Through Stained Glass GUEST POST--The Thing About Advent

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. …

Forgive me, I’ve forgot
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.