Friday, December 8: Advent as Midwife

In 2015, my Advent meditation prompt was Advent as Midwife.  Each day was an hour of the process of labor. I imagined myself in the stable, helping with the birth. Day after day, I held her hand. Wiped the sweat off her face. Coached her through her pain.

I held Joseph’s hand, telling him the pain was normal, he didn’t need to worry.

I sent him out for water from the pump, for a blanket from the storage area in the shed beside the stables.

These days of labor became so real that when the baby came on Christmas Eve, I wept along with the couple. I watched as they stared into his face, whispered about how long they would be able to stay there.

And then, the next night, I left them. I sat outside, looking up at the stars, weeping because there was so little I could do now. Their lives were going to take their course. Jesus’ life was going to take its course. I knew the rest of the story, but they didn’t.

As I lowered my eyes from the stars and prepared to go inside, to leave the meditation there, I saw them in the doorway. Joseph was helping Mary out the door, his arm on hers. She had the baby in her other arm. They walked slowly, slowly through the door and out into the cool night, together. They looked up at the sky.

The miracle star was still there, so huge and bright. They breathed, took it in, holding onto one another. Then they passed the baby back and forth, looking down at him, deep love in their eyes.
As I slowly walked away, feeling a deep awe rather than grief, I realized something important. That moment when parents look with deep, clear love at their child—it is real.

It may not last long, especially for families in poverty, families struggling with abuse, addiction, pain, parents who are going to hand the baby over to another family who will raise the child as their own.  
But the artists who have drawn and written and sculpted and painted that moment throughout the ages are not necessarily acting out of sentimentality. They may, instead, be acting out of hope.


Even in the midst of the deepest pain and fear, we must be open to what is best and clearest and purest in ourselves and in one another. That doesn’t have to mean we are ignoring the deeper story of poverty, loss, oppression--or the need for healing and justice. Despite or perhaps because of the deep need for justice, we must be able to gaze at a baby, to lose ourselves in that tiny body's features, smell, cooing sounds. 

Presence and awe are necessary ingredients for hope.

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