Sanctuary of Women: Blog

The Women’s Christmas

January 5th, 2011


Wise Women Also Came © Jan L. Richardson

This past year I was delighted to learn of a women’s tradition connected with Epiphany, which falls on January 6 and marks the end of the Christmas season. There is a custom, rooted in Ireland, of celebrating Epiphany as Women’s Christmas, called Nollaig na mBan in Irish. It originated as a day when the women, who carried the domestic responsibilities all year, took Epiphany Day as an occasion to celebrate together and left hearth and home to the men for a few hours. Particularly celebrated in County Cork and County Kerry, the tradition seems to be enjoying a resurgence.

My sweetheart and I, who are celebrating our first Epiphany together in our new home (having married last Spring), share the tending (and sometimes lack of tending) of our home, so I can’t say I’m in particular need of a break from being a domestic diva, which I am not. But still, especially with Advent and Christmas always being an intense time of year for me, I love the idea of ending the season with a celebration such as this.

So, to mark the occasion, I’m joining a group of girlfriends for dinner tomorrow. A couple of them are dear friends whom I haven’t seen in much too long, and the others are friends of theirs who might just be girlfriends-in-the-making for me. As I leave the Christmas season and begin to settle into the rhythms of this new year, I am looking forward to spending an evening in their company.

Here on the eve of Epiphany, I am here to ask you: How might you celebrate your own Women’s Christmas? Tomorrow or some day soon, whom might you connect with for a cup of tea, a festive toast, a meal, or even a phone call? Whose company do you want to share and to celebrate as you cross into this new year?

The “Wise Women Also Came” image above is a collage I created many years ago—one of the first that emerged as I was beginning to discover the artist layer of my soul. I designed it as a card for Epiphany. Some years later, I included the image in my Night Visions book and wrote this poem to accompany it. I offer these women and these words as an Epiphany gift for you.

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.

For more about Women’s Christmas, visit this article published yesterday in The Irish Times: Go on, have a cuppa tea on Nollaig na Mban. And for my Epiphany reflection at The Painted Prayerbook, see Epiphany: Where the Map Begins.

Many blessings and a Merry Women’s Christmas to you!

[Image and poem © Jan L. Richardson from Night Visions: Searching the Shadows of Advent and Christmas. “Wise Women” prints and cards available at janrichardson.com.]

Solstice: A Woman in Winter

December 21st, 2010


A Woman in Winter © Jan L. Richardson

We were up late enough last night to see the start of the lunar eclipse. It looked like the moon was wearing a beret, just a touch of an upper curve lying in shadow. It has been nearly four hundred years since a lunar eclipse occurred on the Winter Solstice. Gary and I stood close for a few moments outside our new home, our faces turned toward the sky as Orion stalked the darkening moon. We took it all in, this night in our first winter married, then said, “Okay, that’s enough,” and hurried back into the warm.

As we pass through this Solstice and begin to tilt toward the bright half of the year, I find myself thinking of another Solstice night, some years ago, when I celebrated with a community of women who carry fire in their bones. Here is a reflection I wrote shortly after that winter’s night.

A Woman in Winter

In Florida, a cold snap may come at Christmastime, but it’s just as likely that we’ll have to run our air conditioners during the holidays. Still, I think something in my blood carries the memories of ancestors who came from colder climes, whose lives were shaped by the turning of the seasons. That’s why I was delighted to receive an invitation to a Winter Solstice celebration hosted by Sister Ann Kendrick and the other sisters with whom she shares a home in nearby Apopka. Nearly three decades ago, Sister Ann helped to found the Office for Farmworker Ministries, which works with the large community of people who have struggled to make a living from working on the farms surrounding Lake Apopka. In 1998 the state bought the farms as part of an effort to clean up the lake. In the process, thousands of people lost their jobs and have found little help from the government in making the transition to a new way of life. The sisters continue to engage in creative ministry with the community, bearing powerful witness to the ways the Spirit dwells with the most disenfranchised people.

The Winter Solstice celebration offered a lively, colorful evening of stories and songs shared in Spanish and in English. The sisters’ home nearly burst with women connected with the sisters and with the farmworker community. In the company of those women I shared this poem, keenly aware of how they knew in their bones what it means to journey both in darkness and in light.

A Woman in Winter

A woman in winter
is winter:
turning inward,
deepening,
elemental force,
time’s reckoning;
sudden frost
and fire’s warming,
depth of loss
and edge of storming.

She is avalanche,
quiet hungering,
utter stillness,
snowfall brewing;
hollowed, hallowed,
shadows casting,
field in fallow,
wisdom gathering.

Waiting, watching,
darkness craving,
shedding, touching,
reaching, laboring;
burning, carrying fire
within her,
a woman turning,
becoming winter.

From In Wisdom’s Path: Discovering the Sacred in Every Season © Jan L. Richardson.

For another solstice reflection, visit Winter Solstice: The Moon Is Always Whole at my blog The Advent Door.

Mother Root

December 14th, 2010


Mother Root © Jan L. Richardson

Over at my blog The Advent Door, I recently posted a reflection on Joseph, that remarkable and ordinary man who attended to his dreaming and chose to remain with Mary and with the child she would bear. So powerful was Joseph’s choice that both scripture and history merged Jesus’ bloodline with Joseph’s, tracing Jesus’ lineage through Joseph and his ancestors. Though we can be sure there were political and theological reasons for this, Joseph’s story offers us a striking invitation to consider our own choices and the power they hold. His story beckons us to pay attention to where God is calling us to place our solidarity, and what difference this can make in the world.

As I continue to reflect on Joseph, I find myself thinking, too, of the women who made Jesus’ story possible—those women whose stories have so often come to us in fragments, if at all. This is a reflection and prayer that I wrote some years ago as I pondered those women and the choices they made.

Mother Root

Some families remember the stories of Advent through keeping the tradition of the Jesse tree, a small tree decorated with ornaments that symbolize the ancestors of Christ. Although this wasn’t part of my tradition, somewhere along the way I became aware of the practice. I also learned that the symbols adorning the branches of the Jesse tree tend to represent the male ancestors of Christ more than his female ancestors, probably having to do with the fact that the stories and the lists of begats in the scriptures tell us much more about the men than the women. The women were there, however, a significant but often hidden stream surfacing occasionally in stories and in places such as the genealogy which opens Matthew’s Gospel. Rahab, Tamar, Ruth, Bathsheba, and Mary, the writer reminds us: their blood, too, ran in Jesus’ veins.

Thinking of them, I began to imagine another tree, one that grows in a hidden grove, tended by those who know the place. The tree has been nourished by the blood of birthing and by the tears of women who struggled for life. The fires meant to destroy it have thickened its trunk and opened its seeds, which the Spirit has spread to the four corners of the earth. Holding the moon in its arms and the sun in its branches, the tree is witness to the cycles of seasons and the turning of years. I am rooted here, drawing on the stretch of generations, listening to the whispered stories in the rustling of leaves. Here all the unremembered, unrecorded names have been traced into the bark. Here the tree grows strong, nourished at the mother root.

Spirit of earth,
take root in me;
strength of fire,
enliven me;
power of wind,
blow through me;
blessing of rain,
fall on me.

Wisdom of blood,
flow through me;
promise of seed,
unfold in me;
endurance of story,
speak through me;
spiral of time,
remember me.

“Mother Root” reflection and prayer from In Wisdom’s Path: Discovering the Sacred in Every Season © Jan L. Richardson, 2000.

Woman, Waiting

December 11th, 2010


All Creation Waits © Jan L. Richardson

And so we come to Advent, this sacred season of expectation and anticipation that draws us toward the festival of Christmas. In these days there is much talk of waiting; it is the enduring theme of Advent, and rightly so. For a culture that so often moves too quickly, too unmindfully, Advent’s invitation to wait comes as a reminder of the wisdom of the pause, the standing back, the stopping to think. To ponder. To pray.

Yet I sometimes struggle with that word, waiting. So often we associate waiting with passivity and idleness. With boredom and dullness. With a sense of helplessness in the face of time that seems to stretch out interminably.

There is this, too: at the same time that waiting can be a corrective to rushing, the flip side is that waiting can sometimes become an excuse for not taking a needed action.

Sometimes we wait too long.

The season of Advent challenges us to ponder how it is that we wait. How (and whether) we engage our waiting as a spiritual practice. How we bring our discernment to our waiting, that we may know when to hold back and when it is time to act.

I have been engaged in some world-class waiting in recent years. One of the threads of waiting has involved my book Night Visions, a collection of reflections and artwork for Advent and Christmas that was published a dozen years ago. The short version of a much longer, tedious story is that, happily, the rights to Night Visions have reverted to me. For a few years, thanks in large measure to my friend Jane Heil, we have been exploring options for bringing the book back into print.

Finally the waiting is nearing an end, though some extra waiting has been tacked onto it. Owing to massive problems with the printer that have resulted in maddening delays, this book designed for Advent and Christmas should arrive just in time for Valentine’s Day.

Still and all, the end of the waiting is in sight. Just this week I had occasion to review the newly-printed interior of the book. As I turned the pages that I had awaited so long, memories stirred of the seasons I passed through as I composed those lines and pieced together those collages. The image above is one of the collages from that Advent book; the poem below is also from those pages. May they be gifts in your waiting, talismans in these days of expectation.

Woman, Waiting

Except that it is not visible
to the naked eye
all the ways
she has ceased to wait.
They cannot see in her
that her waiting carries no idleness,
no passiveness.
She is not resigned,
awaiting the delivery
of her sealed fate.
It has little to do with patience.

Her waiting has not been
a biding of time
but an abiding in time,
dwelling,
making herself at home.

She has taken every last frayed end,
knotted it;
every loose thread,
woven it;
every jagged edge,
worn it smooth;
every ragged scrap,
stitched it up.

This woman, waiting,
is the wise maiden with oil in plenty,
the grown woman who knows
the time of birthing,
the aged crone who feels in her flesh
the measure of her days.

It cannot be seen in her
all the ways she is ready.
But soon,
in the fullness of time,
she will cry out
and be delivered.

How are you waiting in these days? What are you waiting for?

May wisdom attend your waiting. A blessed Advent to you.

[Image and poem © Jan L. Richardson from Night Visions: Searching the Shadows of Advent and Christmas.]

P.S. In this season, I would be glad to have your company over at my blog The Advent Door, where I’m offering reflections and artwork as we travel toward Christmas.

Feast of All Saints: Sanctuary among the Shelves

November 1st, 2010


A Gathering of Spirits © Jan L. Richardson

Six months into our marriage, my husband and I have recently found ourselves in the midst of a wondrous phenomenon: we are home at the same time from our respective travels, and we are, for a little while, free of the major deadlines that we lived with in the first few months following our wedding. To celebrate this, we are throwing ourselves into some activities that we finally have time for. Like buying furniture. And unpacking boxes. Having spent the past seventeen years living either in a parsonage, which was mostly furnished, or in a very cozy studio apartment, I now own more furniture than I ever have in my life. We’ve taken delivery on a sofa, comfy chairs, and a dining table. I am delighted with all of them, but I will tell you which new furnishings I am the most thrilled to have:

Bookcases.

We now have one whole wall of our living room lined with bookcases. So I spent much of the weekend happily sorting through many boxes of books as Gary unpacked them onto two tables. Nearly half of the books had not seen the light of day in more than a decade. I had put them into storage when I moved into a small space, not anticipating that a couple of years of studio apartment living would stretch into more than a dozen. Although a fair number of the stored books are now in the large stack that will be sent on to other homes, there are lots of treasures that I was delighted to see again and put on the new shelves.

Many of the books bear inscriptions from the friends or family members who gave them to me, often during significant transitions or other memorable events. I can trace much of my history through these books: a copy of A. A. Milne’s Now We Are Six, inscribed by my friend Janse on—of course—my sixth birthday; a Bible from my parents “on the occasion of your 12th birthday and your church membership”; a volume of poetry by Robert Frost from my friend Eric, who wrote, “…I hope that turning 21 was wonderful, and I also hope that it pales in comparison to the future.” My shelves now hold the Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy, a classic of Norwegian literature given by my friend Tone when I spent a month with her and her family in Oslo, two years after she lived with my family as an exchange student; several beautiful children’s books (I collect them) that my parents gave me the night that the Conference Board approved me for ordination; and a copy of The Women’s Bible Commentary that Brenda—an enduring friend from college who, even after living with me for our three years of seminary, still likes me—gave me when we graduated.

There are texts that testify to the ordinary days as well: among the many books that Brenda (a book-giver and inscriber par excellence) has given me across our years of friendship is a copy of Kurt Vonnegut’s Welcome to the Monkey House, whose college-era inscription reads, in part, “Here it is…the book that Eric and I passed back and forth while you drove on one of our road trips.” And there are books that hold harder pieces of my story, their pages bearing words laid down by old loves or friends who have died. Some of the books I have held most dear are those given by a friend over a long stretch of years who later removed herself from my life. I placed them on the shelves, wondering at the absence to which their presence bears witness.

These books enclose not only my own history but layers of family history as well: a tiny Methodist hymnal that belonged to a great-great-grandmother; books bearing my grandparents’ signatures; and several shelves’ worth of volumes of theology and biblical studies bequeathed to me by Eulalie Ginn, a Methodist leader in Florida who was a friend to several generations of Richardsons and whom I knew as “Aunt Eulalie.” There is a leather-bound Bible bearing the names of a beloved great-aunt and of her husband, who died before I was born. And in the pages of a novel given to my grandfather by his mother, I found a card stating that the bearer—my great-grandfather—is entitled to draw books from the public library in Jacksonville, Florida, until February 9, 1909. (The card also urges the holder to “Please give prompt notice of a change of residence, or of contagious disease.”)

I will continue to sort and shelve for the next few days, taking up these generations of books and gathering them in the same place for the first time. There is a deep sense of satisfaction and wholeness that comes in seeing the books that span my history all together now, shoulder to shoulder in their new home. I imagine them chatting with one another after we’ve turned out the lights for the night, whispering stories from the pages of their history, and mine.

It strikes me that spending time among the volumes is fine and fitting work to do as we cross through this stretch of the calendar that includes the Feast of All Saints, which we celebrate today. An occasion in which we remember the beloved dead, All Saints’ Day rests upon earlier pre-Christian festivals that commemorated the ancestors. One of these festivals is Samhain, the ancient Celtic celebration that occurs around November 1. A major festival in the Celtic wheel of the year, Samhain both marks the new year and is also a time of looking to the past and remembering those who have gone before. We derive some of our Halloween customs from the Celtic belief that at this time of the year, the veil between worlds becomes permeable—what’s known as a thin place.

For many years, this trio of days that we’re moving through right now—Halloween, the Feast of All Saints, and the Feast of All Souls—have been a thin place in the rhythm of my own year, an occasion to gather up memories and to contemplate those who have been part of my path. This turning in the year reminds me that the veil thins toward those who lived in the past but also toward my own past, so well marked by these books that grace our new shelves. I carry thin places in my own self, spaces in which layers of memory become permeable and open to one another.

These feast days invite us to remember that although it’s not wise to dwell too much in the past, it can do our soul good to pay it a visit, to see where and whom we have come from, and how this might inspire us as we dream our way toward the path ahead. In these days, where does your memory turn? Who is part of the “communion of saints” that you celebrate on this day? Who lingers close to you in this season? Who or what haunts you? What layers of your history might God bring to the surface, perhaps offering wisdom and insight that you couldn’t perceive at the time? How might your remembering help inspire your dreaming about the path ahead of you?

In these days of memory and celebration, blessings and peace to you.

Blessing the Beginning

October 21st, 2010

When the official publication date of In the Sanctuary of Women rolled around on October 1, I was in one of my all-time favorite places: Asheville, North Carolina. I was traveling with my husband as he did some concerts around the Southeast. Although I don’t often get to travel with Gary when he’s performing, the combination of fortuitous timing and the fact that several of the concerts were being hosted by friends of mine, in places that I love, made the trip too compelling to miss.

To mark the book’s publication, Gary and my longtime friend Brenda gathered up a splendid group of folks for a post-concert celebration at one of Asheville’s congenial establishments. It was a perfect evening: the good company of friends both old and new; a chance to relax and take a breath in the wake of a year that, with events including getting married and finishing the book, has been tremendously and wondrously intense; and the easy conversation that being around a table so often evokes.

As we visited, I shared about how, when friends had a party to celebrate the publication of my first book, Sacred Journeys, I asked everyone at the party to sign the book as a way of blessing its beginning and providing a tangible reminder of that remarkable night. Fifteen years later, the signatures and words of blessing and good cheer with which those friends graced the book’s pages remain a tremendous gift. Sanctuary is something of a sequel to Sacred Journeys, and so it seemed fitting on that recent October night in Asheville to invite the folks around that table to do the same thing. Passing around a pen and a copy of my book, which had arrived—hot off the press—just before Gary and I hit the road, I asked them to do a book signing in reverse—to leave their mark as a remembrance of that night and a blessing for the book as it begins to make its way into the world.

During the following days, as we continued to travel, I invited other friends to share in the book signing. Already the book has become a treasure, with the names and powerful words that friends have left on its pages. Some of my favorite words are from children, including one who wrote “Good gob!” inside the front cover.

These pages will go with me as a reminder of the many people who have blessed the book in very tangible ways throughout its journey. From the book’s earliest days as scraps of ideas written on index cards, to its recent launch, and in the long stretch of writing in between—with both its wonders and its occasions of feeling quite daunted—friends have sustained both the writing and the writer with remarkable reminders of their care. Their encouragement and support have been a sanctuary indeed.

As we launch not only the book but also this companion website, I am grateful for all the blessings that have helped make this beginning possible, and for those who have offered these blessings. On this day, what blessings are you mindful of? Who has offered them to you, and how might you pass them along to others? Are you contemplating a beginning that could use a blessing? Where might you find this?

As you ponder this, here’s one of the blessings that I wrote for the book. May it grace you on your way.

Where there is no way,
no path, no road made plain,
may there be wise ones
who inspire you to see
where the way could begin.

Thank you for stopping by; your presence is a blessing upon this beginning. I pray that this site will offer a space of sanctuary and sustenance on your path. Peace to you.