Lectionary readings: Hebrews 10.5-10 and Luke 1.39-55
Christmas is the Season of the
Incarnation. The season of learning how to inhabit a body. The season of coming
home to your body.
Perhaps you are uncomfortable at the
prospect. Perhaps you feel that your body is too tall, too fat, too frail, too plain,
too awkwardly clumsy to be loved. At puberty, our bodies can run ahead of us,
demanding that we expand, to lofty elevation or ample bosom, before our peers,
leaving us exposed to cruel name-calling. Whoever said ‘sticks and stones may
break my bones, but names will never hurt me’ was deluded or misguided at best.
And in old age, our bodies demure to do the things we have been so long used to
doing together, call on us to downsize our lives – but how can you downsize,
when your body has accumulated so much baggage over the years?
This Sunday, Advent 4, the Church
reflects on the visit of Mary, in her first trimester, to Elizabeth, in her
third trimester. When their bodies were experiencing changes and where two new
bodies are first formed.
In their world, children were seen as
the fruit of the womb, a woman’s fruitfulness in life determined by her ability
to bear sons and daughters. Elizabeth is barren, ground from which no tree has
sprung. And this is a source of great shame, the belief that you are not worthy
of love, not worthy of connection. That awareness (distorted, but no less real
for that) that you are not enough, not good enough. ‘Poor Elizabeth,’ her
fruitful neighbours say, ‘She has always followed God’s laws so diligently and
yet he does not reward her’ (have they forgotten how many childless women have
played such key parts in their people’s past?) and their condescending pity
adds to the slick of shame.
When Elizabeth realises that she is
pregnant, she keeps it a secret for five long months. The only people in her
community who possibly understand her existence are other barren women, and she
cannot risk losing them also, to envy. Not to mention the very real risk of
miscarriage. And so, for five months, Elizabeth is hyper-vigilant, not to let
slip her condition. Do nothing out of the ordinary.
For five months, she is utterly alone
in the world. Unable to converse with anyone (even her husband has lost his
voice). This is enforced solitude, even in the midst of everyday life. Perhaps
the solitude is not much different from how she felt before, alone among the
other women drawing water from the village well. But the need for
hyper-vigilance is new.
First trimester: hiding morning
sickness, back ache, stomach cramps. Second trimester: don’t respond to the joy
of feeling that first flutter of your unborn child moving within; don’t respond
to the discomfort when, bigger, stronger, they kick against the womb. No one
can know.
As Elizabeth reaches the third
trimester, as it becomes too hard to keep her changing body hidden, news of her
pregnancy breaks. Now, at last, she can breathe. Now, at last, the community
holds space for her, to focus on her coming child, and once she has delivered
her son, to bond with him. Now someone else will go to the well. Now her
relative Mary comes, quickly and purposefully, to be with Elizabeth. Now she
has company, for solitude – so essential to the driven life – is dangerous for
the soul that is in recovery from shame.
And even now, Elizabeth wrestles with
the shame that God has moved to remove. ‘Who am I,’ she asks, ‘that the mother
of my Lord should come to me?’ I am not worthy.
Even so, Mary comes; and with her,
joy. With her, deep connection, woman to woman, womb-to-womb,
unborn-son-to-son. This is the antidote to shame.
And Mary sings a song of revolution.
A song of God raising up and honouring those who are nobody in their own eyes,
honouring them and establishing them in community, with others like them.
Connection, with shared experience. You are not alone. You are worthy of love
and connection, you and those like you who have known shame, who have felt
yourself unworthy. And those who have looked down on you, they will be humbled.
Brought low, sent away empty.
Elizabeth is the first person who Mary
sings her song over.
But her song has echoed down the
centuries. And Mary sings her song today, over all who live with shame – as all
live with shame. Sings over you, and over me. Over the emptiness inside, the
belief that we are not and cannot be worthy of being filled, with love.
Sing, Mother of God. Sing over your
relatives. Sing, and may your song be poison to our shame, burning it away.
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