Hello Deeply Beloveds!
As we continue on through the ending of summer and entry into the school year (and all the parents said "Amen!"), as well as continuing through the 6-month season of Ordinary Time in the liturgical year, I have found the words from Jan Richardson's blog very helpful and beautiful. Ordinary Time for me offers space away from the large and full celebrations for high holy days, though all are glorious and nourishing in their own right. But Ordinary Time, for me, allows for slow transformation, budding growth, and holy exploration. Here is where are spirits can gently enter the new and the mystical. I love how Jan Richardson writes about such transformation in her blog "The Painted Prayer Book"*:
In my retreat work, I often encounter folks who claim that they don’t have a creative bone in their bodies. I understand this; can see all too readily how our culture chips away at the creative spirit that is innate to us. It is alarming, how easily we participate—however unconsciously—in societal patterns that seek to keep us within certain confines; that keep us from being too distinctive, too creative, too noticeable. That keep us from standing upright.
But in these past weeks, I watched a woman create a sculpture for the first time since her mother’s death more than a decade before; I heard a woman in her 80s declare that she was going to spend the rest of her life painting; I saw people take the scriptures into their bones as they sang and worshiped and prayed and danced the sacred texts of our tradition; I saw them piece together words and images that drew them more deeply into their internal terrain where they found the presence of God in ways they had not noticed before. I saw them holding one another in community, walking with one another into new landscapes.
As these scenes and moments of the past weeks play through my memory once again, I see, too, among them a shadow: a woman bent, moving, rising, standing, praising. Healed and free.
And so I, the preacher and writer and artist who perpetually circles around the same message, am come this day to ask you: What are the patterns you are enacting in your life and your community? Do you have any habits and routines that, once comfortable, have become constricting and confining? Are there ways that you participate in keeping others in rhythms that are comfortable for you? Do you allow others to do this to you, letting yourself absorb assumptions and prejudices that keep you bound, however subtly? Do you resist moving in ways that might challenge and conflict with the patterns of others? What would it look like to place yourself in the healing path of Jesus, and know sabbath down to your very bones?
Prayer for All Things Rising
For all things rising
out of the hiddenness of shadows
out of the weight of despair
out of the brokenness of pain
out of the constrictions of compliance
out of the rigidity of stereotypes
out of the prison of prejudice;
for all things rising
into life, into hope
into healing, into power
into freedom, into justice;
we pray, O God,
for all things rising.
In the coming days, may you place yourself in the path of the Christ who desires our wholeness. Together. Blessings to you!
[“Prayer for All Things Rising” © Jan L. Richardson from Sacred Journeys: A Woman’s Book of Daily Prayer (Nashville: Upper Room Books, 1995).
Peace, healing, and joy to you,
Mother Nikki+
*blog entry, "Freedom in My Bones" (This entry was posted on August 15, 2010 at 9:26 PM and is filed under art, Gospel of Luke, lectionary, Ordinary Time., Jan Richardson.)
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