Today's midweek reflection is by First Presbyterian Church member, mother, writer, poet, and whimsical warrior, Kelli Owens. Today's words are inspired by the season of Advent. You can check out more of Kelli's writing at her blog by clicking here.
photo by Kelli Owens. |
The thing about Advent is it begins in the dark. And for a
word that means “coming” this feels strange, right? We often subconsciously
associate the approach of something grand with alacrity of light, rejoicing,
making merry. Garish bulbs and consumerism are perhaps easier to stomach than
other things. Things of darkness. Of obscurity. Of whispers.
The thing about Advent is it begins with a body.
Specifically, the body of a woman. Let that sink in - along with all conscious
and subconscious connotations. The body of a woman is part of the story of the
body of the Holy. Advent asks us not to rush past this.
There is a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke imagining the
interaction between the angel Gabriel and Mary at the annunciation. How the
angel lost all sense of his message by the immediacy of the woman before whom
he stood.
“And yet your hands — how wondrously
Grown full of grace they are.
Such hands by woman never grew
So ripe, so fulsomely. …
Grown full of grace they are.
Such hands by woman never grew
So ripe, so fulsomely. …
Forgive me, I’ve forgot
What he who sat within the sun
Told me to speak about”
What he who sat within the sun
Told me to speak about”
Her tender hands, the space her body inhabited, her ripe smallness. These are all implied by the biblical narrative, of course, but Rilke’s words give them sinew and skin. They bring us into the room.
What Rilke did there is the same thing we are invited to do
every December. To bring the esoteric and abstract onto the gritty shores of
earth. To disquiet our heavenly expectations of what Love looks like by
cringing at a baby’s cry and being shocked at the scandal of his misunderstood
young mother. Because if anything, darkness invites us out of our comfortable
certainties to the bodily experience of the wild unknown.
The mystery of the season is not in the details of what we
see as much as in the eyes we gain by watching for what the process wants to
bring. Word becoming flesh isn’t a once and done, after all. What else could a
season enshrouded in darkness mean if not to upset our expectations and shift
our paradigm of the holy?
We can’t all have the gilded words of Rilke, walking backward
into the biblical narrative - imagination first - so we can discover what wants
found there. But perhaps what he points at isn’t the poem itself, but the invitation
to come into the room. To let the word become flesh in ways that have nothing
to do with skill level and everything to do with initiating ourselves into
paradox. This is a time for us to hold space for the darkness and get curious
about our relationship to it. This is a time for us to inhabit our human bodies
as, like Mary’s, part of the story of the body of the Holy.
Sometimes Advent asks more questions than it answers. That’s the thing about Advent.
I'm savoring these words and the images they create. Your photo is nicely chosen to celebrate the text because of how it honors the in-breaking of sacred darkness. Thank you Kelli for piquing our desires to enter into Advent, beneath the cloak of unknowing and into the obscure spaces of seeking new hope. It is a luxurious piece!
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