To that last question, at least, we can say Yes, and that Yes is easier for us to say because of Christmas. What a difference this birth makes to our lives! God, in human flesh, dignifies our mortal flesh forever. How did the schism between flesh and spirit ever come about to confuse and confound us? God put on our flesh and affirmed its holiness and beauty. How could we ever have fallen for the lie that spirit is good and flesh is evil? We cannot make our flesh evil without corrupting spirit, too. Both are God’s and both are good, as all that our Maker made is good.
God created, and looked on Creation, and cried out, It is good!
At Christmastime we look at that tiny baby who was born in Bethlehem, and we, too, may cry out, It is good! It is very good!
Maker of the galaxies
O Maker of the galaxies,
Creator of each star,
You rule the mountains & the seas,
And yet—oh, here you are!
You ride the fiery cherubim
And sail on comet fall.
You teach the seraphim to hymn,
And yet—you left it all.
You left the realms of fire & ice.
Into a young girl’s womb you came.
O God! This was the sacrifice!
Nothing will ever be the same.
A Galaxy, a Baby
The birth of my own babies (every woman’s Christmas) shows me that the power which staggers with its splendor is a power of love, particular love. Surely it takes no more creative concentration to make a galaxy than a baby. And surely the greatest strength of all is this loving willingness to be weak, to share, to give utterly.
That Newness
The second Christmas of our marriage, and the first with our six-month-old baby, the beautiful flesh of our child made the whole miracle of incarnation new for me, and that newness touched on kairos (God’s time, not human time).
Now, all these years later, I plunge into the delightful business of painting Christmas ornaments with my grandchildren; I hear the hammer as Bion puts together a dolls’ house which looks remarkably like Crosswicks, our house in the country; the New York kitchen smells fragrant with Christmas cookies; this, for me, is incarnation.
EPIPHANY
I cannot go back to night.
O Truth, O small and unexpected thing,
You have taken so much from me.
How can I bear wisdom’s pain?
But I have been shown: and I have seen.
—from “One king’s epiphany”
Miracle on 10th Street
A snapshot of a little girl, a piano, a Christmas tree. What could be more ordinary, more normal, more safe? But it wasn’t safe that Christmas. It might have been ordinary and normal, because what happened to us happens to many people, but it wasn’t safe!
This little girl, our first child, is looking wistfully at the tree, and her usual expression was vital, mischievous, full of life. But that Christmas she was wilted, like a flower left too long without water. She sat with her toy telephone and had long, quiet conversations with her lion (“You can never talk while the lion is busy,” she would explain). She didn’t run when we took her to the park. She was not hungry. I bathed her and felt her body, and there were swollen glands in her groin, her armpits.
We took her to the doctor. He looked over our heads and used big medical words. I stopped him. “What you are saying is that you think she has leukemia, isn’t it?” Suddenly he looked us in the eye. When he knew that we knew what he feared, he treated us with compassion and concern. We knew the symptoms because the child of a friend of ours had died of leukemia. We knew.
We took our little girl to the hospital for tests, and she was so brave that her very gallantry brought tears to my eyes. We went home to our small apartment and sat in the big chair and told stories and knew that we would have several days’ wait for the test results because of the holidays.
My husband was an actor. I am a writer. Like most artists, we had vivid imaginations. We tried hard not to project into the unknown future, to live right where we were, in a small apartment on 10th Street in New York City. We loved our apartment, where we slept on a couch in the living room. To get to the bedroom we had to walk through the kitchen and then the bathroom. At that time Leonard Bernstein lived on the top floor and would occasionally knock on our door to leave his suitcases when he did not want the long climb up the stairs. We were happy. My husband was playing on Broadway. I had had two books published and was working on a third. We had a beautiful child.
And suddenly the foundations rocked beneath us. We understood tragedy and that no one is immune. We remembered a church in New England where, carved in the wood of the lintel, are the words: REMEMBER, NO IS AN ANSWER.
My mother grew up in a world of Bible stories, and I thought of the marvelous story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. These three young men refused to bow down to an idol, a golden image, and King Nebuchadnezzar was so furious that he ordered them to be thrown into a furnace so hot that the soldiers who threw them into the fire were killed by the heat.
But Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego stood there in the flames, unhurt, and sang a song of praise of all creation.
King Nebuchadnezzar was astonished and asked, “Did we not cast three men bound into the fire?” They answered, “True, O King.” He replied, “But I see four men loose, walking in the midst of the fire, and they are not hurt, and the appearance of the fourth is like the Son of God.”
And that, perhaps, is the most astounding part of the whole story. God did not take Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego out of the fiery furnace. God was in the flames with them.
Yes, it is a marvelous story, but I thought, I am not Shadrach, Meshach, or Abednego and the flames burn.
I rocked my child and told her stories and prayed incoherent prayers. We turned on the lights of the Christmas tree, lit a fire in our fireplace, turned out all the other lights, and I managed to sing lullabies without letting my voice break, or tears flow. When my husband got home from the theater we put her to bed, and we held each other. We knew that the promise has never been safety, or that bad things would not happen if we were good and virtuous. The promise is only that God is in it with us, no matter what it is.
Even before the test results came from the hospital our little girl began to revive, to laugh, to wriggle as we sat together on the piano bench to sing carols. Our hearts began to lift as we saw full life returning to her, and the tests when they were returned indicated that she had had an infection. It was not leukemia. She was going to be all right. She is now a beautiful young woman with children of her own, and she has gone through her own moments of terror when her eldest child was almost killed by a car. I suspect that most parents know these times. I know that the outcome is not always the one we pray for. In my own life there have been times when the answer has indeed been NO. My husband died, and I will miss him forever. This past July 28 the car I was in was hit by a truck and I was almost killed. I am still recuperating and wondering by what miracle my life was saved, and for what purpose. Certainly everything is more poignant. Were the autumn leaves this year more radiant than usual? What about the tiny new moon I saw last night? And my family and my friends: Have I ever loved them as much as I love them now?
I think back to that Christmas when my husband and I did not know whether our little girl would live to grow up.
Between that Christmas and this there have been many times when I have been in the fiery furnace, but I am beginning to understand who is in there with me and that when I need it, I am given courage I never knew I had. Every day is a miracle, and I hope that is something I will never forget.
Summer’s End
Now the long golden shadows of evening no longer stretch across the field. Shadows already hover in the corners. Nevertheless we set the table for dinner outdoors. It is cool enough so that
I put on my old polo coat. My feet in summer sandals are cool. Long before we finish eating we have to light the hurricane lamps. We sit there watching the last pale light leave the sky, the first stars tremble into the darkness. Then the Big Dipper is there, and Cassiopeia’s Chair, brilliant against the night. Summer is over.
Calling, Calling
One foggy night I was walking the dogs down the lane and heard the geese, very close overhead, calling, calling, their marvelous strange cry, as they flew by. I think that is what our own best prayer must sound like when we send it up to heaven.
And indeed prayers continue and will continue. Mostly my prayers are almost wordless, just a holding out to God of your names, and then I can call on the Spirit, like the geese.
A Thanksgiving Weekend
Snow fell on Friday, a lovely clinging whiteness that outlined every twig and branch and blade of grass. Now we have had rain and the snow is all gone, but it was just right for a Thanksgiving weekend in the country.
A child’s prayer
Thank you, God, for water,
for the water of the ocean
in which I paddle with my bare feet
and let the sand squish through my toes.
Thank you for the water from the brook
which flows even in the winter
under the ice.
That Tiny Flame
I think of James Clement (in The Love Letters and Certain Women) telling about the making of cider in the winter, when it is put outdoors to freeze. In the center of the frozen apple juice is a tiny core of pure flame that does not freeze. My faith (which I enjoy) is like that tiny flame. Even in the worst of moments it has been there, surrounded by ice, perhaps, but alive.
Crosswicks: An Old Pattern
I was grateful at Christmastide to have time for these thoughts, away from the busy schedule which never seems to let up in the city. Here, at night, I can listen to the silence, which is broken not by sirens and taxi horns but by the creaking of a house that is about two hundred and fifty years old. It was built by hardy folk. They didn’t have the machinery we have to make things easier. Men and mules did the work. The wood for our house didn’t come from a lumberyard, but from the great forest that surrounded the original village; it must have taken incredible strength to have felled the tree that is our roof beam.
And those who built had to be hardy spiritually as well as physically. The doors at Crosswicks are Cross-and-Bible doors. The hardware is HL—Help Lord—and they needed help. The weak survived neither the long, cold winters nor the heat of summer. Women and infants died in childbirth; grief was a daily companion, but it was also part of their spiritual life, their pattern of creation.
The glory
Without any rhyme
without any reason
my heart lifts to light
in this bleak season
Believer and wanderer
caught by salvation
stumbler and blunderer
into Creation
In this cold blight
where marrow is frozen
it is God’s time
my heart has chosen
In paradox and story
parable and laughter
find I the glory
here in hereafter
Into the darkest hour
It was a time like this,
War & tumult of war,
a horror in the air.
Hungry yawned the abyss—
and yet there came the star
and the child most wonderfully there.
It was a time like this
of fear & lust for power,
license & greed and blight—
and yet the Prince of bliss
came into the darkest hour
in quiet & silent light.
And in a time like this
how celebrate his birth
when all things fall apart?
Ah! wonderful it is
with no room on the earth
the stable is our heart.
An Open Window
If I look for an icon for Christmas, what I see is a mother and child and the radiant love between them—not necessarily Mary, the mother of God, but any one of us human mothers holding our babe in delight and joy.
This icon, too, alas, can be idol. When a mother manipulates, controls, abuses, ignores, dominates, sees her own motherhood as more important than the child she has birthed, idolatry is again rampant. But the icon can remain clear even when we make mistakes, as all mothers do, as even Mary surely did. She, being human, could not comprehend the dual nature of her son. She wanted him to turn water into wine, to reveal his divinity, even though he made it quite clear that the time was not ready. We mortal mothers far too often do not want our children to be human. We are human creatures, and with the best will in the world we do the wrong things. But as long as we remember that Creation, including our children, is God’s, not ours, the icon of mother and child can be an open window.
The Eve of Epiphany
When I was a little girl in France I put out my shoes on the Eve of Epiphany. They were only ordinary shoes, not proper sabots, so I wasn’t sure that they would be noticed by the three Wise Men; but in the morning one shoe held a new drawing pad, and the other a box of colored pencils. I like the idea of presents and feasting on Twelfth Night, so that Christmas can follow quietly on Advent. Christmas doesn’t start until Christmas Eve, and then it can go on and on and the tree shines as brightly on Epiphany as on Christmas Day.
And there’s more time to make things, which is one of the joys of Christmas. Our favorite presents are the homemade ones. Several years ago we decided that we were not going to be bullied by the post office or the Greeting Card Establishment into mailing our cards well before Christmas. We make our own cards, and I may not get an idea for one well before Christmas, for one thing. And there are a goodly number of people we write to only once a year, tucking the letter in with the card. So for the past several years we’ve taken our time, and as long as the last Christmas letter gets mailed before Lent, that’s all I worry about, and Epiphany is a season of joy instead of exhaustion.
Epiphany
Unclench your fists
Hold out your hands.
Take mine.
Let us hold each other.
Thus is his Glory
Manifest.
God became man, was born of a woman, and we would have liked to keep this man-child with us forever; and that kind of possessiveness leads to disaster; as most parents know.
When I wrote the following lines I thought of them as being in Mary’s voice, but they might just as well be in mine—or any parent’s.
Now we may love the child.
Now he is ours,
this tiny thing,
utterly vulnerable and dependent
on the circle of our love.
Now we may hold him,
feeling with gentle hands
the perfection of his tender skin
from the soft crown of his head
to the sweet soles of his merrily kicking feet.
His fingers softly curl
around one finger of the grownup hand.
Now we may hold.
Now may I feel his hungry sucking at my breast
as I give him my own life.
Now may my husband toss him in the air
and catch him in his sure and steady hands
laughing with laughter as quick and pure
as the baby’s own.
Now may I rock him softly to his sleep,
rock and sing,
sing and hold.
This moment of time is here,
has happen
ed, is:
rejoice!
Child,
give me the courage
for the time
when I must open my arms
and let you go.
I looked at my last baby lying in his cradle, knowing that he was the last child I would bear, for I nearly didn’t survive his birth; looked, touched, listened, with an incredible awareness I might not have had if I had been able to expect to bear more children. As each change came, I had to let the infant-that-was go, go forever. When he was seven months old I weaned him, as part of that essential letting go, letting him move on to child, little boy, young man…Love, and let go. Love, and let go.
An Offering of Love
Jesus should be for us the icon of icons, God sending heaven to earth, “Lord of Lords in human vesture.” God has given us each other as revelations of divine creativity, and the ultimate revelation is in Jesus of Nazareth, the Incarnation of God into human flesh: carne = flesh. God enfleshed for our sakes. God’s love offered to us fully and wonderfully and particularly in one person.
Making worlds: a child’s prayer
Lord God,
you took great big handfuls of
chaos and made galaxies
and stars and solar systems
and night and day and sun and rain and snow
and me.
I take paint and crayon and paper
Miracle on 10th Street Page 4
