The Slow Way: Darkness
How love comes into our fragility
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.
Darkness
“For Behold, darkness shall cover the earth, and gross darkness the people; but the Lord shall rise upon thee, and His glory shall be seen upon thee, and the Gentiles shall come to thy light, and kings to the brightness of thy rising.” - Isaiah, chapter 60
“Immensity, cloister’d in thy dear womb, / Now leaves His well-beloved imprisonment.” -John Donne “La Corona”
We are all some mother’s child, all born through great pain, then a flood of release, an unbearable empty. I sang a broken song, a wail of psalm until you came. We were cold, alone, this man who will raise you, and I. No mother, no midwife, one blanket, a borrowed pot of water on the fire. Did I not expect you would cry with me, you who had willed every infant’s cry? Did I not expect you would need me, your body suddenly cold, craving my skin? You bobbed your head along my chest in search of milk: ordinary, human. Where were the trumpets, where the showering of gold? We three were hushed in the dark, my blood trickling to the ground, my husband’s silent tears, your infant body learning to swallow. And in this, somehow, Glory. My God, you deserve more than the two of us, torn open and shivering with you in the dark.
A Slow Practice
I wrote this poem when I was pregnant with my now 11-year-old son. He was my second-born, and I remember entering into the final stages of my pregnancy with a dread I hadn’t known when my first child was born. The pain and suffering that was coming? I knew it deeply already. I knew that mothering would tear me open, both literally and figuratively. I knew the euphoria of holding a new human that had come straight from my own flesh. And I knew the gentle sweetness of introducing my body to that child. I was the one who could keep him warm. I was the one whose milk existed only for him, for his fragile life.
What a strange and glorious thing childbirth is. In the midst of my joy, there was always the ache that my baby would never again live inside me. That the particular love we had shared in those nine months would always be different from that time on. And that was all mixed in with the utter relief of holding him, of being on the other side of the suffering.
I wanted to capture that intensity of both things at once in this poem. And also consider Mary’s fragility. How weak and uncertain and terrified she must have felt.
Today I wonder how weak and uncertain and terrified you feel. I wonder what these weeks leading up to Christmas remind you of, if there’s a dread you carry with you. If there’s an uncertainty, or a fragility you don’t know how to name.
Today, can you sit in the silence and name it?
Breathe in.
Breath out.
Take a moment to imagine the cold of the night in the barn, as Mary labors and Joseph struggles to find help. Imagine a chill that whips through the cracks of the barn door. The smell of the animals. The sounds of a woman in labor.
Imagine the fire that burned to keep Mary warm. Picture the borrowed pot of water on the flame. Were there blankets? Was there a midwife? (Note: though my poem imagines there is none, Kelly Nikondeha’s new brilliant exploration of the Advent story insists there would have been a collection of women supporting Mary. Her book is a must read.) Were there any complications with the birth?
Did the labor take hours? Did Joseph have a clean cloth he could use to wipe Mary’s head as she pushed at the end?
And, what about the breaking through? When the child arrived? What did Mary feel?
What do you hope she felt?
And in her fragility, what did she learn about Divine Love?
What about you? Spend the next couple of minutes of quiet asking yourself that question. In your fragility, what is the sacred Love of God revealing to you?