The Slow Way: Christ's Mother Reflects, His Childhood
A poem for Christmas Eve
Merry Christmas! This advent, each issue of The Slow Way newsletter has come from the transcripts of the first five episodes of The Slow Way Podcast from last December. Each episode, all of which have re-aired 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.
Christ’s Mother Reflects, His Childhood
“and for him to see me mended / I must see him torn.” -Luci Shaw “Mary’s Song”
He stood at the door, wet-faced and panting.
in his hands three baby birds. They’re hungry,
he sniffed, nested them in a bowl with grass,
fed them worms until they died. After, I held him
for an hour, his soul too much for this world.
Who doesn’t want normal for her son?
Yet he chose the lonely of the children, played ball
with the friendless. He was quiet, sat with me
long hours, watching: the grass, the anthills, the sunset.
Sometimes his sigh at such beauty went down too far.
Do you know where I lived before I found you?
He asked once as we sat on cold stones
watching fireflies, Joseph inside with the little ones.
I breathed long and answered. No, my love, I don’t.
I scanned his face with my eyes: a spark, a smile I didn’t know,
as if his chest’s glow might burst, blind me in its radiance.
We never spoke in metaphors: Not light of the world,
not cornerstone, not sacrificial lamb.
When I found him at his studies, face down toward
Isaiah’s words, he looked at me and laughed.
For my sake? I wondered. His own shock?
A memory of the words he would fulfill?
Later: the teaching, the miracles, the homelessness
he chose. How to follow the child you raised?
How to warm yourself in his light
without catching flame and melting?
Drink his blood, eat his flesh, beg his body
to release from the wood it lay torn upon.
Recognize the great pain he’d always carried,
how his split soul all along was mending mine.
A Slow Practice
I love thinking about the in-between spaces of this relationship of Jesus and his mother. An entire life unknown to us. What was their relationship like? Did Mary see it as her task to foster his spirituality? To train him up? We have two tiny smidgens of information about Jesus the child/young man. One is the story of his holding his own with the rabbis of the Temple as a 12 year old. And another is that famous explanation containing all that the writers of the Gospels thought we ought to know. He grew: In wisdom, in statue, and in favor with God and man.
We all know that history is hardly kind to the women who built the communities and neighborhoods and cities of the past. The women who made the food and raised the babies and held the world together when the men all left for war. And what about this woman? What did she know? What did she tell Jesus about the truth of his divinity? When scripture says he grew in wisdom and stature and favor, this is what I hear: His mama taught him to think deeply. His mama fed him and forced him to exercise. AND…his mama made sure he kept his manners, especially when arguing in the synagogue with the religious leaders of his day.
Today, as we near Christmas, I invite you to come close to this story in a fresh way. To consider what Mary witnessed as her son grew. To consider how much she was asked to sacrifice.
Breath in.
Breathe out.
Let’s imagine that scene one more time. Jesus the child on a stone outside his house, watching the end of the sunset. I don’t know if there are fireflies in Israel/Palestine, but let’s imagine there are. As the dusk settles in, the fireflies lift up from the ground like a miracle of light.
There’s swing and a clack. The door to the house opened and closed, and in the background we hear the sound of Jesus’ younger siblings playing inside for the brief moment that the door is open. His mother walks the stone path down to where he is sitting.
She sits on a stone beside him. Do you know where I lived before I found you? He says, not taking his eyes off the fireflies, not turning to look at her. No, my love, I don’t. His mother answers.
Sometimes I think the gift of believing (or trying to believe) the wild power of a story like God revealing God’s own divinity through a human child, is not in it’s ease. There’s nothing easy about believing it. The gift is in the humanity. A God who knows what it is to sit with a mother in the quiet. A God who knows the sweet slowness of a sunset. A God who has had to learn some manners. I like the small deliberate truth of God-with-us actually means.
I want to invite you to take some quiet space to consider what speaks to you about God-turned-human, about our rescue coming through a boy who had to go through puberty, poor thing. Take some time to quiet your body and come close to God.
A few things:
You can find this poem and slow practice in The Slow Way Podcast. It’s available today. If you’ve missed any other of the five poems, find them in previous episodes of The Slow Way Podcast here.
This will be our final installment of The Slow Way newsletter for the next three months. I’ll be taking a break from the newsletter and podcast in order to focus on completing my next book by April.
If you want to keep up with me while I’m away working on the book, I’ll continue to release my Slow Seven newsletter twice a month for all paid subscribers. If you enjoy my work, please consider becoming a paid subscriber! It’s a way to support my work and receive a fun email twice a month with links to all I’m reading, watching and thinking about!
Wishing you a Merry Christmas and a very Happy New Year. Enjoy your people and rest up, okay? See you soon.