A Time to be Born

“A time to give birth/to be born, and a time to die.” (Eccl 3:2)

Advent is a time to prepare for a birth.  Whose birth?  Christ’s and our own.

The season invites us into a dual role – that of mother to the gestating Christ, and that of the developing infant in the womb of God’s encompassing love.  Perhaps it seems a little complicated to be both mother and child.  Does this thought give you indigestion?  Bear with me as I unpack these two factors of our spiritual experience, and perhaps you too will be so reluctant to relinquish either of them that you will seek to hold both in mutually enriching tension.

We begin with the mother.  One who is being readied to give birth becomes a vessel, a living cocoon perfectly molded to carry, protect and nourish another life growing within.  She may or may not be aware of this at the beginning, since the early signs are subtle.  She may desperately hope for and desire it, or it may fill her with confusion and dread.  The crux of the experience is that Someone else is present inside her, a presence that makes itself felt ever more clearly as time passes.  And this Someone is to begin with unknown, a stranger.  She will come to know him only gradually, if she gives herself wholly, body and soul, to the task of bringing him to term.

Caryll Houselander, English mystic and writer of the first half of the twentieth century, had an extraordinary capacity to find words of piercing clarity for what she called “our Christ-life.”  She describes Christ as the good seed sown in the soil of our humanity, and our task as nurturing that life to full stature:

“The law of growth is rest. We must be content in winter to wait patiently through the long bleak season in which we experience nothing whatever of the sweetness or realization of the Divine Presence, believing the truth, that these seasons which seem to be the most empty are the most pregnant with life.  It is in them that the Christ-life is growing in us, laying hold of our soil with strong roots and thrust deeper and deeper, drawing down the blessed rain of mercy and the sun of Eternal Love through our darkness and heaviness and hardness, to irrigate and warm those roots.
…
“The seed must rest in the earth. We must allow the Christ-life to grow in us in rest. Our whole being must fold upon Christ’s rest in us, as the earth folds upon the seed. …
“This is the moment of faith, the hour of growth, the supreme darkness, in which faith consents to God’s law and allows Christ to grow in us, because he rests in us and we rest in him.  In faith Christ grows in us.”
(Caryll Houselander, The Passion of the Infant Christ, pp. 15, 16)

As we enter into Advent, the season of waiting, we may or may not be aware of the indwelling presence of Christ.  But whether or not we feel something moving and changing within us, that Someone making his presence felt, we can enfold this emerging life with concentrated attention, deliberate nurturing, and unconditional love.

Now let us turn to the child.  None of us remembers our time in the womb, since we only develop the capacity for self-reflection and autobiographical memory some years after birth.  But though conscious awareness may be absent, there is a kind of intuitive knowledge in the one who is coming to be.  She is being knit together in secret, molded in darkness, in the enclosed space which hems her in on every side.  The whole process prepares her for entrance into a totally unforeseeable world of light and air and space and other people.  For now, though, she knows only containment within a mysterious Other, whose voice comes to her in muffled sound and bodily vibration.  She entrusts herself to the One who knows her through and through, who searches her heart, who prepares all her ways.

I have decided to take Nicodemus as my patron this Advent, the Jewish leader who came by night to visit Jesus, impressed by the signs he had heard of, and prepared to acknowledge him as a teacher from God.  Jesus draws this man swiftly into deep waters, revealing more to him of his identity and mission than he seems to be ready for, provoking questions, and leaving him apparently speechless.  Jesus speaks of being “born from above” as a condition for seeing the kingdom of God, and Nicodemus questions:

“How can a person once grown old be born again?  Surely he cannot reenter his mother’s womb and be born again, can he?” (Jn 3:4)

We follow his train of thought and imagine the physical improbability of a second round in the maternal womb for one pushing middle age.  But no, Jesus is speaking not of going backward to repeat that first formative experience, but of going forward to a new and greater experience that has resonances of physical birth yet goes beyond it.  Birth “from above” is elusive:

“‘The wind blows where it wills, and you can hear the sound it makes, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes; so it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.’ … ‘How can this happen?’” (Jn 3:8, 9)

Nicodemus doesn’t know, and neither do we, exactly.  Like the maturing infant in the womb, we cannot understand what we are becoming, what God’s creative Spirit is making of us.  We cannot fathom the world that awaits us, postpartum.  But we can allow ourselves to be carried, to be soothed by the voice that comes to us from the One in whom we are contained, whose love is communicated in vibrations of the Spirit.

So, if I may make a suggestion for these days of Advent, let us spend them consciously and deliberately mothering the life of Christ within, attentive to the slightest movement and enfolding it with love that fosters this life as it develops.   And let us spend them as a child of the God who encompasses us, attentive to his voice, which speaks in the scriptures and the liturgy most powerfully.  Let us hear, as if for the first time, those declarations of everlasting love, and let us surrender with profound trust to the providence which presses in on us from every side.

I will end with the words of another English mystic, the poet John Donne, who spoke these words to Mary, and to us:

“Thou hast light in dark, and shutt’st in little room
Immensity, cloister’d in thy dear womb.”
(John Donne, “Annunciation”)

Image: Dubian Monsalve, Pregnant Mountain, 2012. Mountainside carving in Santo Domingo, Colombia.