Author and artist Jan Richardson of Florida led a women's retreat at Wisdom House in Litchfield, Connecticut, this weekend, and I'm glad I was there (video).
Your life is a sacred text, suggested Richardson, an ordained minister in the United Methodist Church who has been leading retreats for the past 20 years.
She discussed the practice of lectio divina, of seeing a passage of Scripture as story and allowing a word or words from it to rise from the page and enter our thoughts and pique our imaginations until they jiggle loose some new door that leads to a new understanding of the text. Passing through that door of understanding inevitably leads to a thin place where heaven and earth meet, where we know God's presence.
Lectio divina is the practice of reading a text, ruminating and praying over it, and then contemplating it that it might find its place in our hearts. For now. Because each reading of a text reveals different layers of meaning, opens different doors, closes yet another gap between heaven and earth.
Bringing this practice to our own lives means returning to an experience and ruminating, praying, and contemplating it--making of it a teacher who opens new doors of understanding over and over again. Bringing this practice to our own lives means reading the stories of others with compassion and humility, accepting that we can learn from each other.
Accepting that your life is sacred text means accepting the Annunciation as your own story, for example. To see Gabriel's invitation to Mary to allow God to be born through her as our own story means that God can be born in each of us. It means we can become a source of grace. It also means accepting that you are God's favored one, special and beautiful in your own right. Accepting your life as sacred text means claiming the Good Book as your own story as much as it means bringing your life to that story.
Along the way, we created accordion-fold books with our own writings or collages in response to readings about Mary, Hagar, that gorgeous woman who anointed Jesus before his crucifixion, and that leader of leaders Mary Magdalene.
Jan Richardson's retreat caused me to think of the Gospel writers. Very likely their intention was to tell us our own story, to hand us a fantastic myth into which we could place ourselves and accept the possibility of transformation over and over again. I wondered when readers stopped seeing themselves in these works and thought of themselves as other, as distant, as the inheritors of something weak and old and all but forgotten. It is not that the characters of Bible stories are special and that we are not but we are those characters.
Your life is sacred text.
I love you, holy, beautiful, and mighty one.
Sandy Carlson Social