Advent 10
Becoming Human. for the Mudroom.
As I flick on the switch, the tiny bulb meant to act as the star casts a warm glow over the scene below. “You have a lot of nativity sets, Mom,” my son comments after he helps set up the wooden, ceramic, hand-carved, and clay sets next to the snow globe manger scene and the stitched Kantha magi picture. I stopped counting how many baby Jesus figures adorn our living room come Advent-time every year. They have captivated me since I was a little girl, even before I knew who this baby in the creche even was. I just knew there was something strange and beautiful about this helpless babe that people revered.
What was attractive about a wriggling bundle of flesh? What power was there in this helplessness? It’s a mystery I still wrestle to answer every year as I gaze upon these nativity sets I have collected from around the world.
In the church, most of the year we contemplate the cross, what we more often see as the symbol of our redemption. But I find myself drawn more to the cradle than to the cross. We view the coming of the Messiah as a culmination of our salvation, but I think it’s just the beginning. The enigma of the life we live in and through the fully God, fully human Savior is something we work out with fear and trembling our whole lives.
The week before we unboxed our mangers, I sat at the computer for hours pondering all I had learned in the last three months during my final trimester of studies for my master’s degree in Practical Theology. We were tasked with writing a statement of faith, detailing what we believed about important doctrines like the nature of God, creation, and our eternal destinies. One question I spent more time on others is what the Imago Dei really means, what it says about us that we were created in the image and likeness of God.
Is it something about our physical bodies? Our capacity to reason? Our freedom to choose or to love? Our eternal nature? I read arguments from theologians and early church fathers arguing for each of these.
But the words I kept coming back to were ones I had heard months before when I spent a day hiking and praying at the Ignatius House in Atlanta. A quiet Jesuit priest spoke to a handful of us retreatants throughout the day about the spiritual exercises of Saint Ignatius of Loyola.
What stuck with me from that day is he didn’t speak about becoming more spiritual through these contemplative exercises but becoming more human. “We become human on our journey through this life and so become what God is like,” he said. It felt scandalous, blasphemous. I grew up hearing that our humanity was nothing more than fallen and sinful from birth, taught we should try to be more like God, less like us. Instead, he was telling us to live more fully into who God created us to be.
CONTINUE READING AT THE MUDROOM
Waiting for the Beginning Without an End
They felt litter thicker than matchsticks in my hands; her tiny fingers seemed like they could snap in an instant. I was mesmerized by her smallness in my arms though her presence filled my entire life. As I held my firstborn in the dark of her bedroom, humming a song to her in the same rocking chair in which my grandmother had rocked my mother and my mother had rocked me, I wept.
I had waited for this for so long, to hold her in my arms. I loved her fiercely as she inhabited my own body, her bottom pressing against my ribcage as I tried to sleep. But now that I held this tiny thing completely dependent on me, I was overwhelmed with her fragility. Her life had just begun and already there was a fear gripping me, the reality that she would be hurt in this life and that one day this life would end. This beginning was the beginning of an end.
***
In every season of a growing life, there is anticipation and longing for what is to come next. Her life only started and we waited to see her roll over for the first time, for that first smile of recognition at seeing her daddy’s face. We watched for her first steps and looking for her first tooth to appear. The moments fly and they never stop coming whether we eagerly wait for them or resist with all our might.
We barely grasp one tenuous moment before the next is upon us. I can recall just what those precious matchstick fingers felt like in my own palm even now as I wait for her womanhood to begin, watch her hips grow wider and her innocence turns to adolescent anxieties. The beginnings she is experiencing signal the end of her childhood.
***
They are nothing more than figurines, these images of mother and child that I place around my house every December. I have been collecting nativity scenes for years, enamored with images of the Christ child and the Holy Mother since I was a child myself. Sometimes when I look at them, I can’t help but weep...
CONTINUE READING AT THE MUDROOM
Nothing Else Is Needed But This
I’ve long loved the Advent symbolism of waiting and expectation. Never have I felt more ready for the coming season than this year, when all in me groans with waiting and longing for a more perfect kingdom. The Spirit has been whispering to me that this needs to be a season of less and not more.
I went to Twitter to ask friends how they find quiet space during Advent. I got answers about less commercialism and social media fasts, getting outside, devotions, and books. It’s not the busy and the commercialism of the season I am struggling with. Living in a land where Christ’s birth isn’t celebrated helped me appreciate a small Christmas and it’s joys.
No, this year my heart is aching with the need to get outside of my own head and into a more spacious place of the spirit of Advent. One writer proposed finding a question to guide you and said this year she is asking, “What does my soul need this season?”
As I sat with that question, the list became clear pretty quickly. All year I’ve been filling up the quiet with words. I love to read and listen to podcasts. I tend to want to fill in all the empty spaces with more knowledge, wisdom, and depth. This has a place. But it also leaves little room for the still voice of God to breakthrough. (It’s also a handy way to avoid the real-life issues I don’t want to be quiet enough to face). My soul needs a spacious, quiet place to connect with God instead.
I also think about how my physical body groans as I round middle age. I stand at my writing desk when I’m too tired of sitting. I stretch aching joints and stiff muscles. But I also know the pains in my body reflect something far deeper than sitting too long. My soul needs more movement, more rest, more laughter, more walks without destinations, and more avenues into joy.
On the morning of Thanksgiving, the light was just beginning to creep through the still amber leaves outside my window. I sat listening to only the hums of the refrigerator and heater, my kids starting to stir. I decided to turn on some Christmas hymns but never made it past the first one. I just kept listening to these words over and over:
O ye beneath life's crushing load,
Whose forms are bending low,
Who toil along the climbing way
With painful steps and slow;
Look now, for glad and golden hours
Come swiftly on the wing;
Oh rest beside the weary road
And hear the angels sing.
I don’t know about you but the whole world feels like it is groaning to me this season. Family and friends are carrying heavy burdens and I can’t see past them right now to the glad and golden hours that await. I need to spend some time intentionally looking for more than a just continued path down this weary road. Continue Reading
The Hope for Which We Now Labor. For SheLoves Magazine.
It’s true what mother’s say about forgetting the pain of childbirth. My births are now seven and nine and a half years ago and I have to strain to remember the details. Giving birth is a moment we spend countless hours preparing for. It is the culmination of reading and birthing classes, showers, reordering our lives and homes, taking growing baby bump photos, and long months of waiting.
Then suddenly the moment has passed and the miracle and the pain all start fading into memory instantly. There’s a new life to care for. There’s not time to ruminate on the glories of childbirth. Just moments ago we screamed, “I can’t do this!” in agony but somehow, like millions of mothers before us, we did.
This time of year we talk a lot about birth. We read and sing about it, talk about it at our parties, reorder our lives and homes with decorations celebrating it, look at photos and miniatures of the place of the birth, and spend the long month of Advent waiting for the day of birth to arrive. Then suddenly the moment has passed and the miracle and the pain all start fading into memory instantly. We spend a month pregnant with the anticipation of the Savior’s imminent arrival.
There’s not time to ruminate on the glories of his actual coming. Life rages on and we forget the incarnation means God actually lived among us, that Jesus didn’t just go from angelic baby in a manger to resurrection. In between he cried out to the father in agony “I can’t do this!” and asked for the cup to pass from him. He lived in the pain with us. He still does.
Reading Lauren Winner’s Wearing God right before Advent this year had me thinking more literally than metaphorically about birth. I squirmed uncomfortably, as I am sure others do when they hear the graphic details of other’s birth stories, when I imagined Jesus’ birth truly for the first time in my life: “As the contractions pick up, Jesus would sense that he was being squeezed. His head helps stretch Mary’s cervix open.”
“Do I really want a God with a body?” Winner asks. “Would I prefer a God who lives as I try to live—mostly in my head?” It’s easier to hold Jesus at arm’s length, to live a sanitized version of Christmas. If he peacefully slipped into the world one silent night long ago, I can relegate him to the corners of my life, packed away with the manger scenes to be brought out once a year...
CONTINUE READING AT SHELOVES MAGAZINE
The Gift I Didn’t Ask For. For Sheloves Magazine.
I didn’t know how much I would miss the “feeling” I have come to associate with Christmas. It starts when the air turns crisp and the leaves crackle under your feet. It’s this intangible excitement that comes along with the lights and the parties, the stories to be read and cookies to be baked. It’s this atmosphere of anticipation when people say, “It feels like Christmas.”
There are no lights this year around town nor any signs of the season. We have moved to a country where Christmas isn’t celebrated in the same way. It’s celebrated under brightly colored canopies hung in the courtyards of the few churches that meet together, in advent candles and carols sung. It’s celebrated quietly in homes where the few Christ followers meet. As I’ve been dreaming of a white Christmas (as I longingly looked at pictures of snow from friends online, in awe because we rarely get snow this early in the year in my deep south American hometown), I’ve been given something of a gift. I’ve been given a small Christmas.
It doesn’t feel much like a gift at first. The ache for the familiar felt like it had a vice grip on my heart as others said, “Oh you’re so lucky you are escaping the commercialism that has taken over Christmas and advent.” Maybe that’s true but is it wrong to just want a peppermint mocha and some pumpkin pie to get me into the spirit? And don’t get me started on the mental hoops I jumped through explaining how Santa would still visit even though most people in our country don’t celebrate Christmas at all. I felt like I was missing something vital to give my small children in this place...
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