Advent: Incarnation, Part 1

Songs:

What Kind of God is This

Creator of the Stars of Night

Poetry:

Those Winter Sundays 

By Robert Hayden

Sundays too my father got up early

and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,

then with cracked hands that ached

from labor in the weekday weather made

banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.

When the rooms were warm, he’d call,

and slowly I would rise and dress,

fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,

who had driven out the cold

and polished my good shoes as well.

What did I know, what did I know

of love’s austere and lonely offices?

Love Calls Us to the Things of This World

By Richard Wilbur

The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,

And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul   

Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple   

As false dawn.

                     Outside the open window   

The morning air is all awash with angels.

Some are in bed-sheets, some are in blouses,   

Some are in smocks: but truly there they are.   

Now they are rising together in calm swells   

Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear   

With the deep joy of their impersonal breathing;

Now they are flying in place, conveying

The terrible speed of their omnipresence, moving   

And staying like white water; and now of a sudden   

They swoon down into so rapt a quiet

That nobody seems to be there.

                                             The soul shrinks

From all that it is about to remember,

From the punctual rape of every blessèd day,

And cries,

               “Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry,   

Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam

And clear dances done in the sight of heaven.”

Yet, as the sun acknowledges

With a warm look the world’s hunks and colors,   

The soul descends once more in bitter love   

To accept the waking body, saying now

In a changed voice as the man yawns and rises,   

“Bring them down from their ruddy gallows;

Let there be clean linen for the backs of thieves;   

Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be undone,   

And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure floating   

Of dark habits,

                   keeping their difficult balance.”

Scripture:

Luke 1:39-45

At that time Mary got ready and hurried to a town in the hill country of Judea, where she entered Zechariah’s home and greeted Elizabeth. When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the baby leaped in her womb, and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit. In a loud voice she exclaimed: “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the child you will bear! But why am I so favored, that the mother of my Lord should come to me? As soon as the sound of your greeting reached my ears, the baby in my womb leaped for joy. Blessed is she who has believed that the Lord would fulfill his promises to her!”

Incarnation: The Ordinary–Beloved and Beatific.

Last week, a Facebook post I wrote 12 years ago reappeared at the top of my page: “I have to say, I have the best mother. She made me soup, let me sleep in her bed all day, and took me to the emergency room at 5am. I love her.” 

Without the context, this post is confusing, concerning even. The important thing to know is that 12 years ago, right at the start of my junior year basketball season, I got my first kidney stone. I say first, because almost exactly a year later, I got another, and now every twinge in my lower back sends me into minor panic. But what amused me about this post–as pain-medication fuelled as it was–is how effectively it encapsulates something of teenage Kathleen. I was nothing if not earnest (and often still am). I do have a wonderful mother that loves me and cares for me so well. But combined with that sincerity is a deep need to be noticed. The slightly enigmatic nature of this post was pretty typical. All I wanted was for someone to ask me what was wrong. And even then, I possessed a certain dramatic rhythm to my writing–all details in threes, starting from the least to most important: soup, sleep, emergency room. 

So much of my childhood I look back upon and marvel at my mother’s practical love of me. I wasn’t always an easy child. I stopped napping at two years old and went through periods in which I struggled to sleep. I would lie in my bed and yell “Mom!” at the top of my lungs in what felt like the middle of the night (it may have only been 10pm) or I would creep out of my bed and quietly knock at my parents’ bedroom door. I cried easily and sulked spectacularly, as my melancholy streak struggled to find an avenue out (this was before the discovery of writing poetry). So the first time I read Robert Hayden’s poem, I heard something of myself. “What did I know of love’s austere and lonely offices?” There was little thanks for my parents in parenting, not in the moment, at least not from me (I won’t speak for my siblings), and certainly not for such ordinary parenting things. It has only been in growing up and older that I have begun to learn something of this kind of love, the true kind that costs us something. 

“Do you want to share this post?” Facebook asked me. Yes, but also no? I love my mother and want to take every opportunity to celebrate her, but I find this Kathleen a little cringey. I would rather have her relegated to the archives of the internet than resurrected for a whole host of new people–college friends, colleagues, guys I’ve dated–to encounter. It feels just a little too personal. 

In Luke’s gospel, unlike some other Biblical accounts, we get a surprising amount of personal detail–full conversations, place names, even who was in power and collecting taxes at the time of Jesus’s birth. In verses 39-45, we have this scene between two women–Mary, who we encounter a few more times and Elizabeth who never reappears. It adds nothing to the gospel–we would still know that Jesus is Lord and that John was sent to testify to that fact–but it does amplify the gospel’s deeply personal and countercultural nature. Here is a story where the ordinary people--women, in fact, who meant very little credibility-wise in that culture and time--in their ordinary lives and settings matter because here is where the sacred is made tangible and human. Two cousins, one longing for a child, another surprised by a child before she was ready, come together to celebrate? Or just to be together in such a confusing, terrifying, awesome situation? Either way, this was a little drama in the scope of world events at the time. But Jesus didn’t come for only the big important moments, but for all of the little ones in between. He lived a fully human life and that is what our lives are made up of–small things, ordinary days, confusing events, commonplace acts of life and love, lots of learning to believe that “the Lord would fulfill his promises to [us].”

The Richard Wilbur poem I’ve included is a great favourite of mine. I first read it in a college class (Modern Poetry) and was immediately captivated by the first stanza–pulleys, spirits, souls, hanging, dawn, “the air awash with angels”. Wilbur uses this scene of awakening to mistake flapping laundry for angels, to say something about how we sometimes see the true nature of things, their essence, through blurry eyes and cloudy minds, not because the thing is changed, but because we are. Even still, we long for simplicity, for there to “be nothing on earth but laundry, / Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam / And clear dances done in the sight of heaven.” Instead, though, in complexity, in mystery, in the ordinary filled with the sacred is where flesh and blood, spirit-animated compassion lives: love for those who don’t deserve it (thieves), who are entangled in it (lovers), and who carry it (nuns). 

The ordinary does not become extraordinary because it is changed, but because it is filled and our sight is altered to see through eyes of “bitter love”--bitter in the sense that it is a love that has tasted hardship, suffering, death, but in spite of this, is still love. In the haze of waking we see, but in the clarity of the Spirit we know that what we see is true. Wilbur sees bedsheets as something full of angelic blessedness. Robert Hayden sees his father differently too–a bit more clearly and with more love upon reflection as he himself has learned the sacrifice of loving. Elizabeth sees Mary and knows her as the "mother of my lord."

The incarnation we proclaim and celebrate in Advent is good news for us everyday folk. We are ordinary and yet that is glorious. We do not make ourselves better to be loved, but are loved to be made better by the reflected glow of Christ. He was made like us so that we can be made like him. But that is not where our belovedness is born. I may think I’m cooler, wiser, more self-aware and emotionally mature now, but Kathleen at 16 was as loved by God as Kathleen at 28 is. Love incarnate calls us to the things–past, present, future, living, breathing, awkward, messy, wounded, beautiful, ordinary–of this world, whether we are ever thanked or not, because blessed are we who have believed that this Christ is for us.