A Pregnant Pause
Remembering the most important thing
In his Christmas message to us this year, our bishop, Austin, notes,
“As we move through this Advent season toward Christmas and the end of 2024, many priorities and people will make a claim on our time and energy. For clergy, there are the many special services for which to prepare, with the attendant opportunity to connect with people who may only come to church just this one time a year, as well as the inevitable pastoral emergencies that arise in winter. For lay leaders, there are gift programs to organize, holiday parties to attend, altar guild and service schedules to fill out, and a variety of outreach efforts to fund and staff. For all of us who participate in church enough to be reading this message, at times the amount of activity during Advent can feel overwhelming and unsustainable.”[1]
And this is just the busyness of church! There is so much more to do, and many of us are in a hurry to get it done. Final exams to complete; year-end work to wrap up; parties to attend; checking our list of gifts to buy, cards to send, and food to prepare. Time seems to speed up as we hurtle toward the end of the year. Hurry, hurry, rush, rush. There are too many things that we mustn’t miss. I wonder, in our hurry, if we might not miss what is most important.
Mary was in a hurry too.[2] She is in a hurry to see her older cousin, Elizabeth, and share with her the perplexing and wonderful and scary news that she is pregnant. Mary is barely of marriage-age, a recently engaged virgin, who discovers that she is pregnant by someone other than her betrothed. So she runs to see Elizabeth, who is dealing with her own unexpected, post-menopausal pregnancy. Maybe Elizabeth will understand how to handle a difficult pregnancy. Mary is in a hurry, but she is in a hurry to get the help she needs to understand where God is in the middle of this messy mix of anxiety and anticipation.
Mary drops everything to see Elizabeth. In the midst of your own life’s messy mix of anxiety and anticipation, what is important enough for you to drop everything else? Who would you turn to for the help you need to get clear about what is most important and what it all means? Mary steps away from the madness, jumps off the treadmill, and takes the time to talk with a soul friend. Sometimes, we need the help of a trusted friend to help us remember what life is all about, to go beyond the busy surface of our lives and plumb the spiritual depths.
Reflecting on his own experience, Bishop Austin writes that
“it has been helpful for me to remember that, as important as all these services, programs, outreach efforts, and seasonal preparations are, they can lose their meaning if we confuse them with our primary calling. The most important thing we can do as those who profess faith in the incarnate Christ is to awaken to the living Spirit of God afresh: to openly receive God’s love for us as beloved children of God, and to allow that love to flow forth from us to all we encounter.”[3]
This is what Mary and Elizabeth also invite us to do: take time to awaken to the life of the Spirit within us. What Mary seeks from Elizabeth is confirmation of what she already knows from her own experience of the divine: the child she is carrying is holy, and will be a blessing for the whole world. Mary can barely get a word out before Elizabeth, deeply in touch with the Spirit stirring up the leaping baby in her own womb, affirms the truth that Mary already knew, but needed someone else to mirror back to her. Elizabeth offers Mary a profound gift: encouragement to trust the movement of the Spirit within her; the affirmation of Mary’s own “yes” to God.
Elizabeth sees Mary. We all need someone to see us. Nothing is more important in this or any season, than to be willing to pause and be present to God and to each other. That pause can change the world. In that pause, Mary recalled the stories of her ancestors in the faith: Sarah, Rebecca, Miriam, Hannah, and even Cousin Elizabeth, the many women who trusted that God was at work in their own messy, mixed-up lives. That pause was enough to evoke her own fresh rendition of the faith tradition for her time and place.
“My soul magnifies the Lord,” Mary sings.[4] She touched down into the depths of the living Spirit of God within her, and found there the solid grounding she needed to move into the future with confidence and joy. Her soul magnifies the Lord. The usual sense of this phrase is that Mary praises God or lauds God’s greatness. But I wonder if it might not connote making God’s presence visible, like a magnifying glass. Just as Elizabeth has mirrored for Mary the Spirit of God within her, now Mary mirrors that Presence directly in her soul, making it visible in her life. Mary makes God visible, in her own soul as well as in her womb.
The great medieval mystic, Meister Eckhart boldly declared,
“I affirm that had the Virgin not first borne God spiritually He would never have been born from her in bodily fashion. A certain woman said to Christ, ‘Blessed is the womb that bear Thee.’ To which Christ answered, ‘Nay, rather blessed are they that hear the Word of God and keep it.’ It is more worthy of God that He be born spiritually of every pure and virgin soul, than that He be born of Mary. Hereby we should understand that humanity is, so to speak, the Son of God born from all eternity.”[5]
The Word becomes flesh in Mary and in Jesus. And it becomes flesh in us. This is what it means to become fully human. In the midst of our busy lives, nothing is more important than magnifying the Lord, making God visible in our lives, giving birth to God in us.
This isn’t the sort of thing about which we can be in a hurry. It takes time. Mary, we are told, spent three months with Elizabeth before returning home.[6] We all need to pause. We need to build in time daily, monthly, annually for spacious plumbing of the spiritual depths. And we need soul friends who can help us to discern the Spirit’s movement within us and to be accountable God’s will for us. We need spiritual midwives to help us birth God in our lives.
Too often, we feel that such a pause is selfish, or that we simply don’t have time. But nothing is more important than making God visible in the world: the Savior God who notices the lowly and humble; the Mighty God who is holy and whose mercy flows from generation to generation; the God who is turning the world upside down and right side up; the God whose promises are fulfilled. I know we are all in a hurry. But it might be worth pausing – just long enough – to acknowledge the difficult pregnancy that all of us must undergo, and to say “yes” to the birth of this God in us.
[1] The Rt. Rev. Austin Keith Rios, Christmas Message 2024 at https://www.diocal.org/2024/12/12/bishop-austins-christmas-message-2024/.
[2] Luke 1:39-55.
[3] Rios, op. cit.
[4] Luke 1:46.
[5] Meister Eckhart, Sermons III.
[6] Luke 1:56.