Sanctuary of Women: Blog

Loving Beyond the Boundaries: Tuesday, Palm Sunday Week

April 12th, 2011

A woman, a vessel, a table, a man.

Each of the Gospels contains a story of a woman who anoints Jesus. Opinions differ as to whether these are four stories about one woman or about several. The basic elements, however, run through the stories: a woman approaches Jesus as he is sharing in a meal, and she pours precious ointment upon him—his head or his feet, depending upon which gospel you read. Jesus’ dining companions deride the woman’s action, but Jesus receives her gesture with grace. Matthew, Mark, and John place the story shortly before the crucifixion, and in their tellings Jesus acknowledges the woman’s action as a way of preparing his body for burial.

In Mark’s account, the woman breaks open her jar of ointment. Her sacramental gesture of breaking and pouring moves the story into a ritual space that contains the seeds of all that will take place over the next few days. Her action foreshadows and reverberates through the breaking of bread and pouring of wine at the Last Supper, the breaking of Jesus’ body on the cross as he empties himself utterly, the rending of the veil of the Holy of Holies in the Temple, and the opening of the tomb from which the risen Christ—still bearing the marks of his breaking—pours forth.

In no telling of the story does the woman speak. Yet her ritual action is a priestly one, and prophetic. Within her gesture echo the ancient rites of anointing: of kings, of the sick, of the bodies of those who have died.

That her gesture is also strikingly intimate is underscored by the use of a word that opens a doorway between the gospels and an ancient love poem.

Two of the Gospel writers, Mark and John, refer to the ointment the woman offers as oil of nard. Sometimes called spikenard, this costly oil comes from a plant of the valerian family that grows in the East. In the whole of scripture, the only other references to nard are in the Song of Songs. Twice the book mentions this luxuriant oil, including the opening chapter, in which the bride exults, “While the king was on his couch, my nard gave forth its fragrance.”

This tale of a woman who intimately attends to, and draws attention to, the body of Jesus is one of the stories that have fueled the theory that Jesus was married. One of the things that strikes me about the anointing story, however, is the way in which it underscores that Jesus, both as enfleshed human and as divine, was accessible to all who approached him. The question of whether Jesus was married raises intriguing and important questions about the place of the feminine in the story of Jesus. Yet I wonder if fascination with questions about whether he shared his sexuality with one specific person has been a way of deflecting our discomfort with the notion that Christ offered, and offers, his body for and to each of us. That God took flesh was a gesture of such radical intimacy that we have never known entirely what to make of it. It is mystifying that both before and after his crucifixion, Jesus manifests his solidarity with us, and his accessibility, largely through his vulnerability, a word that comes to us from the Greek vulnus. His wounds.

Yet, as we will explore later, the wounding of Jesus is all the more striking because it comes to one of such marked integrity, such completeness of being. The woman who anoints Jesus compels me with the way her being seems to match his in its integrity, its wholeness of purpose. Her power is not only that she has intuited the wounding that will come to Jesus and offers balm to him but also that her action of breaking and pouring out somehow mirrors his own. In a world in which women in particular are acculturated to be endlessly accessible, to empty ourselves constantly in the service of others, the tableau of Jesus and the anointing woman tells us: choose well where you pour yourself out.

The story of Jesus is in large part the story of how loving always breaks our hearts, how it perpetually opens up wounds within us. But that’s not the whole story, of course, for the resurrection challenges us to recognize that our wounds do not have the final word, that they can become thresholds, can become doorways into deeper and wider understandings of who we are and what God has placed us in this flesh to do.

It’s a bit of a sly move that Jesus makes, saying that the woman’s anointing has prepared his body for burial. He will no more be confined by his wounds, or by his tomb, than can this woman keep her gift confined in its alabaster jar.

Questions for reflection

Where are you pouring yourself out these days? How do you discern what to offer and where to offer it? Are you giving from the place of your deepest gifts—like the anointing woman, offering what is precious to you, something only you can give? Or are you in a place where it is difficult to give from the depths of who you are—and, if so, how is it for you to be in this place?

Adapted from Garden of Hollows: Entering the Mysteries of Lent & Easter © Jan L. Richardson.

Loving Beyond the Boundaries: Monday, Palm Sunday Week

April 11th, 2011


A Woman Anoints Jesus © Jan Richardson

As our Lenten journey draws us toward Palm Sunday, our theme this week comes from a chapter of Sacred Journeys titled “Loving Beyond the Boundaries: The Woman Who Anoints Jesus’ Head.”

Invocation

Compassionate God,
you beckon us to touch
and to heal.
Move through us,
so we may know
the strength that comes
from living with passion
and compassion.

Text

Mark 14:3-9

In the rhythm of the Christian liturgical year, this week we remember Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem. This familiar story, which has inspired songs, poetry, sermons, and paintings, tells of Jesus’ sending two disciples ahead to prepare the way and of the crowd that greets him with hosannas. It constitutes a memorable, festive, dramatic moment in a perilous journey.

Yet there are others who help prepare the way for Jesus in his final days; others who accompany him in times of certain loneliness. We find one such companion in the woman who anoints Jesus’ head as he sits at table in the house of Simon the leper. This woman emerges from beyond the boundaries of the table, a table most likely filled by men. She, of all those present, seems to know who Jesus is and what he needs. In her act of anointing, which is both a gift and a sign, she names Jesus as Christos, the Anointed One. In her touch, she reveals her awareness of his pain and her longing to heal it. She offers a prophetic act of beauty and grace. She both bears and becomes a balm for his wounds.

Jesus knows the depth of her gift and receives it with equal grace, delighting that one among them all possesses the heart to touch him. In his receiving he makes known his openness to those who possess the courage to touch, to love, and to heal beyond the boundaries that others set.

Jesus’ gratitude is so deep that he promises that “wherever the gospel is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in remembrance of her.” Yet often we have forgotten her story and her grace-filled act, missing its vital message in our passage from Palm Sunday to Good Friday and beyond. As we live into this unnamed woman’s story, we continue our Lenten journey. And we remember anew.

Questions for reflection

Where do you find yourself at this point in your Lenten path? Did you have hopes or expectations at the outset of this season? How have these played out? As we move into the final stretch of Lent, how do you want to move through the coming days? As we cross into the story of this woman who anoints Jesus, what do you notice? What gift might she offer to you for the way ahead?

Adapted from Sacred Journeys © Jan L. Richardson

For an introduction to the Lenten journey we’re making here at Sanctuary of Women, visit A Season of Spiraling. Today’s artwork originally appeared in Garden of Hollows: Entering the Mysteries of Lent & Easter © Jan L. Richardson.

Bearing Witness: Sunday, Lent 5

April 10th, 2011

Some years ago, in need of a change of scenery and fewer distractions as I entered the final stretch of working on a new book, I went to Miami and spent a week in the home of friends. I had taken along my copy of An Interrupted Life. At the time, this abridged version of Etty Hillesum’s diaries was the only available edition of her work. One evening I picked it up to look for a quotation that I wanted to include in my book. I soon realized that I would not be able to simply skim through Etty’s words to find the passage I sought.

In the course of the week I reread the book cover to cover, taking in Etty’s words more slowly than I had done the first time I read them. I found myself struck by the similarity of some of the questions that Etty and I both carried and devastated anew by the extinguishing of the woman whom her friends had described as “a luminous personality.”

Our week with Etty here at Sanctuary of Women closes with a poem I wrote during that Miami sojourn.

For Etty, Who Still Walks
on the Path of Witness

It is midday in Miami.
Esther, who bears your given name,
sets an orchid on the table outside
where I sit surrounded
by hibiscus and blooming cactus,
by poinsettia and palm.

This tropical haven
would be foreign to you,
but I think this is how
your soul must have looked:
a riot of color,
a garden of defiance
planted against the growing terror.

I long for your presence
at this table,
to tell you how your words
bore fruit
bore witness
bore hope
in the decades that followed,
how every phrase was a seed
that settled in the throats
of those struggling to speak,
how every sentence became a bloom
in the hands of those writing their way
out of the wilderness.

Bless us, Etty,
for there is still much
that cries out for witness,
and the shadows grow long,
and we need endless healing balm.

Closing blessing

Blessed are you
who bear witness
in these times,
for from your words
will flow a balm
for all wounds.

“For Etty, Who Still Walks on the Path of Witness” is from In Wisdom’s Path, and the closing blessing is from Sacred Journeys, both © Jan L. Richardson.

Bearing Witness: Saturday, Lent 5

April 9th, 2011

“We should be willing to act as a balm for all wounds.”

These were the closing words in the final entry of Etty’s diary. I don’t know that we can expect to be a balm for all wounds. Yet I am haunted by Etty’s willingness to pour herself out: how she lavished her words upon the page and her attention upon the world. How she did this with abandon and without losing herself. In this season, in this life, how will we do this? How will we pour ourselves out with an extravagance that will become a balm for a wounded world?

Bearing/Baring
to Etty

In bearing witness
you bared the truth
the heart
the soul
of the times.

Forged in the depths
of a fire-filled heart,
your daily truths
were olives
pressed to oil,
grapes
crushed to wine.

The brutes laid you bare
to your very bones
but could not stave
the words you bore:

the balm for wounds
the cup of grace
poured out and mingling
for tikkun olam
for the healing of
these broken vessels.

Adapted from Sacred Journeys © Jan L. Richardson

Bearing Witness: Friday, Lent 5

April 8th, 2011

Here is one of the qualities I treasure most in Etty Hillesum: For all the grace and intention she brought to doing her soul work, and for all the skill she possessed in navigating and negotiating the relationship between her inner and outer worlds, she never presented herself as someone who had mastered the spiritual life (and likely would have thought the notion ludicrous). Nor, in her persistent ability to cultivate a sense of hope and an appreciation of beauty, did she give the appearance of one who was naive or oblivious to her circumstances. Etty was not the Pollyanna of the Holocaust. She did not use her diary to escape from or mask what was unfolding in the world around her or within her own self. Her insight and wisdom were grounded in an ability to look at the world and herself with a growing honesty and depth.

In the next-to-last entry in her diary, written during a trip home from the labor camp at Westerbork while she was, as she put it, “more or less bedridden” because of illness, Etty writes beautiful and evocative words describing some of her impressions that “are scattered like glittering stars on the dark velvet of my memory.” As she closes this entry which recounts these impressions, she writes, “A soul is forged out of fire and rock crystal. Something rigorous, hard in an Old Testament sense, but also as gentle as the gesture with which his tender fingertips sometimes stroked my eyelashes—”

But then, that evening, she picks up her pen again and writes, “And then there are moments when life is dauntingly difficult. Then I am agitated and restless and tired all at once….All I can do is to lie motionless under my blankets and be patient until I shed my dejection and the feeling that I’m cracking up being scattered to the four winds….One must also accept that one has ‘uncreative’ moments. The more honestly one can accept that, the quicker these moments will pass. One must have the courage to call a halt, to feel empty and discouraged—Goodnight.”

Etty did not hesitate to convey her sense of struggle in her diaries or in the many letters she wrote to friends. A particularly telling example of this comes from a letter she composed while in the Westerbork labor camp, just a few months before her death at Auschwitz. 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. 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.”

Questions for reflection

What do you do with your own internal struggles, your moments of difficulty, your occasions of frustration, your moments of weariness or despair? Do you have a way—with a practice such as writing or with a trusted listener—that you can bring these struggles into a place of safety where you can look at them, wrestle with them, learn what you need to learn from them, and then let them go?

Etty’s words are from Etty: The Diaries and Letters of Etty Hillesum 1941-43 and can also be found in an abridged version of her work, An Interrupted Life: The Diaries of Etty Hillesum 1941-43.

Bearing Witness: Thursday, Lent 5

April 7th, 2011

This week we are traveling in the company of Etty Hillesum, a young Dutch Jewish woman who in 1941 began to keep a diary, nine months after the Nazis invaded her homeland of the Netherlands. To pick up the thread of this week’s reflections, visit Monday’s post.

This is a Week of a Million Things. A Week of Not Enough Time. A week where I wish I could work as fast as I can think and imagine and dream. A week in which I wish I had a few more hands for all—expected and otherwise—that waits for my attention.

I find myself thinking often of Etty, who on a spring morning wrote, “Sometimes the most important thing in a whole day is the rest we take between two deep breaths, or the turning inward in prayer for five short minutes.”

Etty knew that a five-minutes’-prayer is no substitute for loitering with God, much as a five-minutes’-conversation with a friend does not take the place of lingering with them, speaking and hearing what can only be spoken and heard when we give ourselves time to tarry together. Yet for Etty, so much of prayer was a running conversation with God, a continual revealing of herself to God in the midst of her daily life. Even as the horrors around her began to press with more and more insistence upon her, she persisted in turning herself toward stillness, even if for a moment, listening for the sacred presence there and speaking her words into the silence.

I am on my way out the door on this full and fine spring day, traveling toward the next thing in this Week of a Million Things. Breathing deep, listening for the One who breathes into the silence between the breaths.

Questions for reflection

How does prayer take place in the rhythm of your days? Is it something separate from the rest of your life, or is it part of the pattern of it, intertwining with the other pieces of your life?

Etty’s words are from Etty: The Diaries and Letters of Etty Hillesum 1941-43 and can also be found in an abridged version of her work, An Interrupted Life: The Diaries of Etty Hillesum 1941-43.

Bearing Witness: Wednesday, Lent 5

April 6th, 2011

Etty Hillesum recognized both her capacity for hatred and the need to let it go. On a February day in 1942, 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.”

Some months later, about a year before her death, Etty recorded in her diary part of a conversation with a friend:

“It is the only thing we can do, Klaas, I see no alternative, each of us must turn inwards and destroy in himself all that he thinks he ought to destroy in others. And remember that every atom of hate we add to this world makes it still more inhospitable.”

And you Klaas, dogged old class fighter that you have always been, dismayed and astonished at the same time, say: “But that—that is nothing but Christianity!”

And I, amused by your confusion, retort quite coolly, “Yes, Christianity, and why ever not?”

It is easy, sometimes, to criticize or condemn the hatred that others inflict upon the world, while at the same time dismissing our own capacity for it. If we haven’t touched our own hatred, haven’t felt it inside us, it’s likely because we have insulated ourselves from being in situations that would kindle it.

Like anger, which we explored here a few weeks ago, hatred is a complex and vivid emotion that comes as a messenger. Hatred has something to tell us, to teach us, about the shadowy parts of our souls and our connections with the world. It presents us with a difficult point of discernment. There are things, situations, people in this world that we are called to stand against and to speak in opposition to. God means for us to name evil where we see it and to work against it. How do we do this while not falling into the depths of hatred, in which lies the impulse to destroy and diminish?

In these days, Etty invites and challenges me to look for where there may be hatred in my life, and how my hatred carries an invitation to do the work I need to do in my own soul. It is this work that frees us and enables us to name true evil where it exists, and to confront it with clarity and purpose.

Questions for reflection

Where do you sense the presence of hatred in your own life? What message or invitation may it hold for you? How do you bring your hatred into your prayers, so that, with God, you may listen to it and let it tell you what it needs for you to know about yourself and what you are called to do in this world?

Quotations of Etty’s words are from Etty: The Diaries and Letters of Etty Hillesum 1941-43 and can also be found in an abridged version of her work, An Interrupted Life: The Diaries of Etty Hillesum 1941-43.

Bearing Witness: Tuesday, Lent 5

April 5th, 2011

In her diaries, Etty Hillesum bore witness to what was happening not only in the world around her but also the world within her—the one place Hitler’s troops 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. She wrote of the presence of beauty that the brutality around her could not diminish.

In one of the final entries in her diary, written shortly after taking a job in the Cultural Affairs Department of the Jewish Council in Amsterdam, Etty wrote, “My red and yellow roses are now fully open. While I sat there working in that hell, they quietly went on blossoming. Many say, ‘How can you still think of flowers!'” The next morning she wrote, “If I should survive and keep saying, ‘life is beautiful and meaningful,’ then they will have to believe me.'”

Persisting in paying attention to beauty, writing in her diary, chronicling and exploring the state of her soul along with the state of the world: these were not forms of escapism for Etty. Rather, her words reveal her conviction that the exterior and interior worlds are not separate from one another. Etty knew 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.

“I am sometimes so distracted by all the appalling happenings round me,” Etty wrote one day, “that it’s far from easy to find the way back to myself. And yet that’s what I must do.”

Questions for reflection

How do you navigate the relationship between your inner and outer worlds? How do you stay aware of and respond to what’s going on around you, at the same time that you attend to what’s unfolding in your interior landscape? How do you find the way back to yourself? In the midst of seeing and ministering to the brokenness of the world, how do you persist in paying attention to beauty?

Quotations of Etty’s words are from Etty: The Diaries and Letters of Etty Hillesum 1941-43 and can also be found in an abridged version of her work, An Interrupted Life: The Diaries of Etty Hillesum 1941-43.

Bearing Witness: Monday, Lent 5

April 4th, 2011

As we enter into the fifth week of Lent, the readings for this week come from a chapter of Sacred Journeys titled “Bearing Witness: Etty Hillesum.” We traveled briefly with Etty earlier in this season when she appeared in a couple of reflections, including this one.

Invocation

God of history,
you are present
with all who suffer.
In these words
and in these times,
O God,
may I perceive
the movement of
your restless spirit.

Text

Proverbs 14:5

Context

“If I have one duty in these times,” wrote Etty Hillesum, “it is to bear witness.” A Dutch Jew born in January of 1914, Etty witnessed one of the most terrifying times of the twentieth century. Shortly after the forces of Nazi oppression moved into Holland, Etty began to keep a diary. Into a series of eight exercise books filled during 1941 and 1942, Etty poured her soul. At the same time that she was deeply affected by the times, she also passionately sought life, hope, and connection within herself and with her people.

A brilliant thinker and a graceful writer, Etty involved herself intimately in the lives of her friends and fellow Jews. When a roundup of Jewish people occurred in Amsterdam, Etty volunteered to go with them to Westerbork, a work camp considered to be the last stop before Auschwitz. By special arrangement, she traveled to Amsterdam from Westerbork many times, transporting letters, messages, and medicine to and from the outside. Although she had many opportunities to escape, Etty refused, even resisting an attempt by friends to kidnap her to safety. She considered her destiny to be bound with those who were suffering.

Reports from her companions at Westerbork confirm the luminous personality that her journals reveal. As the train that took Etty, her mother, her father, and her brother Mischa to Auschwitz left Westerbork on Sep­tember 7, 1943, she threw a postcard from the train. On it she had written, “We left the camp singing.”

Etty died in Auschwitz on November 30, 1943. Her mother, father, and Mischa were killed there also; her other brother Jaap left the camp but died on his way back to Holland.

Etty left her diaries with a friend in hopes they would one day be published. In 1983, J. G. Gaarlandt took an interest in them and published them in Holland. They have now been translated and published in nearly a dozen countries under the title An Interrupted Life: The Diaries of Etty Hillesum. In 2002, Etty’s unabridged diaries were published in Etty: The Letters and Diaries of Etty Hillesum, 1941-1943 (edited by Klaas A. D. Smelik and translated by Arnold J. Pomerans).

Questions for reflection

In these times, to what are you called to bear witness? How does this, or how might this, happen for you; what form will your witness take?

Adapted from Sacred Journeys © Jan L. Richardson

For an introduction to the Lenten journey we’re making here at Sanctuary of Women, visit A Season of Spiraling. Today’s artwork originally appeared here at The Painted Prayerbook.

Meanwhile . . .

April 4th, 2011

As we cross into the second half of Lent, this seems a good time to do a spot of housekeeping here at Sanctuary of Women. Just a few things I’d like for you to know…

NEW PRINTS: Prints of the cover artwork from In the Sanctuary of Women are now available! They come in a special edition (shown above) and a standard edition. Check them out on my main website at the Color Prints page.

BLOGAPALOOZA: During Lent I’m offering reflections also at my other blog, The Painted Prayerbook, and would be delighted to have your company there.

SUSTENANCE FOR THE SEASON: For further offerings and resources for these Lenten days, I invite you to visit this page at The Painted Prayerbook.

SACRED JOURNEYS: During this season at Sanctuary of Women, I’m drawing from the Lenten section of my first book, Sacred Journeys. Although Sacred Journeys is currently out of print, you can find copies here at Amazon.

SOCIAL SANCTUARY: Sanctuary of Women has a Facebook page. We’d love for you to “like” us and to share in the Sanctuary there!

I am grateful for your presence here in the sanctuary. Know that I hold you in prayer and wish you many blessings in this and every season.