The Slow Way: A Story of Sacred Friendship
Mary, Elizabeth and the story our lives are telling
This Advent each issue of The Slow Way newsletter will come from the transcripts of the first five episodes of The Slow Way Podcast from last December. Each episode (all of which are re-airing throughout the month of December), contains an original poem I’ve written for the season of Advent, as well as a prayer practice to help us open our hearts and minds in the presence of God. I hope this can be a holiday season in which we lean into to the quiet, where we slow ourselves down when we’re tempted to hustle, and where we experience sacred spaces and moments all around us.
The Lord is With Thee
-from the Gospel of Luke, Chapter 1
They hail me Mary, full of grace. They bless me: brave, obedient—holy. What would you have said to the twelve-foot, light-soaked man, a gold flecked tower whose honey lips spoke your name? I said Yes. Then ran, traveled days, silent, hungry, purging in the grass, to my cousin’s. I knew nowhere else to go.
I found Elizabeth, impossibly, full with child. She, fifty and bare, as pregnant as I, thirteen, unknown. We, an absurd pair. Did I hope she would recognize my angel tale, believe for me what I hardly could? The Lord is with thee, she said. Her baby soared inside.
Her face was vague to my memory. What I recalled was her voice: in candlelight, she once tucked me under wool with my sisters, sang us to sleep with poems of Yahweh. How easily she spoke of God, as if he were a neighbor, a fishmonger on the street.
Blessed art thou among women. Blessed is the fruit of thy womb. For three months she hid me from rumors, from my angry betrothed. I took walks. I threw up. I ate. Robes can only hide so much.
Then I stood beside the midwife, water basin in hand while my cousin squatted and screamed. I knew what my Yes meant this body must do and wept for myself, for this child of God given to my clumsy care.
Who am I? I once said to Elizabeth after dinner, beside our fire. I am small and weak in faith. She placed her palm on my cheek, whispered, You’re God’s.
A Slow Practice
It seems to me that we often miss out on the gifts that the season of Advent is trying to give us, because we’re so intent on proving to ourselves the divinity of the story of Jesus’ birth, without allowing ourselves to consider the humanity and vulnerability of the players in this story. Mary was a new mom, and while you certainly don’t need to understand what it is to be a new mom to feel the depth of this story, I think women who have experienced the trauma and euphoria of birth have something to teach all of us about how we can best lean into the days leading up to Christmas.
I gave birth for the first time when I was two months shy of 29 years old, in a secure relationship with my partner, in a financially stable lifestyle, and with the care of knowledgeable medical practitioners. Mary had none of that. She had an angelic message, a fiance who had tried to leave her and then decided not to because of a dream. No midwives that we know of, no secure lodging, and she was a little baby, as far we can surmise. A teenager, possibly, being shipped off to marriage because she’d gone through enough of puberty to be allowed her place in the realm of mothers.
She really had one secure thing. And that was her older cousin Elizabeth. Elizabeth had an uncertain birth as well, perhaps a disapproving community (a little old for babies, aren’t we Elizabeth?), and a husband who had stopped talking after his heavenly encounter.
I’m so grateful the scriptures include this relationship. We women get so few pictures of the sacred gift of female leadership, care, and community. Elizabeth and Mary held each other up, carried each other through their seasons of pregnancy, and their faithfulness to this season in one another’s lives set the foundation for the work of their little boys: John the Baptist who would go wild in the woods, eating locusts, preaching repentance, making baptism the sacred marker it is, and clearing a path in the wilderness for his distant cousin, Jesus. John would die a gruesome death, and Jesus would remind us how to grieve. Jesus would lean into his Sermon on the Mount: Blessed are those who mourn.
Today, I hope you’ll consider the foundation you’re laying with your life. This may not be a season of giving birth (either literally or metaphorically), but the truth is that we’re always prepping the land for something. And the foundation you lay now will be felt by the ones who come after you.
Let’s take a moment to consider how the way you live your days, ultimately determines your life.
Sit still with me. Breathe in. Breathe out.
The choices you are making today are laying a foundation for who you become, who those who follow behind you become.
Breathe in: Holy One, you invite me to make a way in the wilderness.
Breath out: Give me eyes to see the ones who follow behind me.
Breathe in: Holy One, you invite me to make a way in the wilderness.
Breathe out: Show me those who need my tender care.
Breathe in: Holy One, you invite me to make a way in the wilderness.
Breathe out: Show me the foundation my life is laying for those who come behind me.
Our moments and daily choices add up to our lives. Spend these next minutes considering your daily rhythms of prayer, service, work, and rest. What does your day say about your life. What small change might you be invited to make today that will build the kind of foundation you hope to leave behind?