Lent births herself this year, no midwife braving the cold to come to her and coax her out with strong sure hands into a thankless world.
Lent crackles like a sheet of ice this year creaking underfoot her timeless chant memento mori remember the sudden plungethe icy fistthat grasps the lungs to beings sick to death of that same song and bodies wrung bare from holding themselves at arm’s length for so long.
Unbidden Lent comes.
Unwanted Lent comes.
Yoke gentle this year Lent comes.
One fist opens to expose the ash she’ll paint upon your brow if you’ll let her.
In a year bereft of touch you may shiver as her fingertips brush flesh and startle at their warmth.
And once you’ve let yourself be marked by dust Lent’s other fist will open for you gentle as spring’s first petals.
This palm glows with embers that flicker out Lent’s second song: This too remember o frail Dust — you’re born from Splendor and Splendor thrums within you even now.
…
Lent births herself this year into a world already stripped bare
and beckons to the embers in her palm. Come. This year they need only the faintest breath to stir them. Come.
This poem was written by Avery Arden. If you use it in a service, credit them and link to this site.
About this poem:
I wrote this before the sun rose this Ash Wednesday morning, my sleeping wife’s warm limbs embracing me, her breathing a steady rhythm at my back. Be gentle to yourselves and to others this season, beloved.
Many souls are already weary in this time of pandemic, and Lent is the last thing they feel like embracing. But Lent is not suffering for suffering’s sake, or increasing our burdens as some kind of challenge for ourselves. Lent is for acknowledging what suffering already is present in the world, and bearing it together; Lent is an intentional remembering of what binds us, all of us, and nourishing those ties.
Lent is stepping into solidarity – alongside Jesus on his journey to crucifixion – with the tortured and discarded of the world.
Lent may just be what our tattered spirits and weary bones need right now.
The concept of splendor comes from Sister Macrina Wiederkehr, who writes in A Tree Full of Angels:
“Why shouldn’t our experiences be filled with God? Who do we think it is who is breathing in us? Where do we think this ache has come from? And has it ever crossed our minds that God, too, has a deep yearning for us? …You are the dwelling place for the Source of All Life. You are an offspring of the One who said, ‘I Am who Am.’ If the One who gave you birth lives within you, surely you can find some resources there in your sacred Center. An expert lives within you. An expert breathes out you. Your life is entwined with the God who gave you birth. Frail dust, remember, you are splendor!”
i will not worship my husband’s god – not now i’ve witnessed how he acts in wrath:
how he burns children and cornered women with the men who long tormented them
and scorches tortured earth and bodies that maybe could have bloomed again if given time and proper nourishment.
ii.
anyone who dares to preach to me on necessary evil, or collateral damage, or how everything happens for a greater purpose
while stepping deftly over charred corpses to avoid soiling their shoes
should thank their bloodthirsty gods they are out of range of my frozen fists.
iii.
i will not worship the god of my husband, no! – he never belonged to me or mine anyway, nor made us his.
in his search for just ten righteous people in this sand-and-soldier-blasted city he overlooked us women and our little ones.
of course he found no innocents among the men perverted by the war they’d lost who would not let themselves give in to grief but let their self-contempt and wounded pride corrode into distrust of all outside their little sphere…of course!
O god of men like mine! of course you failed to round up righteous men in such a place where strangers are condemned as enemies and difference is dragged out and disciplined!
but had you thought to look where men never look you would have found us.
iv.
if any god will make room for my wrath i’ll worship them till my last crumbling breath!
v.
the sex slave of my husband’s uncle claimed she found a god who saw her as she languished – a goddess not too proud to meet her gaze nor too ashamed when faced with Hagar’s anguish to hear out her complaints.
o desert deity of the attentive eye and ears that hear the tortured woman’s cry, are you the one who turned my frantic flesh into this silent sentinel of salt?
vi.
let me worship whatever Being it was who took my broken heart and salted it so that never again will it have to bear fruit only to watch it trampled and consumed by men not worthy of it.
yes! let me worship whatever Being it was who came in mercy, not in wrath to wrap my limbs in unbreachable brine so he can never, ever touch me, take me, again –
not after what i heard he’d let men do to the fruit of our union, the girls of my womb;
not after he proved willing to turn his back on women and children going up in flames.
that is the Being i’ll worship now: the One who stood with me transfixed upon despair,
who empowers my bearing witness for all time to the screams of burning women, left behind.
with my face to them my back is turned on him forevermore…
though i worry who will protect my daughters now from him from all men.
vii.
if any deity swears to defend my little girls, i swear i’ll worship them…
viii.
from my fixed point in the sand i watch the stars flow across the overturned bowl of the sky.
i alone watch long enough to learn by heart the patterns stretching over years traced by these winking fish wheeling in their pool of perfect black.
but i who chart the arc of time unblinking discern no promised bend towards justice.
evil breeds and grows as strong as good. knowledge is slaughtered, lies fallow for centuries before it raises a slender shoot again that is seized and hailed as something New… only to be mangled, murdered, dis-membered again.
nothing new, nothing new under the stars.
ix.
with sleepless eyes i mark the cyclical slaughter the rich slip underneath their laden tables while sipping from their cups that bubble over red as the blood they’ve trampled from the neighbors they choose not to re-member.
and, far away and high, as eons wheel by i watch the stars wink out one by one.
If you this piece it in your own service, please credit it to Avery Arden and link to binarybreakingworship.com. I also invite you to email me at queerlychristian36@gmail.com to let me know you’re using it!
About this poem:
I intend for this poem to make two points:
That to bear witness is holy and necessary, particularly when moving quickly on from history’s atrocities serves the Powers That Be. This is why in my poem, Lot’s Wife interprets her transformation not as a punishment for looking back but as a gift or act of mercy — affirmation of her need to bear witness, her refusal to turn her back on her neighbors.
That we must actively reject the God of Patriarchy, the God of Genocide, the God of Xenophobia, in order to embrace the God Who Sees those whom the world discards. See Shirley Guthrie’s commentary on God the Heavenly Tyrant being dead, along with all other “gods that were really nothing but a projection of our own fears, wishes, insecurity, greed, or speculation.”
Meanwhile, I acknowledge this poem’s shortcomings, particularly the over-simplification of implying all the women of Sodom were “innocent” or that all the men were guilty; gender dynamics are much more complex than that, especially in our own time and space. To say nothing of nonbinary people like me who do not fit within that man/woman dualism anyhow.
I have long held a deep compassion for Lot’s (unfortunately and tellingly unnamed) wife of Genesis 19, ever since first reading Slaughterhouse Five in middle school, in which Kurt Vonnegut writes,
“And Lot’s wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human. So she was turned into a pillar of salt. So it goes.”
Vonnegut’s was the first voice I found that pushed back against the predominant interpretation that Lot’s wife was wrong to look back. Since then, I have found others who also treat this woman with love instead of scorn — including the primary inspirations for this poem: Miguel A. De La Torre’s Embracing Hopelessness (2017); and Peterson Toscano’s and Liam Hooper’s Bible Bash Podcast episode 26, “Sodomy, Terrorism, and Looking Back.”
In a different work of his, a short essay from 2010, De La Torre explains that Lot’s wife has been vilified across the ages in order to “justify her demise”: “If she is not portrayed as a foolish woman with a self-indulging heart, then her punishment would appear capricious.” If we are to believe in a fair God who doles out punishment only on people who deserve it, we must conclude that Lot’s wife was wicked somehow. To suggest that she was right to look back, and unjustly punished, is to call God’s goodness into question — or at least to question the biblical text.
De La Torre argues that we will never know the motives of Lot’s wife (and of course I agree, even while using this poem to imagine what those motives may have been). Chances are, he says, this woman was neither perfectly innocent nor horribly wicked:
“Rather than depicting Lot’s wife as either the totality of worldliness or the other extreme of virtuousness, maybe we should see her like we see the rest of us: a human who falls short of the glory of God. As an invisible member within a patriarchal society, she probably did the wash with her neighbors – also nameless women. They might have been present when she twice gave birth, as she might have been when they gave birth to their own children.”
It is this woman who carved out a life — as so many of us must — in “the entrails of empire,” who befriended her fellow unnamed women in patriarchy’s shadow, that I with Vonnegut love dearly.
As we come to accept that we cannot know much but only conjecture about Lot’s wife, the biblical text does provide us more background on Sodom than is often explored in discussions of this story.
In the Bible Bash episode from which I drew for this poem, Peterson Toscano brings in Sodom’s painful military loss in Genesis 14 to contextualize the xenophobia and brutality of Sodom’s men in Genesis 19. In the biblical world, defeat in battle sometimes resulted in the rape of defeated soldiers by the victors — sexual violence that is much more about humiliation and domination and toxic masculinity, of course, than sexual orientation. Moreover, Sodom’s enemies proceeded to loot the city of everything. After such a painful loss, it seems in Genesis 19 that the men have been twisted into hateful, fearful beings — in a way that Peterson skillfully connects to the United States’ response to 9/11. These defeated men of Sodom would enact sexual violence on any foreigner who dares enter their domain, as if to regain some of their (toxic) masculinity by acting as the victors, not the defeated.
It is this war-wounded city that Lot, his wife, and his daughters flee — but only his wife looks back. And therefore, according to Peterson,
“In the end the only righteous person I can think of is Lot’s wife, who can’t turn her back on this destruction. Who can’t turn her back on the women and children who weren’t even considered when they were counting who was righteous and who was not.”
(The counting of the righteous being a reference to Genesis 18, wherein Abraham persuades God to refrain from destroying Sodom and Gomorrah if just 10 “righteous ones” (masculine plural) can be found within them.)
Later in the episode, Liam responds to Peterson’s declaration that Lot’s Wife is the only righteous person the Sodom story shows us by relating her choice to look back to the present day:
“What I see around me is many, many people who also cannot turn their back on the suffering around them, and the destruction, and the ways that we are complicit in that. There are still those of us who can’t turn away. And she’s been vilified, right, as being disobedient – ‘you were told not to look back; you looked back.’ Well. Maybe that’s an interesting place to enter the story, right? What does it mean to look back, and when do we disobey?”
Whenever God is constructed in the image of fearful, vengeful, violence-hungry men, we must like Lot’s wife disobey. We must face the atrocities we would much rather turn away from.
And therein comes the influence from Embracing Hopelessness, wherein De La Torre rejects triumphalist histories that sweep suffering past and present under the rug for the sake of the comforting lie that humanity is making constant progress towards God’s reign. In accepting that history is more disjointed and arbitrary than we’d like to think, and that it has no certain happy ending, we join the poor in their state of insecurity and uncertainty (see pages 47-49 of Embracing Hopelessness).
According to De La Torre, we must let go of our salvation histories wherein suffering will be revealed to have meaning in the grander scheme of things, in favor of active solidarity with the world’s most disenfranchised. We reject ideologies that paint them as less human than us, or as coerced “living sacrifices” on the altar of progress (p. 55). With Lot’s wife in my poem, we do not turn our backs to the pain that is accepted as a necessary evil to fuel the luxuries of the elite few. And unlike with Lot’s wife, we cannot compel individuals to shoulder the burden of bearing witness alone; it must be a communal act.
As De La Torre explains, only when a community — its privileged and disempowered alike — dares to acknowledge atrocity can collective healing begin. He shares psychological findings that show how “Refusing to forget the horrors of history can bring healing,” as making space for survivors to be heard “contributes to a collective healing process that publicly condemns the past while attempting to prevent future violations” (p. 103 of Embracing Hopelessness).
Without a communal acknowledgement of atrocity, there can be no healing. Thus there will be no healing for Lot’s wife: she is quite literally frozen in her act of re-membering her destroyed city, because none join her in it. Just as marginalized persons are dehumanized into mere objects in the dominant culture’s epic history, Lot’s wife is denied personhood as well — her very name has been lost to time along with her human form.
Meanwhile, in turning their backs to the destruction, fleeing from acknowledgement of Sodom’s suffering, Lot and his daughters likewise will find no healing. Their story as developed in Genesis 19:30-38 brings more atrocity, more fracturing of personhood and relationships. As De La Torre explains, “Trying to forget past traumas…leads to emotional disorders with consequences for the individual and community” (p. 103). Trauma unaddressed begets trauma across generations.
With the generational trauma that has built up and festered over centuries in our own time, it becomes clear that “present social structures are the end product of a history the dominant culture prefers to forget. These events may have taken place in the past, but the power and privilege squeezed out of them continue to accrue” (p. 105). In the face of this reality, we must admit that the notion that history’s arc naturally bends towards justice is nothing but a comforting lie.
And when we reject that comforting lie for the truth that the future is uncertain, we must also scrutinize the certainty that a wholly good, all-powerful God exists — the question of theodicy. Alongside the righteous Job of scripture, as well as with Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, De La Torre puts God on trial; he insists upon holding God accountable for not preventing the horrific suffering that is the disowned and forsaken offspring of Eurocentric, imperialist “Progress.” And for any who may worry that such a trial would constitute some manner of blasphemy, De La Torre writes,
“I fully understand the trepidation of placing God on trial. I would rather follow the lead of others and say at the conclusion of time, it will all be explained and make sense. I too feel a pull toward fixing my gaze at a happy ending, joyfully proclaiming ‘it is well with my soul.’ Oh, how much more comforting it would be to proclaim, ‘God is good – always!’ With all my heart, soul, mind, and being, I wish to become intoxicated with the simplicity of an unquestionable and uncomplicated faith. But to do so would be an insult to the God in whom I claim to believe.
To challenge God, to yell out in protest, to place God on trial is not the ultimate act of arrogance; rather, it is to take God seriously by crucifying our Christian-based idols for an honest appraisal of the metaphysical – whatever that might or might not be.
And maybe this is the ultimate beauty of faith – to doubt, to wrestle, to curse, to question, to disbelieve, to oppose, to joder, and to hold accountable God in defense of God’s creation.” (p. 78)
I imagine Lot’s wife joining in the outcry of Job, of prophets and psalmists, of Elie Wiesel and numberless others who respect God enough to demand answers from Them. I myself will continue to grapple with the stories of scripture as well as the stories of my own nation, to wrestle until a blessing for the oppressed is shaken out.
May we all band together for the difficult work of dismantling false gods and false histories, in order to make room for truths that empower and restore dignity to the most disenfranchised of our world.
and no one will go away hungry because there was no food that fit their dietary needs
and the table will be high enough for wheelchairs to slide easily beneath it
and no one will gawk at those of us who have trouble sitting still so long and stand instead, and stomp our feet
and no one will grab our flapping wrists and hiss, “quiet hands!” (God, i cannot wait to never hear that hateful phrase again)
and Jesus, there you will be, not at the head of the table
but in the middle of things breaking bread with hands that struggle a little, impeded by the damage done to your fine motor skills when the nails pierced your wrists
and with a wheelchair stationed behind you that friends can push you in when the chronic pain in your nail-damaged feet becomes too much
and we will all share in the lopsided chunks of gluten free bread that is your body or the cups of juice with straws in them that is your blood
and there will be laughter, oh there will be laughter loud and carefree
communicated through AAC or sign language or smiling mouths as we finally learn what it means to be
truly One: united, not in spite of but through diversity.
[image: a mural by Hyatt Moore based on Luke 14′s parable of the banquet. There’s a blue background and lots of people gathered at a long table with a white tablecloth piled with food. There are persons of many different races and cultures and with various disabilities, including several in wheelchairs or with canes or crutches, several who have down syndrome, one with a service dog, and so on. Jesus stands near the right end of the canvas, conversing with a child of color in a wheelchair and an older Black man in a wheelchair. /end id]
If you this piece it in your own service, please credit it to Avery Arden and link to binarybreakingworship.com. I also invite you to email me at queerlychristian36@gmail.com to let me know you’re using it!
About this poem: I wrote this poem as part of a project on disability theology for a class in seminary. I began my research into Luke 14’s parable of the banquet during that project, and I’m pretty sure at this point I’ve read more articles and books on Luke 14 than any other scripture passage (except perhaps Exodus 4). You can watch me discuss this text at length on my YouTube channel in the video “Luke 14 – Disabled persons are vital guests at God’s banquet.”
This poem is one of a few in which I try to envision what “perfect accessibility” would look like. In our own world, such a thing is nigh impossible, because sometimes what accommodates me may actually harm another disabled person. For instance, I struggle with loud chaotic noises and crowds, which are pretty much unavoidable at a banquet scene like the one in Luke 14 or in this poem! Could the banquet hall include a side chamber for people like me to calm down when needed – but somehow not isolate us? Will my autism manifest itself differently in heaven so that I do not become so overwhelmed by crowds – without losing what makes me me? These are important questions to explore as we work to make our faith communities as welcoming and accessible as possible – even while knowing we probably will never get it perfect for everyone. Being willing to own up to our mistakes and truly listen to what individuals say they actually need is key.
Some notes that might help in the reading of this poem:
the mentioned phrase quiet hands is one frequently used in abusive therapies (such as ABA) that try to get autistic people to be as “normal” (read: non-autistic) as possible. “Quiet Hands” is a command to keep one’s hands still rather than stimming with them. Being forced to repress behaviors that come naturally, such as stimming, can go so far as to cause PTSD in autistic people. See this webpage for more information: http://autism.wikia.com/wiki/Quiet_Hands
For more on Jesus’s own disabling wounds, with which he chose to rise and ascend into heaven, check out The Disabled God by Nancy Eiesland or by listen to/read my sermon on John 20 “The Wounds of Jesus: Goodness Embodied.” …Or just email me – it’s like my favorite topic ever and I’m always thrilled to get to discuss it!
“The disabled God is God for whom interdependence is not a possibility to be willed from a position of power, but a necessary condition for life. …For many people with disabilities, too, mutual care is a matter of survival.
To posit a Jesus Christ who needs care and mutuality as essential to human-divine survival does not symbolize either humanity or divinity as powerless. Instead it debunks the myth of individualism and hierarchical orders, in which transcendence means breaking free of encumbrances and needing nobody and constitutes the divine as somebody in relation to other bodies.”
– Nancy Eiesland in The Disabled God
“The text [of Luke 14] clearly situates people with impairments at the final banquet just as they are, not with their impairments erased or made invisible. …Consistent with the presence of the scars on Jesus’ resurrected body, here the marks of impairment are not cured or expunged. …
What would a world in which impairments will not be eliminated but rather “redeemed” look like? For Eiesland, such a world is one in which justice comes for disabled people in the form of perfect accessibility and mutuality: ‘a justice that removes the barriers which constrain our bodies, keep us excluded, and intend to humiliate us.’”
– Amos Yong in The Bible, Disability, and the Church
Divinity entered the world in the form of an infant born in Bethlehem — a town whose name means “House of Bread”! He was swaddled by parents poor in the eyes of the world, but rich in love, and laid in a manger —
a food trough for cattle!
Thus it is that from the very moment of his birth, Jesus made known his intention to feed the hungry world with his very being — to be bread for empty stomachs and nourishment for flagging spirits.
His life was a continuation of a Movement that God had begun long centuries before Jesus:
a Movement that glimmered in the starry sky laid out for Abraham, that invited Jacob to wrestle faithfully and fervently until he came away wounded and blessed;
a Movement that carried the enslaved Hebrews out of bondage and taught them how to live into true freedom;
a Movement kept alive in times of corruption, and empire, and exile by fearless prophets who would not be silenced and who looked forward to the liberation of all prisoners, the uplifting of the poor.
It was those prophets’ message that was boldly sung by Mary, and that she and Joseph, faithful Jewish parents, taught to the boy Jesus with the help of their community’s synagogue.
It is this message, the proclaiming of God’s World-Upturning Movement, that infuses the bread and cup we share today.
Eat, drink, and let the sharing of this meal unite us across the miles into one Body of the liberating Christ who walks and breathes among us even today.
I wrote these pieces for a virtual service on December 27, 2020 (First Sunday of Christmastide) centered around the story of the Presentation at the Temple as told in Luke 2:22-40.
if you are content now you will be devastated then
for when the world is flipped upside-down all your riches will go spilling into space.
a voice cries out in the wilderness cries out: prepare the way! prepare – for what? for peace? perhaps, eventually
but first a revolution – woe to you (to us) who sit too comfortably! for soon all thrones will be upturned, and those who served as footstools wear the crown!
(o come, Immanuel! come and turn the whole world upside down!)
if you are satisfied now you will be inconsolable then
when all that succeeded in filling you up is razed to the ground to make way for a table
built of once-rejected stones – the ones too crooked, too jagged, too small, too broken to ever be chosen before.
…will those of you (of us) accustomed to places of honor at the table accept the humbler seats when those once trampled underfoot are seated at its head?
If you this piece it in your own service, please credit it to Avery Arden and link to binarybreakingworship.com. I also invite you to email me at queerlychristian36@gmail.com to let me know you’re using it!
This is a revised version of a poem included in my published volume The Kin(g)dom in the Rubble.
About this poem: Many of the Bible’s prophets speak of the End of Days and God’s in-coming Kin(g)dom as a fearsome time indeed for any of us who are comfortable with the status quo. In this poem I follow in their footsteps, and hope to remind myself that even though I belong to several oppressed communities, as a white middle-class US citizen there is much indeed I will “lose” when God transforms the world. Will I be ready? Will I be able to let go of my comfortable seat and embrace the revolution?
“But it turns out that always being accepted, always being liked, is not what following Jesus, what sharing God’s news for the world, is all about. Because sometimes, sharing God’s news for the world comes as bad news for the people who have to hear it, ourselves included. And no one likes the bearer of bad news. …”
…
“There’s no denying the similarities between our society and the one God called Amos to prophesy against: we too have gross income inequality, the mistreatment of immigrants, refugees, and other vulnerable people, the worship of money at the expense of the marginalized…
Our fancy homes and all we have in them, our malls and factories, all razed to the ground to make way for a system that does not exploit the poor?
In theory, sure, I like the idea of no one being exploited…but does it have to mean I must sacrifice some of my favorite luxuries? Must there be chaos, must there be destruction of the old, to bring in this new world of justice?
When we are at the top of the social ladder, when we are the ones benefiting from other people’s suffering, God’s good news about the world flipping upside down sounds a lot like bad news.”
When I sit with God in quiet moments, I feel so small. Sometimes, this is a beautiful thing: I become a little child in the lap of their mother, I become a baby chick under the soft, warm wings of their mother hen; I feel safe, and comforted, and loved.
But other times God’s vastness in the face of my own littleness becomes overwhelming: then I am an ant under God’s magnifying glass, I am one atom in the face of the ever-expanding universe that is God
and I become discouraged. Surely no gift I could bring to the table is big enough for this God to even notice, is big enough to make any impact on God’s vision for the health and wholeness of this world!…
so why bother? Why even try? Who am I to talk to God or about God, to lead church events, to participate in worship services, to go to a rally for immigrant rights? What change can I or any of us make?
…Then I remember that God became little Themself, as little as any of us ever was.
The impossible hugeness of God folded itself down into a microscopic embryo, was nourished by an umbilical cord, was born as a fragile infant, dependent on the love and protection of impoverished human parents.
In this season of Advent looking forward to Christmas, let us pray together to the almighty God who became small, vulnerable, one of us:
Jesus of the manger,
When we grow discouraged at our own littleness in the face of the work that needs to be done, in the face of God’s greatness, Remind us that you know our smallness, and delight in it! — that each and every one of us does have gifts to offer to you and to our fellow living beings, gifts that matter, gifts that make a difference.
Remind us of your parents, a poor young couple shut out from the inn, who made use of what they had to care for you, for God in their midst.
Remind us of how you adored the little ones among us: the children who were meant to be seen and not heard but to whom you said, “Come to me!”
And in the remembering of your love for the littlest ones, the poorest ones, the scorned ones, may we be inspired to use our gifts for the betterment of your world, to do small things with great love, to keep hope burning bright for the coming of your Kin(g)dom, where the small are lifted up.
Amen.
If you want to make this a call to the passing of the peace, you can add:
Friends, now that we have recognized that our littleness is not something to be lamented but embraced, we can share the peace of the One who became small to live and love among us. The peace of the infant Jesus be with you.
And also with you.
About this piece: I wrote this for a Advent worship service some years ago; it was our pageant day, when the children enact the nativity and we sing songs of how the divine Word became human flesh, how the great became small so that the small might become great, how each of us has a gift to offer God.
I was also channeling something I’d learned from classmates in a seminary class where we’d been discussing Psalm 139, that Psalm where the speaker wonders at how there is no place they can go that God is not there, knowing their every move:
To me, this has always been a very comforting and indeed awe-some thing to marvel at! But for one classmate, it was a thing of terror – she said it made her feel trapped in past times when she’d been desperate to escape the image of God that had been forced on her, a God who is judgmental and cruel, ready to pounce on her and damn her for any little slip-up.
She reminded me that God’s bigness can be a terrifying thing, even while it is a comfort when we meet God as a child meets a loving parent. I wanted to hold up her fears as legitimate in this piece, while hopefully softening and soothing them.
“Dust, remember, thou art Splendor!” – Sister Macrina Wiederkehr in A Tree Full of Angels
If Lent is a time to admit to our Dust – the death that awaits us, the sin that permeates our cells, our littleness and our frailness and our need –
perhaps Advent can be a time to embrace our Splendor: our intimate connection to Divinity who gave birth to us, who calls us Good and calls us to be better, who is the breath within our lungs and the warmth in dancing bodies.
Divinity embraces mortality; God entered our world and fused the physical with the Divine so inextricably that we can declare that every cell of us pulses with Splendor, despite the infection of sin.
Now is the time to be a womb for Splendor, nourishing it within ourselves.
Now is the time to prepare for the labor: the teenage girl birthing God into the world. God birthing a new world around us, inviting us to serve as Her midwives.
About this piece: I first wrote this in Advent 2019 for Instagram.
If you’re interested in more on Sister Macrina’s concept of “splendor,” here’s the longer passage from which the pull quote was taken:
“This brings me to the heart of this book, which is trusting the God who speaks to us in our experiences at every moment. No one ever gave me permission to trust my own experiences as prayerful and holy. It was something I stumbled upon, like a treasure hidden in a field. …In recent years, I seem to hear God say, ‘Put your books away. Be with me. Trust your experience. There are no experts in prayer, only people who have been faithful to the ache.’
…Why shouldn’t our experiences be filled with God? Who do we think it is who is breathing in us? Where do we think this ache has come from? And has it ever crossed our minds that God, too, has a deep yearning for us? …You are the dwelling place for the Source of All Life. You are an offspring of the One who said, ‘I Am who Am.’ If the One who gave you birth lives within you, surely you can find some resources there in your sacred Center. An expert lives within you. An expert breathes out you. Your life is entwined with the God who gave you birth. Frail dust, remember, you are splendor!”
Advent is the Time of Mary: The time for us to take notice of one whom this world deliberately ignores – a woman of color, a poor woman, a teen mom, a refugee.
Was Mary meek and mild? Not if those words are about unquestioning submission, fearful passivity.
Only if those words are about inner power, restrained for the sake of the vulnerable – not the power of violence but the power of compassion.
Not the trust of one foolish and without questions but of one thoughtful and bold and unafraid to ask an angel, “What does this mean?”
Mary the Mighty, Mother of the Meek, you who guided the first clumsy steps of the God of the Universe,
You said yes to social ostracization, yes to the heavy metamorphosis of pregnancy,
yes to God’s inrushing revolution in which the lowly are pulled up from their ashes and tyrants pulled down from their thrones.
And so all generations call you blessed – you whom the world would see stoned.
All-powerful God, You who let go of your omnipotence in favor of interdependence,
it is a wonder to behold a woman’s body shelter you, feed you, knit your cells together – just as You once knit her.
You depend on her, and she will not fail You. May I be able say the same.
I first shared this reflection on my Instagram during Advent 2019, and included the following text as a caption:
Mary’s yes to God (see Luke 1:26-55), freely and triumphantly given, was no passive yes: she said yes to interdependence with her God.
God’s request was not to overpower her or control her, but to enter into a relationship of mutual need:
Just as God kept every cell in her body spinning, so she would nurture God’s new physicality within herself – and then, after birth, feed God and keep God safe, teach God to walk and talk and read.
God desires a relationship of mutual yes, mutual care and need – a relationship of interdependence with each of us.
How do you say yes to this simultaneous empowerment and vulnerability, yes to living into a fullness of yourself that simultaneously serves others?
between your jubilant “Yes!” to God seeking shelter in you and Joseph’s “yes” to marrying you despite your indiscretion (daring to get knocked up out of wedlock! Did childhood friends desert you? Did your father weep in shame?)
would you have laughed, disbelieving, if informed that the primary epithet bestowed on you by those future generations who call you blessed… is Virgin?
Mary, teen mom, against whom every packed inn turned its back, about whom, maybe, neighbors laughed and mothers told their daughters, “Don’t be like her” (spitting your name like a nasty thing)…
You relate to the round-bellied girl eating alone in a cafeteria crowded with harsh stares;
You relate to the girl singled out at church for wearing a “too-short” skirt, blamed for the lust of grown men who ought to pluck out their eyes for looking at her at all!
…yet the words fastened to people like these are much less pretty than what you are called.
Mary, teenage rebel! – You who embraced impropriety with a song
you, full of grace but called disgraceful by men who would have you stoned –
what in heaven’s name does virginity have to do with you?
…Unless for you, virginity means not “no” to sex but “yes” to choosing for yourself, defining yourself, controlling your own body, your own life.
Hail, you who looked the status quo square in the eye – and laughed!
Hail, you who saw the Grace in being called disgraceful by a world not ready to be turned on its head.
Hail, you who defy categorization: virgin or slut, child of God or God’s own mother, obedient servant or the one who knew Jesus would do all you told him to do (and thus you brought fine wine into a world that’s parched for it)…
Teach us this defiance, devout rebel! Teach us your fervor for God’s revolution, your thirst for liberation from convention.
If you this piece it in your own service, please credit it to Avery Arden and link to binarybreakingworship.com. I also invite you to email me at queerlychristian36@gmail.com to let me know you’re using it!
About this piece: This devotional from Advent 2019 was my first attempt at explaining why I love and look up to the Virgin Mary – whether she never had any sex in her lifetime, or had a little bit of sex, or had sex hundreds of times. Regardless of her sex life, she is holy, powerful, and worthy of honor – and she knows what it is to have your sexuality used against you, whether to vilify you or to put you on a dehumanizing pedestal.
I draw from ancient ideas of virginity as being about whether a woman had a man in control of her (be that her father, guardian, husband, or son) rather than about whether one has had sex. See Pallas Athena, Artemis, and the Vestal Virgins of ancient Greece.
As a child packs a snowball tight and firm and cold seeping even through their mittens into palms
so You once packed the Universe into a ball scarce larger than the pomegranates that had yet to burst into being…
But still a greater miracle awaited! — a denser packing of Infinity into small single atoms — You! You
curled Your endless Being up into an embryo
oh! You who grew the cosmos on a particle of Breath
You packed Yourself down into near nothingness — and waited.
You waited there in warm dark roundness till the time had come for Her to birth you, wet and bloody, into an uncaring world.
Somehow the Being who could wear the galaxy like a bangle nursed and grew and toddled, walked among us tiny beings of the frail bones…
i’ll never, ever ever fathom it.
Divinity! if i could hold You now as Mary held you, in my quaking arms i think i might just know why You sustain
each instant — now, and now, and now again — all of existence.
Seed upon the palm tucked lovingly into a rich dark soil
infant on the breast fed lovingly from one’s own aching flesh
— but not yet. Not yet — already, yes — and still not yet.
with Earth i wait for You with bated breath.
If you this piece it in your own service, please credit it to Avery Arden and link to binarybreakingworship.com. I also invite you to email me at queerlychristian36@gmail.com to let me know you’re using it!
About this poem: I’ve been going through a time of spiritual stagnancy as religious trauma caught up to me…so it was a gift to awaken a little after midnight on this first Sunday of Advent with images of Divinity and Roundness glowing in my heart like embers, reminding me of birth and rebirth and the eternal sustaining breath of God.
The Creation and the Incarnation are intertwined for me – when I think of God birthing the universe, my mind eventually wanders to the human who birthed God, and vice-versa.
And through the way our liturgical year returns us over and over to the story of God’s entering into Hir good, good world; and the story of God’s creative act lasting not an instant but over all ages, I think of Meister Eckhart’s declaration:
“What does God do all day long? God gives birth. From the beginning of eternity, God lies on a maternity bed giving birth to all. God is creating this whole universe full and entire in this present moment.”
Here are notes about some of the images in this poem:
On the image of the pomegranate for the Big Bang event – have you ever sliced into a pomegranate and pulled the halves apart with enough force for those rich ruby seeds within to fling themselves upward, sideways, all about? That bright explosion is to me a fitting image for that first flinging of dust into infant stars, scattered across black space.
“…the Being who could wear the galaxy / like a bangle…” – this line is inspired by Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore’s depiction of the Lord of the Dance, Shiva, with celestial bodies whirling round his dancing ankles. You can read more of it at this link, but here are the most relevant lines:
Rebellious atoms are subdued into forms at thy dance-time,
the suns and planets, anklets of light, twirl round thy moving feet, and,
age after age, things struggle to wake from dark slumber,
through pain of life, into consciousness,
and the ocean of thy bliss breaks out in tumults of suffering and joy.
- Rabindranath Tagore
Shiva’s dance is the source of all movement in the universe; it also frees humanity from ignorance and illusion. This conception of Divinity as Dancer resonates deeply with me, and links well in my mind to the Big Bang event – a dance begun so long ago continues into the present and for all time, ever sustaining and constantly transforming the cosmos that Divinity so loves.
“…seed upon the palm…” – we return to the image of a seed, but this time it’s the hazelnut of Julian of Norwich’s visions. In her vision, Christ hands Julian a ball no larger than a hazelnut and tells her that all of Creation is contained within that small globe:
“I was amazed that it could last,” Julian says, “for I thought that because of its littleness it would suddenly have fallen to nothing. And I was answered in my understanding: ‘It lasts and always will, because God loves it; and thus everything has being through the love of God.’”
There is not a speck of matter in this universe that is not loved by God, that is not nurtured and watched over by its Creator, who revels in the stars and celebrates the blood pulsing through your fingertips. It is the creative energy and life-bearing power of this Love that forms and sustains each and every one of us. And it is that Love that moved God to slip off Infinity and step into flesh. Already this impossible event has taken place – and yet…we return to it yearly. Await it yearly. Yearn for it yearly.
The already and not yet of God’s Kin(g)dom is a Mystery that I almost think I begin to grasp when I think on the wonder and waiting to which we return as one, every Advent.
Binary-Breaking Worship 