ‘men do not really look like trees at all,’ and was astounded to discover that her every visitor had an utterly different face. Finally,” Dillard writes,

a twenty-two-year-old girl was dazzled by the world’s brightness and kept her eyes shut for two weeks. When at the end of that time she opened her eyes again, she did not recognize any objects, but, ‘the more she now directed her gaze upon everything about her, the more it could be seen how an expression of gratification and astonishment overspread her features; she repeatedly exclaimed; “Oh, God! How beautiful!”‘

Dillard writes of how, under the influence of von Senden’s book, her vision is affected for weeks. She sees differently, as she looks differently: patterns of light and texture appear to her, what is hidden reveals itself under the intensity of her gaze. She discovers, too, what comes when she loses her focus, when she sees without agenda, when she allows her eyes to blur. “When I see this way,” she writes, “I see truly.”

“But,” she goes on to observe, “I can’t go out and try to see this way. I’ll fail, I’ll go mad.

All I can do is try to gag the commentator, to hush the noise of useless interior babble that keeps me from seeing just as surely as a newspaper dangled before my eyes. The effort is really a discipline requiring a lifetime of dedicated struggle; it marks the literature of saints and monks of every order East and West, under every rule and no rule, discalced and shod…

The secret of seeing is, then, the pearl of great price. If I thought he could teach me to find it and keep it forever I would stagger barefoot across a hundred deserts after any lunatic at all. But although the pearl may be found, it may not be sought. The literature of illumination reveals this above all: although it comes to those who wait for it, it is always, even to the most practiced and adept, a gift and a total surprise.

That’s the challenge, and the invitation, of lectio divina: to see at close range, to wait for what will unhide itself—in the text, in myself—when I draw near; and to allow space for surprise. And then to step back, and farther back still; to stand where I can take in the big picture once again, but differently this time, because I’ve caught a glimpse of what’s there in the artful layers. I’ve seen the textures left by the painter’s hand.

Sitting down at my drafting table sometimes feels like opening a door to some other world. I often find that as I engage the creative process, as I give my attention, my desire, my devotion to the materials at hand, I am visited by all manner of stuff that wanders in. Often what arrives are memories, like some kind of soul-creatures who quietly come to attend the creating, attracted by who knows what: the colors, the materials, or perhaps simply the quality of focus that’s present at the table.

In collage, as I work with the pieces in order to find patterns and create something new, I notice that a similar process takes place on a soul level. It happens spontaneously, with little intention or agenda on my part. There is a sifting of memories that occurs, and in that place I am a witness, noticing what presents itself, what connects, what new landscape takes shape.

In his book Original Self, Thomas Moore offers some observations about memories that have helped me understand and engage my own impulse toward being creatively present to the past. He writes,

Being present to the life that presses upon us does not mean simply being alert and full of consciousness. Surrendering to a daydream or a memory may be a way of being engaged with the present. Drifting into reverie might bring us to the full immediacy of the moment, which may be properly focused on invisible things…

The principle of being present to life is also complicated by the soul’s odd sense of time, so different from the literal measurements of the clock and calendar. The soul exists in cycles of time, full of repetition, and it has equal portions of flowing temporality and static eternity.

What happens at my drafting table is an informal way of doing what one author has called lectio on life. In his illuminating introduction to lectio divina, Fr. Luke Dysinger, a Benedictine monk, writes about doing lectio with our own experiences. He encourages us to think of our lives as texts that can be read with the same contemplative spirit that we bring to the written word. Lectio on life helps us recognize the presence of God in ways that we might not have been aware of during the experience itself, and it also helps us remember that, as with a written text, our experiences rarely contain just one meaning. (Fr. Luke’s article “Accepting the Embrace of God: The Ancient Art of Lectio Divina” is on his community’s web site; in the menu, click An Introduction to the Practice of Lectio Divina.)

I created today’s collage while reflecting on an image that appears in two of the readings for this Sunday. Isaiah 11.1-10 and Romans 15.4-13 both refer to the root of Jesse, from which a branch of hope will grow (which Christianity has interpreted to refer to Jesus). It’s a potent image that speaks to the power of memory. The scriptures remind us repeatedly that our lives are collectively rooted and grounded in what has gone before, and specifically in the story of God’s saving, liberating action on behalf of God’s people. Many of the readings for Advent call our attention backward and beckon us to remember, to recall, to return to the roots of our shared story, and to perceive how the story continues to unfold: in the birth and life of Jesus, in our own life, in the life of the world.Advent is a season to sort through our memories. These days invite us to do this not in a way that has us wallowing in the past or giving it so much energy that we become estranged from the present. Rather, this season beckons us to look at our stories with an eye toward finding new connections, different patterns, deeper layers of meaning. It’s an invitation to enter into memories not just for memories’ sake but to see what God might create from them. Going to the root, what new thing might spring forth?

Today I’ve been noodling on the Psalter reading for this coming Sunday: Psalm 72.1-7, 18-19. It’s a blessing for a king, probably offered on either the occasion or commemoration of a coronation. The psalm blesses the king up one side and down the other, calling him to be a defender of the poor, a deliverer of the needy, and a crusher of the oppressed. There’s lots of nature imagery: sun, moon, rain upon mown grass. (Mown grass? How did they mow grass back then? Maybe it’s a cows and bears thing.) The king, the land, the people, and God’s own being are bound together in an ecosystem of blessing and prosperity.

Sounds splendid.

Having spent all my life in a country with a democratic form of government, it’s kind of hard to wrap my brain around the idea of having a king. That’s part of what makes reading the Bible tricky sometimes; with all the royal imagery, it’s somewhat challenging to capture and convey what’s at the core of these kingly depictions, for folks who don’t have the experience of living under a monarchy.

But I can completely relate to the desire to have a wise, visionary, justice-defending, rain-on-mown-grass kind of person running things. I don’t mean only at the leaders-of-the-world sort of scale. I’m also talking about at the level of my own life, and the running of the kingdom that is my own personal ecosystem. There are plenty of days where I find myself wishing that someone would just come along and take care of everything.

As a forward-thinking, independent chick, it occasioned a fair measure of cognitive dissonance when I first began to get in touch with the powerful desire for someone else to take care of things (you know, shelter, food, that kind of stuff). I’ve gotten over the dissonance, but not the desire.

More than ten years ago, I moved out of a salaried position as a pastor and into what we call, in the United Methodist Church, an extension ministry position. I became the Artist in Residence at a Catholic retreat center, where I remained for some years, and then formed my own corporation last year, which serves as an umbrella for the various pieces of my ministry. It is a fabulous fit; I love my vocation, and I have an unusual degree of freedom in ministry. It also means that I live without the forms of institutional security that I had when I worked for a congregation. I raise my own income. I take care of my own housing. I pay for my own health insurance. The tradeoff is totally, completely worth it, and I am utterly fortunate and grateful to have an amazing community of family and friends, including my wondrous sweetheart Gary, who have helped sustain this ministry in various ways, and there would be a safety net if the need ever arose. But there are days…

I remember reading Mary Gordon’s novel Spending some years ago. It’s about an artist who, to her surprise and considerable delight, acquires a patron. I thought, Ooohh, yeah, that sounds great. (She winds up with lots of other tasty benefits in addition to the financial support; these, along with our contemporary scarcity of individual patrons, provided apt cause for Gordon to subtitle her book A Utopian Divertimento.) I wouldn’t wish myself back to the era when patronage of artists was at its height—it wasn’t exactly the best of times for women in religious leadership—but I wouldn’t mind seeing a resurgence (a renaissance, shall we say?) of folks with a commitment to supporting individual artists, and in a fashion that didn’t largely revolve around contributing in a government-sanctioned, tax-deductible kind of fashion—but that’s another blog entirely.

The thing about reading this passage in the context of lectio divina, however, is that it challenges me not just to acknowledge the pining-for-a-patron longing that I carry but to go even beyond that. In the space of lectio, this psalm beckons me to ponder and pray with the question, How might God be calling me to be the deliverer I am longing for? How is God inviting me to be a defender of the poor, a deliverer of the needy, a person who cultivates a flourishing ecosystem not only within but also beyond myself? How can I be a rain-on-mown-grass kind of gal? (And is there a way I can be a patron for others?)

The designers of the lectionary likely chose this psalm for Advent because it resonates with—some would say foretells, but that’s another blog, too—the kingly qualities of Jesus whose birth we remember and anticipate in this season. The thing about the royal Jesus is that he turned people’s notions of a savior entirely upside down. What they were looking for in a messiah, they didn’t get. But oh, what they got…

I’ll be thinking about that, next time I get all hungry for a personal messiah. Best to keep one’s imagination open to what deliverance could really look like, and where it might come from.

Christ just might be needing to work it out through us.

May you have a rain-on-mown-grass kind of Advent.