First Week of Advent 2013
Living, Transforming- in Body and Soul
Advent has been on my mind ever since my sister learned of my January due-date and proclaimed, “You are so lucky! You’ll be pregnant through Advent!” I do feel lucky, favored with this unique, tangible way to experience the burden and blessing of Advent; to experience what it is to anticipate, to patiently, actively wait and prepare the way for something new that’s coming, something that will change everything in ways I don’t yet understand.
Now is the time for Advent. I am grateful. I am excited. I am not, however, ready. There is far too much going on for me to really be present and engaged in this special season. Though, perhaps that’s the best and only way to begin. In the same way, I was not ready to be pregnant. I may have felt a movement urging me toward it but my mind kept insisting that at this time in my life it was inconvenient and impractical. I was freshly married, enmeshed in the work of soup lines and hospitality at the Catholic Worker, navigating new family dynamics and preparing to move and start a new community. I felt that I had quite enough on my plate.
It wasn’t exactly convenient timing for Mary either. I imagine her response to Gabriel, “How can this be…?” could be translated, “You do realize that I’m a virgin, right? That I’m betrothed to be married? You must know an unplanned pregnancy is going to ruin the plans I have for my life. Maybe get me killed?” Yet she concludes with a profound recognition of presence, “Here I am,” naming her sense of being, “I am the Lord’s servant,” and of invitational authority, “Let it be so.”
Mary’s response indicates a faith in her capacity to expand in response to the call on her life, to take on what seems impossible, trusting that with God all things are possible. Pregnancy offers a unique example of how, when we are willing to participate with it, the impossible occurs. It provides a physical manifestation of Mary’s powerful “yes,” that triggered a miracle.
In her book Creating with God, parent and pastor Sarah Jobe, articulates the manifestation of this mystery in wonderfully practical and anatomical terms: “The uterus is a miraculous organ,” she writes, “Through it, women are able to welcome whole other people into their bodies to live…the uterus expands to make room…Organs scooch out of the way. Hormones work a double shift.” Imagine being asked to make room so dramatically, shifting the very parts and patterns we thought necessary to live, and all that for a yet unmet being.
“Our babies are strangers to us,” Jobe continues, “and we invite them inside of us to live…The mystery at the heart of the church is that we are called to let Jesus abide in us. The scandal at the heart of the church is that Jesus does not come alone.”
Jesus does not come alone, nor does he come in an expected form or by expected venues. Despite being highly anticipated, Jesus’ visitations often begin and sometimes end unrecognized. Very few during Jesus’ life would have expected the glorious Messiah to be the illegitimate son of a working class family from the ghetto town of Nazareth. Very few who were on board for a revolution to overthrow the Romans expected it to be nonviolent or for this long awaited Messiah to be crucified. Even Jesus’ followers often didn’t recognize him post-resurrection until he gave them clues. And in our time, in our own lives, how often do we not recognize Jesus? How often do we harm or even kill the veiled Christ in our midst?
How can we expect to recognize the Promised One if that one is forever so enigmatic? Matthew 25 gives some good hints – Jesus tells us he was there in the homeless, the hungry, the naked and the prisoner. When we respond to them, we welcome him.
Being pregnant, I can’t help but respond to the needs of the incarnation of love that is growing inside. Whether I like it or not, my uterus is indeed expanding, organs are making way, my mind is turning to thoughts of how to provide a safe, warm space in our home, and after birth a simple cry of hunger is likely to produce milk from my breasts whether I feel like sharing or not. In the life of faith, it’s not so automatic. We are given the freedom to choose which includes the freedom to avoid, to look away, to cling to things as they are and as if they are ours.
Jobe suggests that Advent is a time when “we are all invited to be pregnant together,” invited into the spirituality of pregnancy. It is a time to consciously practice the disciplines and sacrifices that happen automatically in the body. In an Advent reflection series by the Jonah House community the writers give some suggestions of how we might prepare for what is to come while simultaneously responding to what already is. They draw on John the Baptists words, “I must decrease that he [Jesus] might increase,” offering examples of what this might look like for us:
– Decrease what is greedy, what is frantic consumerism, for the increase of simple, life-giving sharing.
– Decrease what is fearful and defensive, for the increase of life giving compassion and generosity.
– Decrease what is fraudulent and pretense, for the increase of life giving truth-telling…about the sickness of society and our enmeshment in that sickness.
– Decrease what is hateful and alienating, for the increase of healing and forgiveness.
It may feel not only outside our comfort, but beyond our capability to live into Advent this way. One thing I am learning from pregnancy is that I had no idea what my body was capable of until this baby came along and revealed my capacity for transformation. I believe it can be so with the life of faith. When we say “yes” to God’s outrageous requests we’re given a role not only in our own redemption but in the redemption of the world. We’re invited to create with God and produce a real Christmas miracle: the promised Kin-dom; life shattered and made new through radical Love.
