Review: 'The Luminous Word'

I received an Advent gift of Jan L. Richardson's The Luminous Word from friends at Wisdom House last week. It is a handmade devotional booklet that considers Mary's experience as the bearer and bringer of the Word into the world. It also reflects on Joseph's experience as a brave taker of risks that the Word might live. Richardson's text then considers how we might do the same in our lives.

It is a wonderful devotional that makes real and immediate the Christmas story, particularly how it appears in the early pages of the Gospel According to Luke.

These words with which Richardson closes her meditation are a glimpse of the spirit with which she writes: "I have lived with this ancient story, the story of the coming of the Word into the world, for a long time. I've been fascinated with it ever since I first figured out that it's not the story of a meek woman resignedly accepting God's designs upon her but rather a woman who willingly opened herself, who chose to bear and bring forth and proclaim the Word. I keep returning to it, to this ancient and familiar story that keeps offering new thresholds, new doorways between its sacred text and the sacred text of my own life."

The charcoal drawings that illuminate this booklet are wonderfully simple and new. This is Advent from a fresh and vital perspective.

Richardson also has an Advent blog that lights the way through Advent. Get to it by clicking here. (Along the way, you might want to check this link for the connection between United Methodists and the St. Brigid of Kildare Monastery.)