Mary came to the grave yard alone
expecting to pour out her grief;
and she met someone she should have known
even though their encounter was brief.
She stayed after the others had gone
back to town to tell Christ was alive;
in the light that came after the dawn
he called her – and her heart was revived.
And she walked with him and talked with him,
and he told her that she was his own;
her heart must have been filled to the brim –
more was rolled away than just a stone.
Share the words by which we are freed:
Christ is risen, risen indeed.
It is difficult to get the news from poems yet people die miserably every day... ...for lack of what is found there
-- William Carlos Williams
Today I hit a wall I didn’t see coming.
I ran into people who couldn’t see the metaphor sitting right in front of us. They weren’t stupid or belligerent or intractable; they just didn’t see it. And I didn’t know what to do. I felt like I was sitting in a coffee shop somewhere in Pakistan trying to carry on a conversation and I was the only one who didn’t speak Urdu. I knew what I wanted to say, but none of the words I had seemed to work.
I think I was so flummoxed because talking about faith means talking about poetry: it’s all metaphor. Let me say here that I learned something from my conversation, so I want to clarify: to say it’s metaphor is not saying it’s something other than true. Poetry, for me, is our best chance at truth telling. For the sake of definition: metaphor is comparison – using one thing to talk about something else.
“Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were not willing.” (Matthew 23:37)
OK, so technically it’s a simile because Jesus used “as,” but he wasn’t claiming to be a hen as much as using the metaphor to talk about the ache in his heart. The word metaphor can be traced back to the sixteenth century:
lit. "a carrying over," from metapherein "transfer, carry over," from meta- "over, across" (see meta- ) + pherein "to carry, bear"
A word bridge, if you will: to carry over, to bear across. This is the way truth travels. When I was looking up the word origin, I came across a philosopher who was new to me: R. G. Collingwood. His introduction was this quote:
It is a commonplace that all religion expresses itself in mythological or metaphorical terms; it says one thing and means another; it uses imagery to convey truth. But the crucial fact about religion is not that it is metaphor, but that it is unconscious metaphor. No one can express any thought without using metaphors, but this does not reduce all philosophy and science to religion, because the scientist knows that his metaphors are merely metaphors and that the truth is something other than the imagery by which it is expressed, whereas in religion the truth and the imagery are identified. To repeat the Creed as a religious act it is necessary not to add "All this I believe in a symbolical or figurative sense": to make that addition is to convert religion into philosophy.
I don’t know much at all about Mr. Collingwood’s faith perspective, but he’s on to something when it comes to realizing that the language of faith is one where “the truth and the imagery are identified.”
And he took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to them, saying, "This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me." And likewise the cup after they had eaten, saying, "This cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood. (Luke 22:19-20)
Jesus’ words are crammed full of metaphor, still when I take the Bread and the Cup in worship there is more going on than figurative language when Ginger looks me in the eye and says, “The Body of Christ.” And it is with the same sense of full contact poetry that I hear one of my favorite Advent quotes (and the one at the center of the conversation that started this post):
What good is it to me if Mary gave birth to the Son of God fourteen hundred years ago and I do not also give birth to the Son of God in my time and in my culture? We are all meant to be Mothers of God. -- Meister Eckhart
When we come back to the story that birthed our faith, we usually see ourselves among the shepherds working our way to the manger and staring up into the starlit night to hear the angels sing. Sometimes, we journey with the Magi, or perhaps come to terms with our inner Innkeeper. Still it seems to me the heart of the story is in the young peasant girl who carried the baby to term and then gave birth to the Incarnation. Eckhart calls us to engage the story as viscerally as it is possible for truth and imagery to collide: hurt and push and scream and struggle and labor to do what it takes to let our lives give birth to Love in the middle of our world. We are all meant to be mothers of God, being created in the image of God who is Mother to us.
A neighbor sent an email on our listserv asking if anyone had a copy of the movie Ishtar. It has never made it to DVD and she said she was one of the few who liked the movie and really wanted to see it again. I was happy to let her know there were at least two of us in the neighborhood and I was glad to let her borrow my copy. The song at the heart of the movie begins,
telling the truth can be dangerous business . . .
As goofy as the song is, truth is dangerous business – dangerous and wonderful business. I don’t mean the kind of truth that becomes a weapon or a measuring stick, but the truth that gives birth in us to a sense of what God can do if we, like Mary, are willing to say, “Let it be.”
You know she lived for years, many years after he left – and she moved from Galilee, following those who had pledged to care for her. Maybe it was easier to not live in the same land where he had parabled and miracled, healed and helped. After he was gone, they still came to town asking to see the house where he was born and she would have to tell them – again -- they were in the wrong place. Maybe it mattered most to be with friends who knew the stories, who had lived through the glory and the grief, and yet, when they knocked on the door they asked, “What did you do today?”
The company that owns the Chicago Tribune (and the Chicago Cubs) declared bankruptcy yesterday. Much like the domino effect on Wall Street not long ago, I expect some other newspapers will fold before long. (Sorry – I couldn’t resist.) Much of the demise of the dailies has been attributed to our quickly changing technology. With all the instant news available, fewer and fewer take time to sit down and turn the page. By the time tomorrow’s headline is printed, it’s old news. A half century ago, Ben Hecht said,
Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock.
The irony is the twenty-four hour news channels and the web outlets as well may be more immediate, but they don’t give any greater a sense of perspective, any idea of context, any sense of memory. We’re still watching the second hand; it just appears to be moving faster – and it’s no longer a the hand of a clock, but a digital counter. We don’t appear to be telling the time anything of great importance.
I read the gospel passage from the lectionary last Sunday: Mark 1:1-8, which begins,
The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.
I never hear that sentence without recalling a sermon Skip Waterbury preached many years ago now at First Congregational Church in Winchester, Massachusetts. He pointed out that the sentence was not talking about the opening scene with John the Baptist, but was better read as the title for the whole gospel. The story of Jesus’ time on earth was the beginning of the Gospel; the story is still being told these twenty centuries later.
Good stories take time to be told.
As we sat down for Thanksgiving dinner, Ginger asked us to go around the table and say what we were thankful for. What came to my mind first was gratitude that we have been in Durham long enough to begin to forge friendships. Acquaintances may be immediate, but friendships are not; they must, like a good story, have time to develop.
When my friend Billy was putting together a Christmas album with some other artists, also some years ago, they called it Christmas in Our Time, drawing from a Meister Eckhart quote that remains an Advent mainstay for me:
What good is it to me if the son of God was born to Mary 1400 years ago if Christ is not born again in my time and in my culture?
Digging around tonight I found a more expansive Eckhart:
We are all meant to be mothers of God. What good is it to me if this eternal birth of the divine Son takes place unceasingly but does not take place within myself? And what good is it to me if Mary is full of grace if I am not also full of grace? What good is it to me for the Creator to give birth to His Son if I do not also give birth to Him in my time and my culture? This, then, is the fullness of time: when the Son of God is begotten in us.
The fullness of time. I love the phrase. It conjures up the image of something ripening, coming to term, growing into wholeness, in much the same way Luke describes Mary getting to Bethlehem in time for the birth:
And so it was, that, while they were there, the days were accomplished that she should be delivered.
Mary knew nothing of second hands. She marked time with every step the donkey took on the road to Bethlehem and she kept time as she saw come alive in her arms and those memories in her heart to return when she needed to find time to do so. The seconds have done nothing but tick away between her time and mine. What am I telling my time in order that the days might be accomplished for me to give birth to Christ in my time and in my culture?
A number of years ago, Ginger and I had the chance to go to Israel with a group from our church in Winchester. We rode our bus all through Israel and Palestine seeing the places we had only read about, watching much of the Bible come alive in ways we could not have imagined and also visiting the “traditional” sites for many of the happenings in the gospels, which all had churches built over them that were all asking for money. “This is the traditional site for (fill in miracle),” our guide would say, “but this is not where it happened. Centuries of a very lucrative pilgrim/tourist trade had made it necessary to mark the spot, even if the spot was wrong.
On three occasions I remember our guide saying with certainty that where we were was the real deal. One was in the Garden of Gethsemane where she said the root systems of the olive trees go back to Jesus’ time; we were sitting among the same trees where he prayed. The second was across the Kidron valley, entering the Old City. The steps Jesus climbed on the way to Caiaphas’ house were still in use; we walked that day where Jesus walked. The third was inside the church in Nazareth, which was built over a spring she said had always been there; Mary would have come there to draw water in the dusty little village as her children ran and played at her feet.
The centuries of “biblical” art that stand between us and the afternoon the angel showed up to tell Mary what was happening to her leave us with images of a woman draped in fine linens being told she would give birth to a boy that looks, in the paintings, more like Giuseppe than Jesus, gilding over all of the grit and gruesome that made up her life; ours, too.
Nazareth was a no count little village hardly worth putting on the map, if there had been maps. The angel probably had to clear the dust from his throat before he began the proclamation and you have to wonder how long he had to practice before he could look this poor little girl in the eye and say, “Blessed are you among women.” She had no idea what that blessing meant, other than to respond, “Let it be as you said.”
My brother was the first person I ever heard talk about “the paradox of blessing” offered to Mary. Yes, she would be the one to bring Jesus into the world, to be the deliverer of the Incarnation, and she would watch him grow in ways she did not understand and suffer and die. Such is the paradox of blessing. However Lennon and McCartney brushed up against it, they understood when they wrote,
when I find myself in times of trouble mother Mary comes to me speaking words of wisdom, let it be
Yesterday, as Ginger was pouring the cup to serve Communion, she said, “And Jesus took the cup and poured – in a room that was not nearly this quiet.” The downside of our reverence is we sanctify the humanity out of the very events that speak to all that it means to be truly human. Mary had to have had less than the ideal pregnancy ending with giving birth in a barn behind a less-than-five-star inn. However romantic our crèche scenes appear, with the animals gathered round, I can’t imagine it being much help to have the cattle lowing and doing everything else that cows do while she was in labor. For God to choose to enter the world in the person of Jesus was as gritty as it was glorious. The angels may have announced his coming, but Jesus came into the world on the bottom rung, at the place, as Bruce Cockburn says (and my friend Bill reminded me) you have to "kick the darkness till it bleeds daylight.”
On this day that the church decided to calendar as the one when the angel visited Mary, I offer Patty Griffin’s song, “Mary,” because it helps make Christmas a flesh and blood event for me.
Mary you're covered in roses You're covered in ashes You're covered in rain You're covered in babies You're covered in slashes You're covered in wilderness you're covered in stains You cast aside the sheet, You cast aside the shroud Of another man, who served the world proud You greet another son, you lose another one On some sunny day and always stay Mary
Jesus says Mother I couldn't stay another day longer Flys right by me and leaves a kiss upon her face While the angels are singin' his praises in a blaze of glory Mary stays behind and starts cleaning up the place
Mary she moves behind me She leaves her fingerprints everywhere Everytime the snow drifts, Everytime the sand shifts Even when the night lifts, She's always there
Jesus said Mother I couldn't stay another day longer Flys right by me and leaves a kiss upon her face While the angels are singin' his praises in a blaze of glory Mary stays behind and starts cleaning up the place
Mary you're covered in roses, You're covered in ruin You're covered in secrets Your'e covered in treetops, You're covered in birds who can sing a million songs without any words You cast aside the sheets, you cast aside the shroud of another man, who served the world proud You greet another son, you lose another one on some sunny day and always stay Mary
In my hour of darkness she is standing right in front of me . . .
