pondering all these things in my heart...

This has been a sobering Advent: without travel or engagements, there has been time to let feelings, memories, habits good and bad, and insights bubble up from deep within. It has been shaped by a time much like the spirituality of the Virgin Mary who Scripture says, "held all these things and pondered them in her heart." (Luke 2: 19) Call it a contemplative season - and I have long turned to Gertrud Mueller-Nelson's wisdom about Advent as an encounter with feminine spirituality in these words from To Dance with God:

The season of Advent invites us to underscore and understand with a new patience the very feminine state of being: waiting. Our masculine world wants to blast away waiting from our lives. Instant gratification has become our constitutional right and delay an aberration. We equate waiting with wasting. So we build Concorde airplanes, drink instant coffee, roll out green plastic and call it turf, and reach for the phone before we reach for the pen. The more life asks us to wait, the more we anxiously hurry. The tempo of haste in which we live has less to do with being on time or the efficiency of a busy life - it has more to do with our being unable to wait. But waiting is unpractical time, good for nothing, but mysteriously necessary to all that is becoming. As in pregnancy, nothing of value comes into being without a period of quiet incubation: not a healthy baby, not a loving relationship, not a reconciliation, a new
understanding, a work of art, never a transformation. Rather, a shortened period of incubation brings forth what is not whole or strong or even alive. Brewing, baking, simmering, fermenting, ripening, germinating, gestating are the feminine processes of becoming and they are the symbolic states of being which belong in a live of value, necessary to transformation. (p. 62)

One of the ways I have come to discern the still, small voice of the sacred that calls to us from out of the barking cacophony of culture involves symmetry. Or synchronicity. It is never coincidence, but rather "the simultaneous occurrence of events which appear significantly related but have no discernible causal connection." (Oxford On-line Dictionary) So when I find that all the writings of Richard Rohr, Thomas Keating, Jean Vanier, Henri Nouwen, and Cynthia Bourgeault this month have been about the linkage between humility and humiliation... I start to pay attention. Consciously - and otherwise - I have been giving space in my Advent quiet time - and dreams - to ways I have  wounded, disappointed, betrayed, denied, and ignored those I cherish. Not as an act of self-pity or the inverted grandiosity of victimhood. Rather, as an invitation into God's grace. God's guidance. God's mercy and cleansing. Talk about humiliation! Looking backwards over 50+ years reveals a lot. As Richard Rohr wrote this in his recent series on the spirituality of the 12 Steps of AA:

Step Eight: Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all. Step Nine: Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others. Making a list of the persons we have harmed is a reversal of what our ego prefers to do—make lists of what others have done to us. We are only able to do this because of the housecleaning we’ve done in the previous steps. When we’ve experienced higher states of love and transformation, we must go back and rectify earlier wrongs in appropriate ways to support the healing of those we have hurt. God forgives us, but the consequences of our mistakes remain. We must repair what has been broken, or we stay stuck in a wounded world.

Last night I awoke to a series of laments. And as much as I despise being awakened from a sound sleep by anyone - God included - this 3:00 AM visitation was insistent. Demanding. Clarifying. As I paid attention, a series of memories washed through me, pulling into awareness some of the disappointments, shame, anguish, and confusion I have caused in my past. It was a wildly embodied meditation that exposed to me some of the consequences of my sins. It made clear some of the amends still to be realized. And, after a time I can't really quantify, when there was no room for ambiguity or excuses in my heart, there came a quiet sense of release. Call it an absolution awakened in humiliation. This is not wallowing in the mire, mind you, just owning reality on the road to acceptance and serenity. God never leads us into experiences of self-abasement. No, the sorrow plants seeds of gratitude that can grow into a shared compassion. That was the other gift that arrived in the middle of the night: an awareness of some of the ways I have learned from my wounds to pursue a path of tenderness. Feeling myself relax and drift back towards sleep, I couldn't help but give thanks for such a liberating irony.

In their book, The Spirituality of Imperfection, Ernest Kurtz and Katherine Ketcham put it like this: "Humility... begins with the rejection of the demand to be 'all-or-nothing." Human be-ing - existing and carrying out our lives in the middle - is to be neither all or nothing." We are always a combination of light and darkness, trust and fear, compassion and selfishness. Paradoxically, we mature into humility only by owning the hurt and cruelty we have caused .

Humility involves learning how to live with (and even rejoice in) that reality, the reality of our mixed-up-ed-ness, our being both saint and sinner, both beast and angel... When we come face to face with the reality of our own imperfection, which IS the reality of our very being, we can either laugh or cry; comedy and tragedy, as the masks we see in theaters suggest, intertwine. At certain moments in our lives, it seems that the most fundamental choice each of us has is between fighting ourselves and laughing at ourselves... When confronting our own incongruities, humor is usually the healthier choice, as the wisdom of word origins hints. For the words human, humor and humility all have the same root - the ancient Indo-European ghom, best translated by the English humus.... which the dictionary describes as a brown or black substance resulting from the partial decay of plant and animal matter.' 

Holding these things - the shame, the hurt, the wisdom, the humility, humor and humiliation - in my heart like Mary requires time. Waiting. That is what this Advent has become: moving slowly and quietly so that what is deep might bubble up and simmer into a deeper grace. Nouwen put it like this in the book I am reading for Advent: "Jesus leads us away from all our useless wandering as well" as the lethargy of self-pity. It takes time - and a willingness to let time infused with grace work on us in the darkness - but then "your light shall break forth like the morning, your healing shall spring forth speedily, and your compassion shall go before you." (Isiah 58:8) When circumstances beyond my control, mostly illness and other family demands, turned this year's Advent into a season of slowness, I had no idea that the feminine "processes of becoming" would be at work within, "brewing, baking, simmering, fermenting, ripening, germinating, and gestating" my way towards transformation. And so the journey to Bethlehem continues...

credits:
+ https://www.holycross.org/blogs/sermons-homilies/a-sermon-for-the-feast-of-the-protection-of-the-theotokos-2018
+ https://www.pinterest.com/pin/806074033279510708/
+ https://aleteia.org/2016/02/06/lesson-in-humility
+ https://www.pinterest.com/pin/397653842080615506/?lp=true