Advent

The first candle symbolizes the light of the hope of the prophets.

Advent is finally here, and I know this year will be significant but not yet in what way.  As I contemplate another foray into hope I name the longings of my heart alongside my fear of disappointment. 

I’ve got big and beautiful plans that need to start in small and subtle ways.  I’m content with waiting for the momentum to build.  Or so I think.

I’m unafraid of evil.  But naïve to my terror of good.

We go to get our Christmas tree earlier this year than any other year.  We decorated the house before Thanksgiving, realizing too late that all the contents of our boxes were filled with savage memories.  I could not deck the halls with this. 

We put most things away, shifted others, and bought (for the first time) decorations that reflected our place in life.  The kids chose items and after the new was raised in place of the old I noticed that it was white instead of red.  Isaiah 1:18 becomes more playful than admonitory.

The outline of the mountains takes my breath away, as ever.  We witness it for half a mile before turning to the farm where we will find our tree.  Winter is so beautiful here.  I love that I live in a place where the harshest, darkest season of the year will stun you with awe.  The advent is palpable.  When will it snow, where will it spring?

The tree we find is noble and the deepest hue of green.  We drive away into darkness and I feel droplets falling hot on my hand and cold strands on my cheeks.  I will weep this advent season.  I have decided to welcome it.  There is nothing lukewarm in my world.  This is our second Christmas here following the three hardest years of our lives.  The inkling of hope returns and I feel the haunt of peace creep onto my shoulders.  Despite my best intentions not to be fooled by goodness again, it permeates the stress and I am defenseless.  To conceive by the Holy Spirit demands an awareness that is terrible to beheld.

            full of grace,

What I long for more than ever this advent is incarnation.  Would that my mind and spirit would inhabit my body.  So far hope has only signified the awareness of the disconnect.  The powerlessness of my desire feels more reality than falsehood and I’m tired of waiting for my own arrival.

What faith does it take for word to become flesh and spirit to enter body?  This candle will burn out before the others are lit.

            pray for us sinners,

Sometimes I think I’ve given up.  Trinkets and remnants of broken company I kept in my closet as tokens of hope were removed.  Several necklaces, a blanket, books, and dishes.  Carefully I place them in a box to give away.  Loss upon loss.  Foolish enough to think I could sanctify talismans of rejection.

Advent has to surprise me.

            Hail Mary,

Friend, knowing and unaware, made a rosary and hands it to me next day.  “I know what it is to know God and not prayer.  May this be your road out of the wilderness.” 

So I climb beads searching for home.  Surprised that letting go of hope brought recompense.

            Jesus.

I decide to learn the joyful mysteries first.  I think I’ll be here awhile.  The series of Our Father’s and Hail Mary’s have given my orphaned soul, parents; my exiled heart, companions.

            Holy Mary, Mother of God.

We bring the tree home and set it up with only lights.  They dim and fade in cadence with the newfangled gadget husband found.  Could there be more magic?

            Blessed art thou among women,

The four children snuggle close.  We decide it is time.  There is a song on an album reserved for Christmas eve, but the moment is now.

            and blessed is the fruit of thy womb,

The familiar and sacred carol fills the room.  Yet I am startled.  The lyrics are that of the only prayer I have offered in a year over the past weeks.  It is the Ave where I am learning to walk the lonely journey both as mother and child.

Our Lord is with thee.

I close my eyes and the twinkling form of the tree seals itself for a moment inside the dark of my lids.  The sound of only voices crescendo in the melody that I have yet to determine is the manifestation of a sunrise or set; were we to hear instead of see.

            now and at the hour of our death.

My baby squirms in my lap.  Hot and cold mingle together on my face again and I look to her standing, eyes level.  The chorus has mounted to utter the last word and I surrender to its ascent.  Littlest sees me with knowing and leans in.  She waits.  Kissing my lips on the final Amen.

Who knew resurrection would begin with the caress of tears?

Hail Mary, full of grace.  Our Lord is with thee.  Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.  Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.  Amen.

Fly

“You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.”

-Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

My son is a prophet.

The stories and emotions other women share about being a first time mother, were, honestly, something I have never felt access too.  When I was 19, I got married.  And having being taught that the use of birth control was a sin and that time alone with your spouse in early marriage only served to develop selfishness, my equally young husband and I, with not yet fully developed frontal lobes, trusted the words of church elders and betters and arrived back from our honeymoon with a baby on the way.

There is both blessing and grief.  I know he is the son of my naiveté and youth, and that he is the strength of my life.  I know this choice of mine began to make a road in the wilderness out of the bondage of legalism.  Yet, I still mourn for his loss as well as mine.  So tiny and small, my body bled from outside in and I will bear the countless scars of carrying him until I die.  The loss of a naked beauty I will never know, with a change in life that came too quickly.   And he, the first baby of a baby, did not receive space for his own emotion: sleep trained, stay on the blanket, be quiet, two-hour long church services, and expectations of spanking.  Voiceless both, we have suffered, alone.

When I was pregnant, I attended a party intended for peers, but as the only one wed and with child did not know how to fit.  I covered myself with self deprecating humor; surviving a game of leapfrog by bemoaning my nascent form.  I attempted to claim advantage in play for effort.  The next day, at church, this hostess took me aside to correct my attempts with phrases like, “flaunting your pregnancy”, “demanding attention”, and “have no thought for the emotions of others.”  Granted, the community had experienced a stillbirth months prior (and I then with a small bump had already struggled with how to hold a child, and another’s grief), but apparently I was also responsible for a twelve year old who, “had awoken crying from a dream that she was not yet married and having a baby.”  Thus I was “insensitive to what I had that others wanted.”  My uncontrolled pregnancy apparently implied control over much I was unaware was mine to bear. 

I went home.

And sobbed for hours.  Husband held me as best he could.

Something inside me broke.  Is still broken.

I don’t blame.  I used to, but trauma has been passed on and on and on, everywhere.  I can only own what parts are mine and leave others who don’t, to be.

But I did lose.  Evil won, and using the consistency of the reproof prescribed by ‘God-given’ authorities in my life it didn’t miss the opportunity to impart.

To my young mind that was constantly told I never knew better than older women or elder men, this is what I learned:  I was wrong to delight in myself or child.  I was not worth being delighted in.  I was not worthy of being rejoiced with.  I was wrong to speak of my body.  I was shamed for having its form. I was responsible for the emotions of others.  I was to blame for their triggers.  I was a lost cause who couldn’t see the effect of her presence in a room.  I was too much on the outside and not enough on the inside.

I wanted the grief to swallow me whole that day and the next and the next and the next; I felt like it would.  I couldn’t carry the weight of my own existence, much less the creation of another life.

It’s no wonder to me that I labored a week for him with sleepless nights of contractions that made my stretch marks bleed climaxing in 90 minutes of transition then transported to a hospital with tearing that needed so many stitches they stopped being counted.

That’s a brief accounting of the story of my first baby.  He’s now seven, going on eight.  The number that signifies endings giving way to the number of new beginnings.  He trails our anniversary year by nine months.  It has been a time of great and heartbreaking endings, but I’ve still been waiting for the new to begin.

Tonight.  My first baby is reading: Babe.  He has space and voice now, like his momma.  He has grief and anger now, like his momma.  It’s hard to give space, to see the heart of someone in the moments of frustration or glum—to see it without eating it, to just be present.  Sometimes I say no, sometimes I don’t, sometimes he responds, and sometimes he doesn’t.  I accept.  He doesn’t smile a whole lot, but then again, neither do I.  Life has been hard, and that’s okay for our faces to show.

He’s now outside the inside of my body.  His outside is a wonder my insides were not allowed to enjoy.  I still wrestle to heal that broken heart of a young girl who has to fight for the right to delight in her son.  I still do not understand this part of my story.

But tonight, the boy comes over with his story and climbs into my lap.  Brave enough to take space to ‘interrupt’ my conversation.  We both know this is important.

“Do you know what I’m reading?’ He asks.

“Yeah.  Babe.” I reply

“It’s so funny.  He’s just told everyone he’s a sheep-pig.”

“That is funny.  And brave, don’t you think?”  I add.

He nods.

“What do you think about how it feels to be something that it looks like you’re not, especially when other people say what you are?”  The question spills out of me and I realize I do not know the answer.

“People are like one thing on the outside and everything on the inside.”  He replies after a moment.  I’m in awe.

He continues on, referring to my favorite animal as knowing part of my insides, and we laugh at the revelation as he shares he has discovered his.

When at last he arrives at what he intended to tell me—I am caught, again, off guard.

“You’re like Fly.”

I don’t know what to say and we sit together in the sacred quiet.  In the story of Babe, Babe is a pig and Fly is sheep-dog.  It is she who first sees and believes in Babe’s abilities and dreams to become a sheep herding pig (a sheep-pig).  She fights for his place to become who he was made to be.  Even though the farmer has sold all her puppies, she takes Babe under her care and lets him call her mom.  Fly knows who she is, and sees past the politics of the farm animals, the jealousy of her own kind, and the unbelief of the master; enduring, believing, and delighting in Babe’s dream.

“Do you feel like I believe in your insides and not what your outsides say?” I offer with caution to this boy of mine that rarely smiles.

“Yeah.”

Then, just like that he hops down to finish the chapter.  And just like that, we both have new names that we love from this boy who sees the inside.  And just like that a piece of the broken place that made us both something we were not, from the space we took up together outside, is restored within.  There’s more to his story and mine, now, to write. 

And, just for this moment, the weight of grief lifts enough that my oh-so-weary, girl-of-a-momma’s heart feels like it could, well…

FLY

“But they that wait…”

Isaiah 40:31

Part One

Here is the beginning of a very short fiction piece.  I've been wanting to try some different writing styles in search of my favorite way to share story.  This was a fun exercise and though I have yet to write Parts Two and Three, I have enjoyed the perspective of waiting and receiving what the end of this adventure will be as it intersects with my real life.

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He laughed in his hurry.  Despite a pounding heart and anxious sweat, the thought struck him.  Pleasure he denied of himself crept in, and he stopped to catch his breath.  Leaning against the wall in the moonlight, the small town silent, he wondered if…  He knew.  God, he thought, no doubt—no, he felt—how else to explain the wonder of this moment?  It wasn’t like something he now realized.  It was.  He, a religious leader, was scurrying the streets to meet the substance of dreams.  He covered his mouth with his robe to muffle the sound and presently the mirth intertwined with tears upon his face.  A gentle breeze traveled the alley and carried his mind away.

He remembered the longings, as a boy.   The parts of himself that would devour his whole being with fire and ache; nowhere to go, with no one to confide in he would battle his soul and drown from the inside.  He did not understand.  Bound for service from a young age and surrounded by bearded men, their lifeless faces embodied wisdom, he was told.  So what did he do with desire?  Slowly, observing somber and repetition, he took the fiery life within and learned to sacrifice.  His mind a continuous altar building and burning thoughts, dreams, wants, and hopes.  He learned to consume the longing to be surrounded, to be satisfied, to be pursued, with the weight of holiness, honor, and duty: the path to righteousness.  He grew.

They were pleased.

The force of his youth buried and laid to rest within his heart.  He hoped someone had received from his offering, but never felt anything.

And now here it was.  In pursuit, flooded again by a long dormant memory.  The whisper of fullness and its insatiable power was driving him to risk everything he had laid down his life for.  It was almost blasphemous, but he didn’t know what to believe, because everything…  Everything.  Everything was changing.

He had stopped too long to think.  Quickening his step, he was just a few short minutes away from the house where they would meet on the roof.  A midnight tryst, the thought that had stopped him before now even his beard couldn’t hide the grin that spread across his wrinkled face.  How defiant a description!  It contradicted law in humor and truth.  Shaking his head, he forgot himself and broke into a run.