Advent: Preparation
- kgmcal315
- Dec 9, 2024
- 5 min read
Songs
Poetry
Annunciation
by Scott Cairns
Deep within the clay, and O my people
very deep within the wholly earthen
compound of our kind arrives of one clear,
star-illumined evening a spark igniting
once again the tinder of our lately
banked noetic fire. She burns but she
is not consumed. The dew lights gently,
suffusing the pure fleece. The wall comes down.
And—do you feel the pulse?—we all become
the kindled kindred of a King whose birth
thereafter bears to all a bright nativity.
Scripture
Luke 1:26-38
In the sixth month of Elizabeth’s pregnancy, God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth, a town in Galilee, to a virgin pledged to be married to a man named Joseph, a descendant of David. The virgin’s name was Mary. The angel went to her and said, “Greetings, you who are highly favored! The Lord is with you.”
Mary was greatly troubled at his words and wondered what kind of greeting this might be. But the angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary; you have found favor with God. You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you are to call him Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over Jacob’s descendants forever; his kingdom will never end.”
“How will this be,” Mary asked the angel, “since I am a virgin?”
The angel answered, “The Holy Spirit will come on you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God. Even Elizabeth your relative is going to have a child in her old age, and she who was said to be unable to conceive is in her sixth month. For no word from God will ever fail.”
“I am the Lord’s servant,” Mary answered. “May your word to me be fulfilled.” Then the angel left her.
Light Out of Shadow
When I was a child, my older siblings would sometimes teach me things, like how to balance a spoon on my nose, how to fit my whole fist in my mouth, or how to relight a candle by magic. It’s not really magic, of course, but as a small child, it felt like it–lighting a match off a candle, blowing out the candle, holding the match over the tiny thread of smoke until the flame seemed to leap from match to wick. For years, any lit candle in any situation was an opportunity to pull out this trick. As I grew older and more courageous, I added extinguishing candles with my fingers to my repertoire. Fire doesn’t scare me (and with so many other fears, I am always keen to display this bravery), but rather fascinates me–its liveliness, its heat, its light. As I write this, I have four candles lit around me. Every candle, in fact, in this whole shared house–the living room, the bathroom, the kitchen–I have contributed. Scented. Unscented. Tea lights, tapers, pillars. It doesn’t matter. And in these long, dark winter nights, I have been comforted by this collection of candles. In an open flame, darkness disappears.
Advent is a season of lighting candles: four, in fact–one each week. Different traditions have different reasonings and stories and words for this tradition and each candle. But at its root, the tiny dancing flames remind us with their pale, pure light of a greater, unquenchable light. Over the weekend I visited a light display in a local park with a friend. As we meandered down paths lit by strings of fairy lights, admired woodland animals made from lights, watched a display projected onto a spray of water, Katie pointed up. “Look, the moon.” I looked up and through two dark branches, as if perched in the crook of the tree, was a bright crescent moon. “Kind of puts these lights to shame, doesn’t it?” she remarked. Just as our electric lights are an imitation of natural light, as the moon is a reflection of the sun’s light, all light is an imitation, a reflection of the light of light’s creator and source–Christ, “the true light that gives light to everyone,” as John’s gospel puts it.
As I was reading through the passage in Luke 1 of Gabriel visiting Mary–the Annunciation–I was struck by the wording of Gabriel’s explanation to Mary of how she will conceive, “the Holy Spirit will come on you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you.” I suppose I currently have a heightened awareness of shadows; with the low angle of the winter sun (when it appears) I have noticed and felt strangely haunted by my shadow. It feels unnaturally long and follows me (or leads me) everywhere I go. But something about the image of Jesus, the true light, coming into the world, emerging out of the shadows speaks to me. Because it’s what he did. He entered into our dark world, lived through a life shadowed by all the sin and brokenness of humanity–grief, hatred, sickness, hunger, poverty, and ultimately death–to drive the shadows out with victorious light.
But that wasn’t the only thing in this very familiar story that caught my attention. The light of Christ, as it turns darkness into light, also transforms lives, beginning with Mary. Scott Cairns’s poem “Annunciation,” captures some of this. Our world, our very selves, we are reminded, are clay, a “wholly earthen compound” made of dust and ribs and God’s breath in creation. And into this, comes a spark. Clay famously is not particularly flammable, but this is no ordinary flame, and it calls to something in us–buried and dying. And the first to catch fire is the carrier of this spark. She, Mary, “burns but is not consumed.” Something changes. She changes from virgin to mother, from ordinary to favoured, from a predictable life to a completely unexpected one. But something else, I’m sure, changes too, deep in her soul. How could it not as
thou art now
Thy Maker's maker, and thy Father's mother;
Thou hast light in dark, and shutst in little room,
Immensity cloistered in thy dear womb.
(“Annunciation,” John Donne)
Mary holds a mystery, the mystery, within her very body. And yet she begins with these simple words: “I am the Lord’s servant.” Whatever is to come, whoever God is making her to be, whatever he is doing through her, she will be obedient. She will believe. She will trust the light that is to come.
Light has come, light is coming. The shadows are receding. We are not as we will be, but we are not what we once were. We are “kindled kindred,” living in the light of Christ, our brother, being made like him. Day is breaking. The flame jumps from match to wick. “Do you feel the pulse?”
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