Time and Space Turned Upside Down
Advent. That time of waiting, waiting even more trembling and terrible than the waiting between Good Friday and Easter Sunday.
But what are we waiting for? Why? We’re not waiting, as we so often are taught as children, for Christmas, for the baby Jesus to be born in a stable in Bethlehem. We’re waiting for something that has not happened yet, that has never happened before, something totally new. We know only what the end of this waiting has been called throughout the centuries: The Second Coming.
What is it, the coming of Christ in glory? The return of Christ to the earth? What’s it going to be like? We don’t know. We don’t know anything about this event that is new, that has never before happened.
But, being human and therefore curious, we want to know. We want to know so badly that sometimes we think we do know, and that can sometimes lead to danger and even evil. Whenever we want to know something before its true time, we get into trouble. We’ve never learned how to wait. We’re impatient creatures. Our impatience, our unwillingness to wait, is all through our stories, from Adam and Eve on.
The only thing I know about the Second Coming is that it is going to happen because of God’s love. God made the universe out of love; the Word shouted all things joyfully into being because of love. The Second Coming, whenever it happens and whatever it means, will also be because of love.
* * *
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We express what we believe in icons, which are creative, or idols, which are destructive. But what is a constructive icon?
Icons break time and space. One of my favorite icons is Reblev’s famous picture of the Trinity, the three heavenly angels who came to visit Abraham and Sarah sitting at a table in front of the tent. On the table is the meal that has been prepared for the heavenly visitors, and what is this meal? We look at the table and see chalice and paten, the bread and the wine. Time and space turned upside down. Here, three thousand years before the birth of Christ, is the Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; here, three thousand years before Jesus came into time for us, is the body and the blood.
So what could be an icon of the Second Coming? I think of Creation itself, and how little the astrophysicists know about it. It does seem that there was, indeed, a moment of Creation, when something, so subatomically tiny as to be almost nothing at all, suddenly opened up to become everything. How long did it take? There wasn’t any time before the beginning. Time began with the beginning. Time will end at the ending, at the Second Coming.
On a rare, clear night I look at the stars. According to present knowledge, all the stars are rushing away from each other at speeds impossible for us to conceive. Are they going to keep on, getting further and further away, more and more separate? Or is there going to be a point at which the procedure is reversed, and they start coming together again? Nobody knows.
The metaphor that has come to me is birth. Our ordinary (oh, no, they’re not ordinary at all—they’re extraordinary) human births. Right now I am like the unborn baby in the womb, knowing nothing except the comforting warmth of the amniotic fluid in which I swim, the comforting nourishment entering my body from a source I cannot see or understand. My whole being comes from an unseen, unknown nurturer. By that nurturer I am totally loved and protected, and that love is forever. It does not end when I am precipitated out of the safe waters of the womb into the unsafe world. It will not end when I breathe my last, mortal breath. That love manifested itself joyously in the creation of the universe, became particular for us in Jesus, and will show itself most gloriously in the Second Coming. We need not fear.
There are many tough questions for which we have no finite, cut-and-dried answers. Even Jesus did not answer all our questions! But he came, because of that love which casts out fear. He came, and he will come again.
Even so, come Lord Jesus!
Coming, ready or not!
Luke 14:32
Coming, ready or not!
The children freeze in their hiding places
waiting to be found.
They are ready.
When the time for the banquet came,
he sent his servant to say
to those who had been invited,
Coming, ready or not!
The old woman in the nursing home
mumbles what she can remember
of old prayers & hymns.
She is ready.
“Come along; everything is ready now.”
But all alike started to make excuses.
Coming, ready or not!
The executive planning a meeting
shouting for lists & faxes
isn’t ready to be ready
not yet.
The first said, “I have bought a
piece of land and must go and
see it. Please accept my apologies.”
Coming, ready or not!
Am I ready to be ready?
Can I put it all down
all the burdens
all the needs of love
is getting ready to be ready
ready enough?
Yet another said, “I have just got
married and so am unable to come.”
Another said, “I have bought five
yoke of oxen and am on my way to try
them out. Please accept my apologies.”
Coming, ready or not?
Drop it all. Let it go.
Let’s go!
Ready!
Advent, 1971
When will he come
and will there be warnings
and will there be thunders
and rumbles of armies
coming before him
and banners and trumpets
When will he come
and how will he come
and will we be ready
O woe to you people
you sleep through the thunder
you heed not the warnings
the fires and the drownings
the earthquakes and stormings
and ignorant armies
and dark closing on you
the song birds are falling
the sea birds are dying
no fish now are leaping
the children are choking
in air not for breathing
the aged are gasping
with no one to tend them
a bright star has blazed forth
and no one has seen it
and no one has wakened
Forever’s Start
The days are growing noticeably shorter; the nights are longer, deeper, colder. Today the sun did not rise as high in the sky as it did yesterday. Tomorrow it will be still lower. At the winter solstice the sun will go below the horizon, below the dark. The sun does die. And then, to our amazement, the Son will rise again.
Come, Lord Jesus, quickly come
In your fearful innocence.
We fumble in the far-spent night
Far from lovers, friends, and home:
Come in your naked, newborn might.
Come, Lord Jesus, quickly come;
My heart withers in your absence.
Come, Lord Jesus, small, enfleshed
Like any human, helpless child.
Come once, come once again, come soon:
The stars in heaven fall, unmeshed:
The sun is dark, blood’s on the moon.
Come, Word who came to us enfleshed,
Come speak in joy untamed and wild.
Come, thou wholly other, come,
Spoken before words
began,
Come and judge your uttered world
Where you made our flesh your home.
Come, with bolts of lightning hurled,
Come, thou wholly other, come,
Who came to man by being man.
Come, Lord Jesus, at the end,
Time’s end, my end, forever’s start.
Come in your flaming, burning power.
Time, like the temple veil, now rend;
Come, shatter every human hour.
Come, Lord Jesus, at the end.
Break, then mend the waiting heart.
Hush!
Hush!
Wait.
What’s the rush?
Why do we try to outguess God?
He will come when he comes
But nobody knows
Jesus said:
I don’t know when.
Even the angels in Heaven don’t know.
Only God.
Hush!
Wait.
It will be in God’s time, not ours.
It will be for love
Not human chronologies.
What’s a millennium?
A few years off anyhow
And on a calendar
not used by much of the world.
Hush!
Wait.
He will come for love
Never forget love
Hush!
Wait.
Listen.
Love.
INCARNATION
We matter to God. We matter that much….That’s the whole point of it all,…that God cared enough to be born.
—from “Transfiguration”
The first coming
He came
throwing off glory
like fiery suns,
leaving power behind,
leaving the storms of hydrogen clouds,
the still-forming galaxies,
totally vulnerable
as he emptied himself.
She took him in—
into the deepest part of her being;
she contained the tiny Word,
smaller than the smallest
subatomic particle,
growing slowly
from immortality into mortality,
mother and child
together in the greatest act of love
the Maker could give the made.
Together they created
immortality from mortality
How? His father was Who?
He looked like any child
from the vulnerable top
of his tiny skull
to the little curling toes.
This whispered Word made
the sun and stars,
wind and water,
planets and moons, and all of us.
But he left this joy
to be
God With Us!
understanding lowly shepherds
and two old people in the Temple.
Later, three Wise Men—
one from each human race—
came, pondering.
Most of the powerful people
were skeptical at best
God become Son of Man? Nonsense.
Christ will come,
expected or unexpected,
when God is ready,
even while we are loudly demanding
signs and proofs
which close our hearts and minds
to the Wildness of Love.
Word of Love,
enter our hearts
as you entered the virgin’s womb.
Come, Lord Jesus!
Transfiguration
Sister Egg left the convent with the shopping cart. Over her simple habit she wore a heavy, hooded woolen cape. Even so, she shivered as the convent door shut behind her and she headed into the northeast wind. There was a smell of snow in the air, and while it would be pleasant to have a white Christmas, she dreaded the inevitable filthy drifts and slush that would follow a city snow. She dreaded putting on galoshes. But she would enjoy doing her share of shoveling the snow off the sidewalk.
The twenty-five-pound turkey was waiting in the pantry, but she needed to get cranberries and oranges for relish, and maybe even some olives to go with the celery sticks. There’s only one Christmas a year, and it needs to be enjoyed and celebrated. She pulled her cape more closely about her. In her mind she started counting the weeks till August. The first two weeks of August were her rest time, when she went to her brother’s seaside cottage and swam in the ocean, and for her that time was always transfigured and gave her strength to come back to the Upper West Side of New York City.
“Hi, Sister Egg!” It was the small child of the Taiwanese shopkeeper from whom she always bought garlic because he had the best garlic in the city. The child rushed at her and leaped into her arms, pushing the empty market cart aside. Sister Egg caught the little boy, barely managing not to fall over backward, and gave him a big hug. “Whatcha doing?” the little boy asked.
“Christmas shopping.”
“Presents?”
“No. Food. Goodies.” And she reached into her pocket and drew out one of the rather crumbly cookies she kept there for emergencies such as this. The little boy stuffed the cookie into his mouth, thereby rendering himself speechless, and Sister Egg walked on. The vegetable stand she was heading toward was across Broadway, so she turned at the corner and crossed the first half of the street; then the light turned red, so she stopped at the island. In Sister Egg’s neighborhood islands ran down the center of Broadway, islands that were radiant with magnolia blossoms in the spring, followed by tulips, and delicately leafing trees. By August the green was dull and drooping from the heat. In December all the branches were bare and bleak.
She stood on the island, waiting for the light to change. She, too, felt bare and bleak. She felt in need of hope, but of hope for what she was not sure. She had long since come to terms with the fact that faith is not a steady, ever-flowing stream but that it runs over rock beds, is sometimes dry, sometimes overflows to the point of drowning. Right now it was dry, dryer than the cold wind that promised snow.
“Hi, Sister Egg.” She turned to see a bundle of clothes on one of the benches reveal itself to be an old woman with her small brown dog on her lap, only the dog’s head showing, so wrapped were woman and dog in an old brown blanket.
“Hello, Mrs. Brown.” Sister Egg tried to smile. It was Christmas Eve, and no one should spend it wrapped in an inadequate blanket, sitting on a bare island on upper Broadway. But she had learned long ago that she could not bring every waif and stray she saw out in the streets back to the convent. It was not that anybody thought it was a bad idea; it was just that the Sisters were not equipped to handle what would likely be hundreds of people hungry in body and spirit. They had taken pains to learn of every available shelter and hostel, and the hours of all the soup kitchens.
Sister Egg had tried to get this particular old woman into a home for the elderly with no success. Mrs. Brown had her share of a room in a Single Room Occupancy building. She had her dog and her independence and she was going to keep both.
From the opposite bench came a male voice, and another bundle of clothes revealed itself to be a man whose age was anybody’s guess. “Sister what?”
“Oh—” Sister Egg looked at him, flustered.
“Sister Egg,” the old woman announced triumphantly.
“Sister Egg! Whoever heard of a Sister named Egg? What are you, some kind of nut?” The scowl took over the man’s body in the ancient threadbare coat as well as his face, which was
partly concealed by a dark woolen cap.
Sister Egg’s cheeks were pink. “My real name is Sister Frideswide. People found it hard to pronounce, so I used to say that it was pronounced ‘fried,’ as in fried egg. So people got to using Egg as a nickname.”
“What idiot kind of a name is Frideswide?” The man’s scowl seemed to take up the entire bench.
“She was an abbess in Oxford, in England, in the eighth century.”
“What’s an abbess?” The man sounded as though he would leap up and bite her if her answer didn’t satisfy him.
“She’s—she’s someone who runs—runs a religious order,” Sister Egg stammered.
“So what else about her?”
Did he really want to know? And how many times had the light already turned to green? And she was cold. “She was a princess, at least that’s what I was told, and she ran away rather than be coerced into a marriage she didn’t want.”
“So she married God instead?”
“Well. Yes, I guess you could put it that way.” What an odd man.
“And merry Christmas to you,” he said.
She looked up just as the light changed from green to yellow to red. Wishing him merry Christmas in return was obviously not the right thing to do. She hesitated.
“And give me one reason why it should be merry. For me. For her.” He jerked his chin in the direction of the old woman.
Why, indeed, should it be merry? Sister Egg wondered. There were thousands homeless and hungry in the city. Even though soup kitchens would be open for the holidays, and although volunteers would make an attempt at serving a festive meal, the atmosphere of a soup kitchen, usually in a church basement, was bleak. A basement is a basement is a basement, even with banners and Christmas decorations.
“Well?” the man demanded.
“I’m not sure it’s supposed to be merry,” Sister Egg said. “I’m not sure when ‘merry’ came into it. It’s a time to remember that God came to live with us.”