Her website is Painted Prayerbook She combines her art, poems and scriptural references in a wonderful review of church seasons and individual Gospel passages.
This poem is for Lent 3 – -the woman at the well. Richardson writes that “the encounter between Jesus and the unnamed woman offers something of an icon of the Lenten season and the invitation it extends to us. If we give ourselves to a daily practice, if we keep taking our vessel to the source even when we feel uninspired or the well seems empty or the journey is boring, if we walk with an openness to what might be waiting for us in the repetition and rhythm of our routines, we may suddenly find ourselves swimming in the grace and love of God that goes deeper than we ever imagined.”
Blessing of the Well
If you stand at the edge of this blessing and call down into it,
you will hear your words return to you.
If you lean in and listen close, you will hear this blessing give the story of your life back to you.
Quiet your voice quiet your judgment quiet the way you always tell your story to yourself.
Quiet all these and you will hear the whole of it and the hollows of it: the spaces in the telling, the gaps where you hesitate to go.
Sit at the rim of this blessing. Press your ear to its lip, its sides, its curves that were carved out long ago by those whose thirst drove them deep, those who dug into the layers with only their hands and hope.
Rest yourself beside this blessing and you will begin to hear the sound of water entering the gaps.
Still yourself and you will feel it rising up within you, filling every hollow, springing forth anew