Two candles lit on the wreath, and we’re half way through Advent. It can be a hard season to get right. There are so many threads to hold together. Christmas planning and excitement, gifts and baking, all the preparations you can imagine and so many church services, too. Anticipation, tiredness, and expectation. All the expectation.
It can be a full season of waiting and of learning to wait.
But all this activity and collective holding-of-breath is a good thing, too. It is good for us to see how the community life of the church reflects our own more personal seasons of hard waiting. We all have to wait sometimes. This year in this house, we’re waiting for the final processes of the Spouse’s studies to complete. For job opportunities and interviews. For the next chapter of our family’s life to come into focus. But we’re also waiting with friends as they look for new opportunities. As they anticipate milestones and moves. As they wait for their first child – or their second child – or their third child to be born.
So we wait together. And we wait with the prophets. We wait with the people holding tight to the promises. And we wait with Mary for the birth of her child.
This birth poem is for her, and for all the rest of us, too.
Rounded Walls
Inside, you built me.
You pushed back walls, made more room for your own growing.
You demanded foundations, tested them with you concentrating feet.
You stretched up, making rafters of my ribs,
pushing into the tenderness under my heart.
For you, I became a space, a home with rounded walls,
taut as a bowl, a full sail, holding us both
in our growing season.
There is a northern church with rounded walls,
a curved sunlit craft with no corners,
no places where one might hide.
But you, hidden in me, rounded me.
You gave me limits and lived within them.
You tumbled in me like a rock in the ocean,
curled into me like a fossil fish,
a growing bone.
Heavy in turmoil, heavy in rest.
And sometimes together we danced.
I wrapped my arms around my solid self and held on to you.
Days passed, weeks and our dance grew slower.
So did we.
We counted, climbed stairs, counted each one, slowly.
Then, the day came at bright noon when the counting rhythm grew insistent,
bringing us together suddenly turning.
And into that night, that long night, that started with insistent joy
we learned this new rhythm, calling rhythm,
working with arms wrapped around me, walls around to support me,
in a room set aside, a dwelling place, working place.
Beneath me a solid floor, and women’s words whispered fathoms deep,
as you quaked inside me, I called out and together we grew;
uncertain, unstable, unsettled, rocked and raw.
Hands gripping, grabbing, fingers clenched as we tried hard to open,
me to you and you through me, opening into what dawn?
But dawn came, quietly, and you turned once more and
slipped through into warm hands, touch and new cloth.
And then the sounds of the world seeped through the curtains,
the open window,
slow rain stopping and the sound of birds on branches,
the sun not yet,
but we are.
I find you in my arms and outside these walls,
the world begins.
But no.
The world begins here.
In my arms, you look in my eyes, tying us two together.
The cord cut; there are cords newly there,
knitting us together as we need each other now,
weaving us to the world, those around, those outside.
I will need others now, more than before,
and you will welcome them, trust them, my love.
They too will love you.
This is how we make the world a home.
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This poem of mine is included in the recent book “Moments of our nights and days” by Wild Goose Publications, the publishing house of the Iona Community.
