After the midwives leave…
December 26th. Is this not one of the strangest days of the year? It feels like the day after the party, when what we have to do now is clean the sink full of dishes. It is an odd day.
The day after my son was born. April 18, 2012
If yesterday we celebrated the birth of the baby Jesus, then maybe December 26th is the day after the birth. I was thinking about that day for me and my family, when it happened nine years ago. The midwives were gone, the inflatable pool emptied and packed up, and now it was just us. Beth and I with a squirming pink baby. Our son was born on April 17th and that date will be forever sacred to us. But April 18th was the day where we each stared at this new being with equal parts awe and worry.
April 18th was the first time we had a newly discovered concern. Our baby hadn’t pooped yet. And so, our first full day as parents was already spent with concern. We had a timeline for a bowel movement. If it did not come, a drive to the emergency room was in order.
There were many methods attempted that I’ll spare you all the details of, but just 30 minutes before we were set to take our newborn baby to the hospital, the long-awaited movement happened. There was much rejoicing, and exhausted/relieved tears shed.
Besides that specific challenge, I distinctly remember that first night bouncing my crying son on a yoga ball, shooshing and soothing in his ear. No amount of classes, books, or stories from parents had prepared me for that moment, one day after the birth of my son. It was a radical reframing of my identity, purpose, and role in life…all while bouncing on a yoga ball.
But I had it easy, I guess, in comparison. Mary, likely still recovering in the barn, may now be coming to terms that she was, now, indeed the Mother of God. I’m trying to imagine what December 26th was like for the mama and papa of Jesus.
There is a famous Christmas song called “Mary, Did You Know” which has, at its heart the theme “Could you have imagined that your child was going to be who he ended up being?” Some of the lines ask her if she knew that one day her son would walk on water, give sight to a blind man, calm a storm with his hand. In the weeks leading up to Christmas, I was delighted to see a new thread emerging from some Christian writers on Twitter. Megan Westra wrote, “Mary freaking new, that her baby boy would one day rule the nations. Mary freaking knew, that her baby boy was Lord of all creation. Yes, she knew! Read Luke 1, you fool, she sang about it then. It helps if when you’re reading, you listen to the women!”
In Luke chapter 1 we read Mary’s Magnificat:
“My soul magnifies the Lord,
and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant.
Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed;
for the Mighty One has done great things for me,
and holy is his name.
His mercy is for those who fear him
from generation to generation.
He has shown strength with his arm;
he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.
He has brought down the powerful from their thrones,
and lifted up the lowly;
he has filled the hungry with good things,
and sent the rich away empty.
He has helped his servant Israel,
in remembrance of his mercy,
according to the promise he made to our ancestors,
to Abraham and to his descendants forever.”
Mary’s song is an incredible and powerful proclamation of the person she is about to birth. Mary went into this wild experience knowing that God looked with favor on her. Not because she was mighty or powerful herself, but she says that God looked with favor on her lowliness. With incredible confidence, she says, “all generations will call me blessed.” Mary knew, and Mary embraced.
I think all of us deserve as much time as we need to recover from moments of incredible transformation. If not just to rest, but also to take in the fact that we are now different than we were before. So often, we seem to be at our most tender in the moments after incredible transitions like this. We can doubt our worthiness in whatever new space we find ourselves in. In my case, all of the doubts and worries about my abilities to father a child, then suddenly visited me as I bounced him on that yoga ball the day after he was born. I don’t know, maybe Mary had the same thoughts and worries. And yet, her song communicates a confident acceptance of being chosen for such a tremendous task. I imagine she went back and forth between the reality of her situation and the hope of her calling.
Sometimes we think that we will only receive the love and appreciation of our loved ones by proving our worthiness to them. That isn’t the way of God though, and that is perhaps one of the most profound elements of a relationship with the divine. God often looks with favor on our lowliness, and that is a paradox that often fails to compute with the worldly formula of being loved by our merit.
We should not ignore the significance of this reality of God’s love and choosing of us in the context of Mary’s song. Because in just a few lines we read that God scatters the proud, that God brings down the powerful from their thrones, and lifts up the lowly. That God fills the hungry with good things and sends the rich away empty. The paradoxical seeing of favor in our lowliness is just a part of the continued paradoxical longing of the divine for a world with rightly ordered priorities. That God loves and chooses us in our lowliness is the antidote to our ever-present self-doubts about our worthiness for love, and our ability to love our neighbors.
Mary carries within her womb the very essence of the life and teachings of Jesus, and proclaims them in song before his birth. I like to think of Mary singing this song and the yet to be born Jesus hearing these vibrations in the womb. I like to think that each of us were incubated in the divine vibrations of Mary’s song to be born with a tremendous sense of love and purpose. Even if we do not feel that we emerged into the world with that, perhaps that is the role of communities like ours. Indeed, it is my hope that communities like ours are the types of places where we can weekly encounter and practice the womb-like love of God, where we are both soothed by uncoditional love, but also a place where we can practice and be reminded of the upside down, paradoxical calling on our lives.
Here are some queries:
How have you wrestled with feelings of self doubt? Have you ever had the experience of seeing what makes you feel inadequate as being precisely the reason God is calling you into something?
As we try to live into the upside down message of Mary’s song, how might we be thinking of who we look to for guidance and leadership? If God looks with favor on the lowliness of Mary to bring about something so profound, how should we be paying attention to who gets our attention and appreciation?