Christmas Prompts | Prompt Times 10

Every Year, Right after Thanksgiving, I Grab My Copy of Night Visions

And curl up with the stories, art, poetry, and prayers of Jan L. Richardson

Night Visions is not your typical Advent devotional.

First of all, it’s a compendium of personal stories, poems, prayers, and artful illustrations, all by Jan L.Richardson. When Night Visions was published she was an artist-in-residence at the San Pedro Center in Orlando, Florida.

She’s an ordained United Methodist minister, but I don’t hold that against her. Jan’s ministry expresses itself through her spirit of creativity.

And through her passion for social justice. She has a gift of expressing the full gamut of subtle feelings from painful longings to radiant joy, not only through poetry and lyrical short pieces, but visually, through the texture, colors, and vibrancy of all kinds of papers.

Woven into her paper collages and fabric tapestries are descriptions of dancing to stamp out war one poignant Channukah, as well as laments about how long it takes to soften sheets when you now sleep alone.

Its subtitle, Searching the Shadows of Advent and Christmas reassures readers that there is a place for all of us at the holiday table, no matter how excluded we feel at the time.

She recognizes it’s not all merry, merry, joy, joy.

This book is written about the shadows, from the shadows. Jan shares her times of pain and longing as much as times of joyous festivity.

In particular, the shadows of Advent.

What is Advent?

Though I love Christmas and all its trappings, I was raised Jewish.

All I knew about Advent is you get those paper advent calenders at the supermarket and open a little window every day from Dec. 1 to 25, and if you’re lucky there’s not just a message, but a piece of chocolate.

For some, advent is the four weeks in December, celebrated with a reading and the lighting of one of four advent candles.

Here’s how Jan describes Advent in her introduction:

The season of Advent means there is something on the horizon the likes of which we have never seen before. It is not possible to keep it from coming, because it will. That’s just how Advent works. What is possible is not to see it, to miss it, to turn just as it brushes past you. And you begin to grasp what it was you missed, like Moses in the cleft of the rock, watching God’s hindquarters fade in the distance.

So stay. Sit. Linger. Tarry. Ponder. Wait. Behold. Wonder.

There will be time enough for running. For rushing. For worrying. For pushing.

For now, stay. Wait.

Something is on the horizon.

Night Vision’s advent starts the Sunday after Thanksgiving and goes for seven weeks through the first Sunday after the epiphany. I believe that’s up through Twelfth Night or the second week in January.

So even though it’s now after Christmas, we’re still in it.

Each week has a theme.

Her seven are darkness, desire, preparing a space, hope, birthing, welcoming, and thresholds. As I write this we are still in the birthing week.

I love that she starts with Darkness.

For me, that’s a recognition that so many of us suffer from depression this time of year. Especially during the forced aloneness of a pandemic.

I find her words comforting:

Our work is to name the darkness for what it is and to find what it asks of us: whether it is darkness that asks for justice to bring the dawn of hope to a night of terror, or for a candle to give warmth to the shadows, or for companions to hold us in our uncertainty and unknowing, or for a blanket to enfold us as we wait for the darkness to teach us what we need to know.

In the book, she shares a story about being such a companion for a friend who’d just moved into a new home. She was as homesick and lonely as her walls were bare. Jan went home and created an image for her to hand up in her new place.

It was of a woman wrapped in a story blanket surrounded by blazing stars. The blanket contained the words of a story shared with this friend about going home and watching the nighttime sky on a blanket like she did as a child.

Birthing honors the feminine face of God.

Jan uses birthing as a metaphor for all of us to enter. Biological moms or not, we’re all giving or have given birth to something. We writers can identify. But it goes even beyond creative projects.

She lifts up an image from a Bible book she mostly avoided with ‘Protestant squeamishness,’ Revelations — cloaked in the sun, chased by dragons.

Not the familiar imagery of Mary, the Madonna in rapture, beaming at her newborn babe in silence, on a night full of light.

Jan writes: The woman clothed with the sun haunts me, journeys with me this season. She whom God delivered, she who had a place prepared for her in the wilderness, she whom the earth came to aid, she holds out her garment to us.

To those who cry out in agony, to those in travail and pained to be delivered, to those struggling toward freedom with the dragon’s breath hot on their necks, she holds forth her fiery raiment, her dazzling cloak, her glorious robe.

When we factor in the Black Madonnas that have appeared the world over, and the way that Mary has become a touchable, comforting aspect of the Divine for people facing hardship, this vision resonates.

I reread this book every year.

Once all the way through and then week by week for a deeper dive. Yes, I know all the stories, and some of the poems by heart. But I feel held and embraced when my eyes and heart gaze at her pages, her poetry, and her paper tapestries. So I keep coming back.

Let me end with this prayerful blessing from the Darkness section:

Make us bold in the darkness to protect each other’s slumber, and make us courageous in the night to guard each other’s dreams.

Can I get an amen?

Hat’s off to Sujona Chatterjee for sharing about I book I did not know I want to read, but I do now!

Thank you Marissa W for this Prompt Times Christmas book prompt!

Marilyn Flower writes humor to laugh the changes she wants to see and make. She’s the author of Creative Blogging: Ninja Writers Guide to Character Development and Bucket Listers, Get Your Brave On: How to Do the Thing You’re ‘Too Old’ & ‘Too Scared’ to Do. Clowning and improvisation strengthen her resolve during these crazy times. Stay in touch!