About a month ago I was asked to speak at church for the fourth Sunday of Advent– today. Our church has a tradition of having a mother speak on this day as it is the reading where Mary rushes off to see Elizabeth. The child in Elizabeth’s womb “leaps for joy” and Elizabeth prophecies the place of Jesus in the new society that is to come. It is a cool thing to be asked.
At first I was honored, then stressed out, terrified, and gradually worked around to confident. I worked very hard on this piece. I mean, I ACTUALLY practiced it!
And it went really well. I felt pretty good about it. I got a lot of support and positive feed back, so I am flying high on that one. Here is the text if you are interested! I cut the second and third paragraphs for time, but I am including them here because I was sad to see them go.
Fourth Sunday Reflection
So here we are in Advent, waiting for Christ and our song is (sung) “We’re waiting for Jesus like Mary”.
On the way to church one day I was bemoaning the task of putting together this reflection to my husband Brad. “What could I possibly have to say about patience or waiting? I’m not a patient person.” “Yeah,” he said, “You are not exactly what I would call serene!”. And then laughed!
“I am too serene!” I wanted to yell. In close relationships, sometimes we offer what we think is this amazingly forthright confession, only to be met by exactly what we don’t want to hear. I didn’t want him to agree with me. I wanted him to tell me how wonderful I am. But I am not a patient person. I am mostly okay with this because for the most part people confuse my impatience with effectiveness, but really at the heart of it all, I want what is not here yet.
Brad and I have three children, Francis who is 6, Zephyr is 3, and Inez is 1. I am a high school language arts teacher by trade, but I am home caring for children right now and sometimes all the waiting and trying to be patient feels like it is killing me. I am sick of doing all the same chores over and over again. I am impatient for the kids to grow up, to need less from me. I am impatient for Inez to quit screaming during church. I would like Zephyr to take his fingers out of his mouth for 2 seconds. And I am sick to death of diapers, diapers, diapers. Older parents say to me, “Oh it goes so fast!” and “Cherish this time!”. I know that they are right, but it is hard for me to muster spirit for their words, maybe because I am exhausted and have diapers to wash.
Pregnancy has always been such a powerful image of waiting, but despite experiencing three pregnancies, I never got much better at waiting. With number 1, I didn’t understand what was happening to me, by number 2, I was eager to be tougher than I was with Francis’s birth. With Inez, the last one, I just wanted it to get over with. That was about month 5.
I’m not good at waiting, but I do understand longing. My pregnancies did help me understand that sort of deep, physical and spiritual longing that comes from some mysterious place inside you, a passionate place, where love and pain are all mixed up together, where you feel something and gasp for breath at how much it hurts. I’ll add here that I don’t think you need to experience pregnancy to know this. We think of this as our heart aching, but why do we hurt in our core like this when our feelings are born in our brain? It is mysterious.
All my children were born in birth centers with midwives. The midwifery model recommends that a laboring woman stay at home as long as possible where she might labor in her own comfortable setting. For me, this was always at night. As I am unwilling to accept comfort when there are things to be done, I was up walking the streets in the dark trying to get my labor to speed up. This is what I sang as I walked: (This is as serene as you are going to get me, so enjoy it). “As the deer longs for running streams, so I long, so I long, so I long for you”. I longed for these babies, these mysterious miracles, these loves of my life.
I understand longing. I can long, and adore, and want change all at the same time. I love my life, my church, my community, but I long for change. I want justice, I want women’s ordination, I want people to stop calling other people “illegal”, I want gay and lesbian couples to have their relationships acknowledged and affirmed by the larger community. In a pregnancy, we know the waiting will all be over after 9 months. Waiting for justice might take a long time though. What are we suppose to do as we wait?
I like this Mary from our Gospel today. She is impatient too. I can just imagine her with her robes hiked up around her knees, her hair and veil flying behind her, rushing as fast as she can over the hills to her cousin Elizabeth’s house. She is out of breath, she is excited, she is bursting with information and can’t wait to hear what Elizabeth might know. Before she can do anything more than call out at the door, Elizabeth shoots up and calls out mightily, “Blessed are you among women! Look at what is happening to us! It is truly wonderful!”.
And it is wonderful. Mary and Elizabeth are not just excited about babies. Yes babies are exciting, but I think what they are excited about is change, is hope. Elizabeth is old and yet she is bearing a child. Mary has been told that her child will rock the foundations of society. Change is coming. The messiah is coming. I imagine that some of you women out there in your 60s and 70s might not consider it much of a favor if you were told by an angel that you were pregnant. “Oh please God no!”, but maybe we can think of this more as a deep symbol for all of us, childbearing or no. Pregnancy in this “old” woman is the ultimate sign of hopefulness. What seemed impossible is not. What seemed too late was not. What seems un-reparable in our human relationships is not without hope.
We long for Christ. We long for peace, for justice, for change. We are impatient. We want to hike up our skirts and run over the hills seeking out our dearest friends and family members to say, “Look what is happening in our world! Look what joy!”. There is value in being patient, but maybe there is value in being hopeful, in letting our longing let us make possible in Christ Jesus what did not seem possible before. Here is the question: can we make our longing manifest in action?
At Advent, we are all pregnant. Close your eyes, wrap your arms around your belly. This is where something wonderful that you long for is growing. Is it peace? Is it healing in your family, in your body, in your human relationships? Sing with me: “As the deer longs for running streams, so I long, so I long, so I long for you”.
What do you need to do to bring it to birth?
6 Comments | In: Philosophical musings, Projects That I Do With My Clever Little Fingers | | #
I hired a day laborer to help me level this stretch of thorns and weeds. This “hedge” was truly disgusting, full of trash and rocks and small, unsightly shrubs. I can see beauty in all sorts of wild things, but this really was not one of them. The plan for this stretch of ground is a nice row of raspberries.
How about that load of yard debris? I have to figure out how to get it to the recycling center. This is what the city of Portland gives us for our yard debris:
Dang wheeling cart is never large enough. I swear I could pull this thing out every week (maybe twice!). It took me a month and a half to get rid of our Christmas tree. I think I still have the trunk in that big lawn pile.
While weeding, I found this! (While you are at it, check out my mulch!). Brad loves rhubarb and as I love him, I planted a bunch to call our very own. He thought it was a goner, but there it is. Rhubarb takes a couple years to get established, and I was unsure how this might do, so I got two varieties. Here is her cousin:
I put this beauty into the backyard, which to me is still sort of a wasteland. There was pretty much nothing there but weeds and butterfly bushes when we got here, and I am still struggling with removing the blights and introducing beneficials. Blights=invasives like blackberries, straggly butterfly bushes packed together and poorly pruned, garbage and plastic in the soil, tell-tale beer bottles and the stupid bamboo that is creeping in from the neighbors’ yard. Beneficials= mulch, shade trees, compost, worms, chickens, and plants that add interest and variation to the yard.
Here is another crazy thing I am doing. While I was in El Paso last, I was checking out the “dry riverbed” thing that a lot of landscapers are doing down there, and I thought it might work fairly well here if I could just figure out how to keep it from becoming a mosquito cesspool. Ain’t nothin’ stays dry around here. I have to incorporate some drainage into my plan. What I am working on is making a dry riverbed leading to a dry “pond” that is actually a sand box. It will have large rocks surrounding it and be a naturalistic and functional place for kids to play. The “river” will start up behind the compost and “trickle out” a bit beyond the “pond”. I think it will look really awesome when I am done. Right now Brad keeps calling it my “mud hole”, but those of us with vision must live with the detractors in our lives. It is going to be AWESOME.
