I, like all angels, am a scatter of words,
half startling with great profundities,
half absurd, I flash the shape of many wings,
I sing, and like all angels, am sometimes heard.
My task, now, is to introduce,
to appear to that slight girl
who will carry a chorus in her womb.
If flesh can reverberate with the cries of prophets,
or murmur like a sage describing a long dream,
this girl will invite the past to sing
as she carries that child who will perfect
the great cosmic stumble of all human beings.
The humans who come after will always tell her story.
They’ll innovate and speculate, repeat it on a rosary,
set it to music, drip paint through it,
sift its claims with theology and poetry.
No one will ever get it right.
Only she can hear what I whisper in her mind.
Only she will feel the belly-kick of the divine,
its tight drumming on her skin,
its messages hidden within her body’s rhythms.
She is the place where holiness meets the world.
She is the bud from which astonishment unfurls.
All others will hear only an echo of my voice,
shaken within angelic reverberations,
muddled by the world’s noise.
No word you hear will be my truest message.
That is reserved for her.
But I invite you, wandering world,
to sing towards a future sky, sequined with angels,
full of resplendent cries, our proclamation of perfection,
of an end to all afflictions, a cessation of agonies,
announced within my messenger’s wings
and your Advent dreaming.
I invite you, wandering world. Hark!
Try to grasp my meaning.
Illumination
Marie Howe helped me to imagine Mary differently. In her book The Kingdom of Ordinary Time she presents a series of poems from the life of Mary, conceiving of Mary as self-aware and mystically-minded, a contemplative whose life has prepared her for the Annunciation. I have heard much rhetoric about Mary’s poverty and powerlessness. This was the way that she was thought of during my time in seminary and after. A child who represents all of the downtrodden of the earth, consenting to God in a way that made her more of a symbol than a person, a mannequin dressed up in God’s love for the poor. Howe made her powerful and real. In the poems her mind is full of mystery, but there is no weakness to her character, no shrinking off to the side of the story. She looks around at her world with a wide, accepting gaze, and reports back what she sees. Howe treats her like a contemporary, and the world she tells us about is very close to our own.
In my poem it is the angel Gabriel who speaks, and I found a kind of humility in this divine being as I attempted to write in its voice. Angels, after all, are messengers for God. But so is a beam of sunlight on a winter day. So is the flight of a hawk, low through the trees, or the lapping of water against a pier, or the sound of music coming from a distance. All of God’s communications are somewhat scattered and offhand in our day to day lives. We might grasp their meaning, but how we grasp it, when it is made up of random incidents and noticing, isn’t something that we can articulate well.
Our understanding of the divine is at least partially conditioned by the world we inhabit. We filter holy messages through our prejudices and assumptions, our habits and theories and histories. The past is always inside of us, and its chorus of foolish and wise voices is always clamoring. To hear something that is truly new, wildly different from the expected, we have to focus hard and concentrate. Even then, we might fail to make out every word that is being said. Listening to angels is like attempting to listen to a friend who is trying to have a conversation with us from the other side of a crowded train station.
Mary doesn’t have this problem, as the divine word is gestating within her. The voice of God is murmuring in her belly. Of course, every parent knows that fetal communication is mysterious and sparse. But it’s a different kind of listening when your own body is involved. It brings the holy close, even if the message remains obscure. Listening to God, for Mary, is intimacy with her own flesh. It is a deeper form of self-knowledge.
The rest of us will have to make do with the echoes and reverberations, the voice drowned out by the crowd, the message conveyed semaphorically by the small incidents of our lives. Gabriel has a limited set of tools to choose from. Mary gets the message repeated in the soundings of her own flesh. The rest of us will have to cup our ears.
KPB Stevens 