So, here we are at the Fourth Sunday of Advent in the second year of Covid. That’s two ways of marking time. We could also say it’s the 12th month in the two thousandth twenty-first year of the Common Era in the West; or, the five thousandth, seven hundred and eighty second year of time within Judaism. And if we really want to have some fun, we might note that it’s nearly the four and a half billionth Winter Solstice on Mother Earth – give or take 50 billion years. Scientists say that our planet is about 4.5 billion years old; so, for those counting at home, that’s two and a quarter million times around Father Sun in a universe almost 13.8 billion years old. Each of these ways of measuring time are true and hold some value for us. But they only tell us part of the unfolding story of our embodied spirituality.
In the Northern Hemisphere those committed to the inward/outward journey are
now living into what was once known as the stay-at-home season. Like the indigenous people of North America, my Scots Irish kin moved everything indoors at this time of year – animals included – taking a few months to journey inward during the quiet and dark months. Winter has long been recognized as an occasion for resting after the harvest of autumn, listening to our lives after the brilliant bustle of summer, and telling stories in anticipation of a new life cycle come spring. A ditty adapted from the Carmina Gadelica – the Celtic book of sacred/secular wisdom collected from the Scottish Highlands and islands – puts it like this:
Hey the Gift, ho the giver that came to us in the time of winter.
See the hills, see the host on the wing,
See the icy strand of Christ the King.
See the angels in the clouds and the messengers in the snow
Coming with words of friendship for all down below.
The Child of the dawn is born, the Child of the clouds,
The Child of the planets, the Child of the stars, the Child of the rain,
I wonder: what songs of love and justice are prayers for you? How do you express joy and revolutionary love? What songs turn your world upside down and empower you to bring some loving new grace to birth in the darkness? EVERY time I hear Aretha sing, “Respect” I get pumped up! Same when the Boss belts out: “Come on up for the rising, come on up put your hand in mine!” I’m pretty damn partial to U2, Carrie Newcomer, the Beatles, Joni Mitchell, and St. Lou Reed as well.
The discipline – the spiritual practice – of this Fourth Sunday in Advent is to feed
and fortify our commitment to compassion. We call it love when lighting the Advent candle, but it’s not at all sentimental: it’s hard won, gritty, earthy compassion. Standing with another. Carrying another’s water and burdens and lightening their load in solidarity. Mary Oliver found inspiration for her compassion listening to the yellow chat down by the river.
Mary of Nazareth tapped into the song of her Jewish ancestor, Hannah, as inspiration for her own song which she belts out in the Magnificat. I’ve found God’s call to compassion coming from my Celtic kin as they sing, “The Christ Child’s Lullabye.” It’s NOT Aretha or Bruce but it is a love song of commitment of embodied trust and compassion in a gentler mode. So, let’s give it a try:
My love, my treasured one are you; My sweet and lovely son are you
You are my love, my darling new, Unworthy I, of you
Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia
Your mild and gentle eyes proclaim the loving heart with which you came
A tender, helpless tiny babe with boundless gifts of grace
Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia
King of Kings, Most Holy One, God the son, eternal one
You are my God and helpless son, High ruler of mankind
Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia
See the angels in the clouds and the messengers in the snow
Coming with words of friendship for all down below.
The Child of the dawn is born, the Child of the clouds,
The Child of the planets, the Child of the stars, the Child of the rain,
the Child of the dew, the Child of the flames, the Child of the dark,
the Child of all spheres, the Child of the moon,
the Child of the elements, the Child of the sun.
the Child of God: Mind and Mary, the Child of good news,
Bright and cheery.
So, hey to the Gift and ho to the Giver:
That came to us in the heart of winter.
To live in harmony with the seasons is to practice an ecological economics. Robert Costanza, one of this movement’s founders, calls this a trans-disciplinary field integrating psychology, history, anthropology, archaeology, and spirituality with the ways we live in nature and make that living. It is, he says, “a grounded way to design a sustainable future that does not stop with an analysis of the past but applies that analysis to something new and better.” It is the contemporary academy catching up with an ancient way of being that always set winter aside to be a story telling season.
That came to us in the heart of winter.
To live in harmony with the seasons is to practice an ecological economics. Robert Costanza, one of this movement’s founders, calls this a trans-disciplinary field integrating psychology, history, anthropology, archaeology, and spirituality with the ways we live in nature and make that living. It is, he says, “a grounded way to design a sustainable future that does not stop with an analysis of the past but applies that analysis to something new and better.” It is the contemporary academy catching up with an ancient way of being that always set winter aside to be a story telling season.
+ Once upon a time, winter was the organic time to take stock of what had happened in the year past; contemplate what had been revealed, learned, and lost; and share those insights with one another – especially our youth – so that tradition, understanding, and hard-won common sense didn’t fall by the wayside when our outward lives resume.
+ I think it was the public philosopher, Will Durant, who used to say: Animals have instincts to keep them safe; given the way the human brain developed, our instinctual center is small, so we developed stories to pass our legacy on one generation to the next. “Most of us, however, spend too much time with feelings from the last 24 hours and too little time with the stories of the last six thousand years.”
Our pre-scientific Christian elders grasped Durant’s insight millennia before him and, over time, crafted twelve holidays and holy nights to be the container for stories of our distilled human wisdom to be shared with those we loved most dearly. Liturgically, artistically, musically, theologically, kinetically, and emotionally, the feasts and fasts of the Christian year were designed to pass on what’s been gleaned from the careful consideration of one generation to the next. Using a series of descending concentric circles reaching back 6,000 years to the cradle of Western civilization and the earliest experiences of our Jewish cousins in faith, the Christian year offers those with eyes to see and ears to hear a way to construct a life of meaning that is in harmony with creation and at peace with all of God’s beloved. Like Rudy Wiebe wrote:
We show wisdom by trusting people; we handle leadership by serving; we respond to offenders by forgiving; manage money by sharing; deal with our enemies by loving; and challenge violence by suffering…. In the Jesus movement we repent and change our priorities NOT by feeling bad but by thinking differently and making our thoughts flesh everyday.
Part of our commitment to living in harmony with God’s creation is knowing that ours isn’t the only vehicle for sharing sacred wisdom and practical truths, right? First Nations people in North America have been sharing their wisdom traditions for at least 15,000 years on these lands – more than twice as long as our Judeo-Christian heritage has existed. And the evidence from Africa suggests that an ecological economy has been thriving there for 300,000 years. I can’t help but think of Jesus telling his friends: “In my Father’s house there are many mansions.” A variety of ways to pass on God’s truth and a host of tools to mark and celebrate time.
As we honor this deep ecumenism, it becomes clear that almost all spiritual traditions share a con-stellation of stories, songs, rituals, and archetypes linking the cycles of nature with holy/human wisdom: we all speak of light and dark, fire and water, community and solitude, sound and silence in our effort to tell each emerging generation what it means to choose life over death – and why it matters. Christopher Hill puts it like this in his brilliant volume explaining the 12 key Christian cere-monies of the Lord’s Year: Contemporary people in the West think of time as a “straight, horizontal line with a middle point – where we currently stand – called the Present.”
This line is always moving past us like a conveyor belt. On the left is the Past, where present moments constantly flow and immediately cease to exist. On the right is the Future, which is always moving toward the Present but never actually arrives…This view of time is not bad… it can be a useful tool… but it’s not the way we experience time in the deepest parts of ourselves, on the level of our hearts, and it is not the way God experiences or expresses time. Above and below our abstract, one-dimensional timeline is… reality… which for most of human history, people have experienced not as a line but more of a circle or cycle. The cycles of sun, moon, and stars; of the seasons; of a woman’s body; of the life, death, and birth of plants, animals, and human beings. Everything went away, but then in some way everything always came back… and THIS way of engaging time is how the Year of the Lord in Christianity passes on its wisdom. (Holidays and Holy Nights, pp.6-7)
Our Christian cycle of stories, songs, and celebrations are each designed to stand alone but also take us deeper the more they’re repeated. Today we’re asked to consider what it means for the essence of God’s love, Jesus, to be born into human flesh within the darkness. It tells us that God’s love came down from heaven to dwell with and among us in a stable in a backwater town called Bethlehem within the womb of a Palestinian peasant woman.
One of our two night vigils, Christmas Eve, at its best, is a sacrament of feminine spirituality. Like the Triduum of Lent – Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and the Holy Saturday Vigil that moves into Easter Sunday – Christmas Eve is shrouded in darkness and steeped in womanly wisdom which includes waiting, mystery, embodied trust, and a quiet, healthy incubation of the holy within our humanity. As I shared at the start of Advent, masculine culture is all about problem solving, treating waiting and patience as a waste of time. Feminine spirituality, however, knows that nothing healthy comes from haste. “As in pregnancy,” writes Gertud Mueller-Nelson, “nothing of value comes with- out a period of quiet incubation:”
Not a health 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 become – and they are the symbolic states of being which belong in a life of value – absolutely essential for human transformation. (To Dance with God)
It is no accident, therefore, that both vigils feature women as spiritual mentors who can lead us through the darkness into the light on a journey of new birth. Miriam of Nazareth is at the center of the Christmas story and Mary of Magdala resides at the heart of Lent. At Christmas, the flesh and blood of Mary, blessed Virgin of tradition and sacred Theotokos – Mother of God – by the spirit, speaks to us about treasuring matter – celebrating the earthly and feminine in their rightful place – as equal in value “to the godly and spiritual.” Dr. Mueller-Nelson says: “It is our lack of belief in the equal value of our earthly matter that misleads us into making false gods and idols. The aberration of materialism which so contaminates our current celebration of this season is just one example of our confusion.” She adds:
For the Lord, matter was NOT too humble. Woman was fully worthy to
bear God’s child. Straw and animals, peasant-shepherds and the smells of the barnyard, all that the world deems inferior and worthless was the setting for God’s self-disclosure amongst us… which holy scriptures frames saying: the very stone which the builders rejected has become our cornerstone…” The great mystery of faith involves our embrace of seeming opposites – the marriage of heaven and earth – the dance of the holy with everything that is utterly natural: a virgin shall be with child, the blind shall see, the dear hear, the lame leap, the dumb sing as the wolf becomes the guest of the lamb, the calf and young lion browsing fields together and a baby becoming our leader.
So, like our ancestors in faith, as winter arrives, we tell one another again how God came to a young woman, Miriam, empowering her to trust the Holy Spirit within herself in such a way that her flesh gave shape and form to the sacred. This embodied trust in a young woman was made equal in value to all the ideas, words, dogmas, and abstractions about the Spirit that our masculine tradition loves to emphasize. With over half a century of marking time in the Christian Year, I’ve come to believe that the reason why God keeps calling us back to this story at this time of year has something to do with how quickly we forget it in our busyness.
Personally, and throughout Christian history, there have been extended and brutal seasons when the feminine mysteries have been ignored, erased, denigrated, and denied. The revolutionary grace Mary incarnates disturbs power – and it’s no coincidence that those most unsettled by Mary are men wielding power. Fr. Richard Rohr cut to the chase when he said: in Mary’s Magnificat this young woman of God tells us a truth we’ve neglected for at least fifteen hundred years:
Her song proclaims that it is the people on the bottom of the system — any system — who are usually much more ready to hear the word of God. Longing and thirsting for righteousness, they are more ready to stop protecting the status quo. Therefore, they're much more ready for conve-rsion because they have a head start, a symbolic if not real advantage. When Jesus matures and says: 'I've come to preach the gospel to the poor' it is linked to Mary’s wisdom and nurture. And what we must finally own after fifteen hundred years in the Western church of trying to preach the gospel primarily to kings, princes, the rich and powerful, is that this message always seems to get prostituted. It liberates nobody: the powerful remain in their illusions and preoccupations with security while the poor remain victimized and often bitter.
Rohr then adds in much the manner of our ecological economists that 21st century people of faith are finally making an important discovery. When you preach to the prisoners, to the financially poor, the handicapped and those who are not the beneficiaries of the system:
You get a much purer response to the gospel. It is not as likely to be used and abused for the purposes of control and power. I think that's why we're only now coming to deal with Jesus' words about war and poverty. If we continue to preach the gospel to the people on top, it will be used by them to support their system and worldview and they will never get around to dealing with the radical questions Mary sings about in the Magnificat.
More than ever before I believe the Holy Spirit has been working through the blind spots, bias, and patriarchy of our tradition’s wisdom keepers so that every winter we’re called back to the basics of feminine spirituality as Mary sings to us of the upside-down realm of God’s grace. Structurally and poetically, that’s what chapter one of St. Luke’s gospel is all about. It opens with a high priest from ancient Israel, Zechariah – father of John the Baptist – being struck dumb while Mary, the peasant woman from Nazareth, breaks forth in song. This contrast between Mary and Zechariah is stark – and intentional. One Bible scholar wrote: “Zechariah has heard the word of the angel and not believed it. He wants proof. He wants to know because unfaith always wants to know. To be in control. But the angel of God is not about knowing.” Trust comes in the story when Mary hears and responds as our role model. This winter story shows us two people:
One is a priest of the highest order in Israel who does not believe. The other is a common peasant woman – and she does! She is all that Zechariah is not… Mary believes the words of the promise. The angel Gabriel scolds Zechariah because he did not believe the words of promise. Zechariah is struck dumb while Mary sings: "Here am I," she says, "the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word." Faith has everything to do with hearing the promised word of God and trusting that word (with our whole embodied selves.) That's the simple yet profound message of entering the dark womb of Christmas. Not to condemn Zechariah, mind you, because we’re all too much like him. But rather to know that there is another way – Mary’s way – the way of song, love, and embodied trust. (CrossMarks, Brian Stoffregen)
And the poetry of Mary Oliver, I think, helps us hold these contrasting stories
together so that we, too might opt for the embodied trust of Mary over the quest for control that haunts Zechariah. Oliver has a sweet gift for synthesizing spiritual truth into clearly stated poems that evoke count-less ordinary epiphanies. She tells us in, “To Begin with: the Sweet Grass,” to simply behold. Behold what God has already shown us in creation. Behold. Watch. Listen. Wait. Taste and see the love of God already becoming flesh within and around you.
Will the hungry ox stand in the field and not eat of the sweet grass?
Will the owl bite off its own wings?
Will the lark forget to lift its body in the air or forget to sing?
Part of our commitment to living in harmony with God’s creation is knowing that ours isn’t the only vehicle for sharing sacred wisdom and practical truths, right? First Nations people in North America have been sharing their wisdom traditions for at least 15,000 years on these lands – more than twice as long as our Judeo-Christian heritage has existed. And the evidence from Africa suggests that an ecological economy has been thriving there for 300,000 years. I can’t help but think of Jesus telling his friends: “In my Father’s house there are many mansions.” A variety of ways to pass on God’s truth and a host of tools to mark and celebrate time.
As we honor this deep ecumenism, it becomes clear that almost all spiritual traditions share a con-stellation of stories, songs, rituals, and archetypes linking the cycles of nature with holy/human wisdom: we all speak of light and dark, fire and water, community and solitude, sound and silence in our effort to tell each emerging generation what it means to choose life over death – and why it matters. Christopher Hill puts it like this in his brilliant volume explaining the 12 key Christian cere-monies of the Lord’s Year: Contemporary people in the West think of time as a “straight, horizontal line with a middle point – where we currently stand – called the Present.”
Our Christian cycle of stories, songs, and celebrations are each designed to stand alone but also take us deeper the more they’re repeated. Today we’re asked to consider what it means for the essence of God’s love, Jesus, to be born into human flesh within the darkness. It tells us that God’s love came down from heaven to dwell with and among us in a stable in a backwater town called Bethlehem within the womb of a Palestinian peasant woman.
Not a health 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 become – and they are the symbolic states of being which belong in a life of value – absolutely essential for human transformation. (To Dance with God)
It is no accident, therefore, that both vigils feature women as spiritual mentors who can lead us through the darkness into the light on a journey of new birth. Miriam of Nazareth is at the center of the Christmas story and Mary of Magdala resides at the heart of Lent. At Christmas, the flesh and blood of Mary, blessed Virgin of tradition and sacred Theotokos – Mother of God – by the spirit, speaks to us about treasuring matter – celebrating the earthly and feminine in their rightful place – as equal in value “to the godly and spiritual.” Dr. Mueller-Nelson says: “It is our lack of belief in the equal value of our earthly matter that misleads us into making false gods and idols. The aberration of materialism which so contaminates our current celebration of this season is just one example of our confusion.” She adds:
bear God’s child. Straw and animals, peasant-shepherds and the smells of the barnyard, all that the world deems inferior and worthless was the setting for God’s self-disclosure amongst us… which holy scriptures frames saying: the very stone which the builders rejected has become our cornerstone…” The great mystery of faith involves our embrace of seeming opposites – the marriage of heaven and earth – the dance of the holy with everything that is utterly natural: a virgin shall be with child, the blind shall see, the dear hear, the lame leap, the dumb sing as the wolf becomes the guest of the lamb, the calf and young lion browsing fields together and a baby becoming our leader.
So, like our ancestors in faith, as winter arrives, we tell one another again how God came to a young woman, Miriam, empowering her to trust the Holy Spirit within herself in such a way that her flesh gave shape and form to the sacred. This embodied trust in a young woman was made equal in value to all the ideas, words, dogmas, and abstractions about the Spirit that our masculine tradition loves to emphasize. With over half a century of marking time in the Christian Year, I’ve come to believe that the reason why God keeps calling us back to this story at this time of year has something to do with how quickly we forget it in our busyness.
Personally, and throughout Christian history, there have been extended and brutal seasons when the feminine mysteries have been ignored, erased, denigrated, and denied. The revolutionary grace Mary incarnates disturbs power – and it’s no coincidence that those most unsettled by Mary are men wielding power. Fr. Richard Rohr cut to the chase when he said: in Mary’s Magnificat this young woman of God tells us a truth we’ve neglected for at least fifteen hundred years:
Her song proclaims that it is the people on the bottom of the system — any system — who are usually much more ready to hear the word of God. Longing and thirsting for righteousness, they are more ready to stop protecting the status quo. Therefore, they're much more ready for conve-rsion because they have a head start, a symbolic if not real advantage. When Jesus matures and says: 'I've come to preach the gospel to the poor' it is linked to Mary’s wisdom and nurture. And what we must finally own after fifteen hundred years in the Western church of trying to preach the gospel primarily to kings, princes, the rich and powerful, is that this message always seems to get prostituted. It liberates nobody: the powerful remain in their illusions and preoccupations with security while the poor remain victimized and often bitter.
You get a much purer response to the gospel. It is not as likely to be used and abused for the purposes of control and power. I think that's why we're only now coming to deal with Jesus' words about war and poverty. If we continue to preach the gospel to the people on top, it will be used by them to support their system and worldview and they will never get around to dealing with the radical questions Mary sings about in the Magnificat.
More than ever before I believe the Holy Spirit has been working through the blind spots, bias, and patriarchy of our tradition’s wisdom keepers so that every winter we’re called back to the basics of feminine spirituality as Mary sings to us of the upside-down realm of God’s grace. Structurally and poetically, that’s what chapter one of St. Luke’s gospel is all about. It opens with a high priest from ancient Israel, Zechariah – father of John the Baptist – being struck dumb while Mary, the peasant woman from Nazareth, breaks forth in song. This contrast between Mary and Zechariah is stark – and intentional. One Bible scholar wrote: “Zechariah has heard the word of the angel and not believed it. He wants proof. He wants to know because unfaith always wants to know. To be in control. But the angel of God is not about knowing.” Trust comes in the story when Mary hears and responds as our role model. This winter story shows us two people:
And the poetry of Mary Oliver, I think, helps us hold these contrasting stories
together so that we, too might opt for the embodied trust of Mary over the quest for control that haunts Zechariah. Oliver has a sweet gift for synthesizing spiritual truth into clearly stated poems that evoke count-less ordinary epiphanies. She tells us in, “To Begin with: the Sweet Grass,” to simply behold. Behold what God has already shown us in creation. Behold. Watch. Listen. Wait. Taste and see the love of God already becoming flesh within and around you.
Will the hungry ox stand in the field and not eat of the sweet grass?
Will the owl bite off its own wings?
Will the lark forget to lift its body in the air or forget to sing?
Will the rivers run upstream?
Behold, I say—behold the reliability and the finery
Behold, I say—behold the reliability and the finery
and the teachings of this gritty earth gift.
Oliver is a wisdom-keeper of feminine spirituality par excellence. She doesn’t give us complicated texts to wrestle with nor impenetrable prose to ponder: just stop and look at what has now been created for you – take in the beauty of this gritty earthy gift – and the holy will become visible.
Eat bread and understand comfort. Drink water,
Oliver is a wisdom-keeper of feminine spirituality par excellence. She doesn’t give us complicated texts to wrestle with nor impenetrable prose to ponder: just stop and look at what has now been created for you – take in the beauty of this gritty earthy gift – and the holy will become visible.
Eat bread and understand comfort. Drink water,
and understand delight.
Visit the garden where the scarlet trumpets
Visit the garden where the scarlet trumpets
are opening their bodies for the hummingbirds
who are drinking the sweetness, who are thrillingly gluttonous.
For one thing leads to another. Behold and soon you will notice how stones shine underfoot.
Eventually tides will be the only calendar you believe in…
And someone’s face, whom you love,
who are drinking the sweetness, who are thrillingly gluttonous.
For one thing leads to another. Behold and soon you will notice how stones shine underfoot.
Eventually tides will be the only calendar you believe in…
And someone’s face, whom you love,
will be as a star both intimate and ultimate,
and you will be both heart-shaken and respectful.
And you will hear the air itself, like a beloved, whisper:
oh, let me, for a while longer, enter the two beautiful bodies of your lungs.
Oliver trusts embodied faith – the mystical marriage of heaven and earth – and gives her heart, mind, body, and soul to the grace of living in radical trust. Like Miriam of Nazareth, Mary Oliver has become a singer of revolutionary love. “Surrounded by the all too real shadows of fear, hatred, and contempt” both women consciously choose the path of prophetic poetry to show how love can lead us through the darkness into the light. Mary of Nazareth sings:
My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for I know that God’s mercy is for those who fear God – that is, those who are in awe of the Lord – from generation to generation. God has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts, brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly; God has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich empty away.
Mary of Provincetown sings this in her own way:
Let me ask you this. Do you also think that beauty exists for some fabulous reason?
and you will be both heart-shaken and respectful.
And you will hear the air itself, like a beloved, whisper:
oh, let me, for a while longer, enter the two beautiful bodies of your lungs.
Oliver trusts embodied faith – the mystical marriage of heaven and earth – and gives her heart, mind, body, and soul to the grace of living in radical trust. Like Miriam of Nazareth, Mary Oliver has become a singer of revolutionary love. “Surrounded by the all too real shadows of fear, hatred, and contempt” both women consciously choose the path of prophetic poetry to show how love can lead us through the darkness into the light. Mary of Nazareth sings:
Mary of Provincetown sings this in her own way:
Let me ask you this. Do you also think that beauty exists for some fabulous reason?
And, if you have not been enchanted by this adventure— your life—what would do for you? What I loved in the beginning, I think, was mostly myself. Never mind that I had to, since somebody had to.
That was many years ago. Since then I have gone out
from my confinements, though with difficulty.
I mean the ones that thought to rule my heart.
I cast them out, I put them on the mush pile.
They will be nourishment somehow (everything is nourishment somehow or another). And I have become the child of the clouds, and of hope.
I have become the friend of the enemy, whoever that is.
I have become older and, cherishing what I have learned,
I have become younger. And what do I risk to tell you this,
which is all I know? Love yourself. Then forget it. Then, love the world.
This is the Serenity Prayer in poetry! Mary’s Magnificat for the 21st century. Bold, revolutionary feminine love is calling us all into an awareness of God’s grace expressed in real time: “Love yourself – then forget it – and love the world!” PERFECT! Mary Oliver gives another gift on this fourth Sunday of Advent in anticipation of the birth of Christ: it’s the tender reminder that songs can be another form of embodied prayer. Mary of Nazareth knew this but somehow our harried culture tends to forget it. So, Oliver pleads with us to reclaim song as communion with the holy.
I wish I were the yellow chat down in the thickets who sings all night,
Throwing into the air praises and pandhandles, plains in curly phrases,
half-rhymes, free verse too, with head-dipping and wing-wringing,
with soft breast rising into the air – meek and sleek, broadcasting,
with no time out for pillow-rest, everything: pathos – thanks-
Oh, Lord, what a lesson you send me as I stand listening
to your rattling, swamp-loving chat singing of his simple, leafy life-
how I would like to sing to you all night in the dark just like that.
This is the Serenity Prayer in poetry! Mary’s Magnificat for the 21st century. Bold, revolutionary feminine love is calling us all into an awareness of God’s grace expressed in real time: “Love yourself – then forget it – and love the world!” PERFECT! Mary Oliver gives another gift on this fourth Sunday of Advent in anticipation of the birth of Christ: it’s the tender reminder that songs can be another form of embodied prayer. Mary of Nazareth knew this but somehow our harried culture tends to forget it. So, Oliver pleads with us to reclaim song as communion with the holy.
I wish I were the yellow chat down in the thickets who sings all night,
Throwing into the air praises and pandhandles, plains in curly phrases,
half-rhymes, free verse too, with head-dipping and wing-wringing,
with soft breast rising into the air – meek and sleek, broadcasting,
with no time out for pillow-rest, everything: pathos – thanks-
Oh, Lord, what a lesson you send me as I stand listening
to your rattling, swamp-loving chat singing of his simple, leafy life-
how I would like to sing to you all night in the dark just like that.
The discipline – the spiritual practice – of this Fourth Sunday in Advent is to feed
and fortify our commitment to compassion. We call it love when lighting the Advent candle, but it’s not at all sentimental: it’s hard won, gritty, earthy compassion. Standing with another. Carrying another’s water and burdens and lightening their load in solidarity. Mary Oliver found inspiration for her compassion listening to the yellow chat down by the river.
Mary of Nazareth tapped into the song of her Jewish ancestor, Hannah, as inspiration for her own song which she belts out in the Magnificat. I’ve found God’s call to compassion coming from my Celtic kin as they sing, “The Christ Child’s Lullabye.” It’s NOT Aretha or Bruce but it is a love song of commitment of embodied trust and compassion in a gentler mode. So, let’s give it a try:
My love, my treasured one are you; My sweet and lovely son are you
You are my love, my darling new, Unworthy I, of you
Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia
Your mild and gentle eyes proclaim the loving heart with which you came
A tender, helpless tiny babe with boundless gifts of grace
Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia
King of Kings, Most Holy One, God the son, eternal one
You are my God and helpless son, High ruler of mankind
Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia
NOTE: Here's a FB link to the livestreaming
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