I see my reflection in the polished gold of my gift,
like a priest staring down into a chalice.
I shine from the side of the scrolled box,
and looking at myself is like looking at the sky,
at the part of me that lives above,
always close to the goodness of God,
always trying to choose, with me,
good thoughts, good words, good deeds.

I am, like all of us, a reflection,
a small encapsulation of my most full self,
sent here, like all of us, to journey, to love, to delight.
Above, I abide like a steward, keeping my eternal house.
Why bring a gift, why follow a star? What is it that I hope for?
To turn, always, away from hate,
from falsehood, deceit, chaos and decay.
I am not alone. My heavenly self walks through stars,
does what is good, thinks well, speaks a generous word.

We will come together at my death,
myself and my reflection in this gift.
We will be judged together on a bridge.
Let it be wide, and easy to cross.
Let my death be full of song.
I have brought my gift to a holy one.
I kneel with it. The echo of my face is lifted
into his holy mother’s arms.
She knows that I’ve sometimes been complicit
in the world’s harms. Still, like the maiden on the bridge,
she will lead me to the House of Song.

Illumination

It would happen to me every Sunday, if I looked. I would see my face reflected in the chalice as I hover over it, praying and memorializing the Last Supper. Myself, distorted in polished silver.

But would I see my whole self? I’ve been reading about Zoroastrianism, the religion of the Three Magi who follow the star to the manger in Bethlehem. Zoroastrians believe in “vertical dualism.” They believe that the cosmos is divided into two camps. The good camp, full of truth, order, kindness, and decency, is presided over by Ahura Mazda. The evil camp, full of falsehood, chaos, cruelty, and self-service, is presided over by Angra Mainyu. Human beings can choose which camp to belong to, and we do so by our daily actions, following Ahura Mazda by engaging in good thoughts, good words, and good deeds, or following Angra Mainyu by engaging in lies, slander, and cruel and self-serving acts. The great cosmic battle is fought every day through individual choices.

Zoroastrians conceive of the self as two separate but always connected entities, at least during our sojourn through this life. When we are born, we separate into the fravashi and the urvan. The fravashi remains in the heavens, while the urvan is sent into the mortal plane. Doug Metzger writes that this process is “like a space station dispatching a scouting craft to earth, reuniting with that craft some time later, and sharing information about what was discovered down on the planet.” This is not a punishment, or a fall. Creation is good and full of delights. The urvan get to sample these delights, and their sojourn here will be joyful as long as they remain aligned to Ahura Mazda and engage in good thoughts, good words, and good deeds.

The magi follow their star, and as they walk over the hills and through the valleys, as they cross the rivers and mountain ranges, they are engaging in good works. They are not spiritual wanderers looking for something to latch onto. They live and act within their own story world, and their actions reflect their beliefs, not ours. If the star is leading them to the baby Jesus, it is because they can understand his birth from within their own context.

For them, he is a  saoshyant, a divine herald of the day of judgment. Born of virgin mothers, saoshyants appear at different moments of history and stand beside Ahura Mazda in the battle against Angra Mainyu. The great cosmic battle ends when the saoshyant sacrifices a bull, ending the last judgment and ushering in the time of peace and beauty that will follow. For the magi, Jesus ends judgment, ends the strife and terror of our moral struggles. He is one of many saoshyants, but that doesn’t diminish his holiness or make the journey to visit him less important.

I have found much solace in this religious understanding, and it does no harm to my own deep Christian belief. Life can be very hard. St. Paul wrote that when we try to do good, evil lies close at hand. Our good thoughts, good words, and good deeds often go unnoticed or unappreciated. Or they are manipulated, and used for evil ends. Or they seem small and unimportant when the world is writhing in pain. I must be reminded that the smallest act of kindness, the rising of compassion within my mind, even when I’m angry, the saying of a word of comfort at a bleak moment, has cosmic value, is its own small defeat of evil.

It gives me solace to think of the self as multiple and good. For awhile now I’ve followed Walter Brueggeman in thinking of the self as a covenant of many personas. We all have playful selves, wounded selves, competitive selves, creative selves, hopeful selves, lamenting selves. We are multifaceted. A covenanted self, to borrow Brueggeman’s phrase, is a balancing act between these many facets. We act differently in different situations. We allow different selves to lead in different contexts. I have a sexual self and a church self, a counseling self and partying self. I live by a covenant in which the sexual self does not show up at church, the partying self does not show up when I’m at a death bed. Every facet of my personality needs an outlet, needs a moment to be in charge. I tend to my soul by going to a party or being intimate with my spouse, and by praying and celebrating at the altar, walking hospital hallways and giving last rites. All of it matters. There is no essential self or “authentic” self. There is only covenant.

Yet there is also, often, a feeling of homesickness. As if there are facets of who I am that simply are not present in this world. The Zoroastrian categories of fravashi and urvan help me to make sense of that homesickness. My heart is restless until I rest in God. There is great solace in allowing the thought that part of me already is at rest within the presence of the divine.

At the end of life, Zoroastrians believe that the fravashi and the urvan are reunited at the foot of the Chinvat Bridge, the bridge that leads into the afterlife. They begin to cross the bridge. If they have cultivated good thoughts, good words, and good deeds, the bridge will be wide and they will be met by a beautiful maiden who will lead them into the House of Song, where divinity waits to embrace them. My poem ends with Mary taking the role of the maiden. The magi who narrates my poem knows that he has, sometimes, failed, despite his best efforts. Yet as his gift is lifted into Mary’s arms, he finds his reassurance. He sees his face reflected in the gold of his gift. His fravashi and urvan anticipate their reunion. Such solace is worthy of any voyage, no matter how arduous.

Now this world’s mind
finds the strangeness of angels
and the snow, trampled in the streets,
relearns the clarity of the sky.
Stars flame in plates of food,
and the claims of bodies,
abused by years of walking,
scarred from work, are made good.
The whole town is angel-dressed,
and all the people are astounded.
Each neighbor wears a different face,
each is arrayed in startling clothes.
Choirs sing from a cow’s dull chewing,
an ox stamps the ground
with a rhythm that only God knows.
We are matter, living selves, really here.
Yet the infant in the manger
brings the angels near.
They are stranger than we hoped,
they stare with many eyes
and roiling galaxies drape their mouths.
The universe astounds with its complexities.
Language abandons all words of praise.
Fall on your knees!
A star explodes where the baby lays,
a Word is summoned through his sleeping form.
The world will never be the same.
We learn to cry like angels.
We learn a new silence.
We adore.

Illumination

John’s Gospel speaks of the incarnation without ever mentioning the manger, the baby in swaddling clothes, the cows and donkeys, the shepherds, the adoring mother and father. God comes into the world as a Word, and although John speaks of flesh, he offers no specificity, as if flesh and language are both equally abstract. No nativity scene can capture his conceptualizations. If we were to follow John’s descriptions and try to put something in the bed of straw in a carefully carved creche, we would quickly realize the limits of our imagination. What small wooden carving or porcelain figurine could represent a word, a light, fleshiness in its pure and unsullied form?
John is referencing the first creation story in Genesis. Again and again, God uses words to create order out of chaos. John would like Jesus to be that chaos denying utterance. Jesus might be a riverbank that holds in the flood waters, a house that remains standing after an earthquake. He might be a ritual, or a harvest season, or a covenant. His flesh comes to represent whatever might help to keep the terrors at bay, whatever gives us a sense of rest and peace. The manger becomes the world, its comforts extended into any setting.
Yet it’s never domesticated comfort. Strangeness is always part of the sense of order. The angels, the seraphim and the cherubim, are composite creatures. Their six wings, their incandescence, their many faces, their wheeling eyes, all contain features from a multitude of beings. If the Word is austere in its abstraction, the angels are lush with description. Both angelic multiplicity and a simplicity that is near to emptiness are used to describe the divine incursion into creation.
A true manger scene might require that we allow the weird into our understanding of the incarnation. Even words will fail eventually. There is something ineffable in the experiences of the people and animals that gathered in the stable. How often we forget their astonishment. How often we forget that they lose themselves in wonder, that they enter states of ecstasy.

If anyone objects to this union
let them know that I will not touch you
until the child is born.
Let no one say that he is mine,
and not the offspring of a vision.
Everyone will look at us strangely.
They will whisper “his new wife
has seduced him with her ecstasies,
he is enticed by mania.”
Even my friends will say
“You are not yourself.
She has changed you.
You are not who you were to me.”
And I will say, “The wind blows where it will.”
I will say, “It’s a different kind of love.”
They won’t believe me.
So I might make recourse to angelic visitations.
I might claim that I received a commanding dream.
But really it was your face when you told me.
The fragile certainty in your gaze.
The way you often look beyond me
to some horizon I cannot see.
The gentle specificity
with which you do everything –
knit a blanket for the cot,
let onions fry in the bottom of the pot.
I am a man who measures twice,
who is careful with a join.
But you are careful beyond all belief,
as if everything is alive, is fragile, as if
the whole world is an infant
pleading for your care.
I am already seeing with your eyes.
Let all others stare.

Illumination

A friend told me about a cathedral in Europe that has a pillar carved with a depiction of the Three Magi arriving at the stable in Bethlehem. They are on one side of the pillar. St. Joseph sits on another side, pouting. A similar image is displayed at the Met Cloisters. Joseph, sitting with his eyes half-closed, resting a cheek on a fist. Is he unhappy? Indifferent? Just sleepy? Two of the magi adore Mary, who sits with a damaged carving of the infant Christ in her lap. Time and, perhaps, vandalism, has removed her nose, making it hard to read her expression. Her eyes, also, are half-closed.
The medieval mind was not the first to relegate Joseph to the sidelines and offer some sly commentary about his place in the story. The Gospels themselves present him as a kind of upright dullard, willing to do the right thing without bothering to have much of an opinion about it. His marriage to Mary is never cast in a romantic light. He’s older than she is. He’s offering his protection, helping her out. It’s easy to imagine that he’s patronizing, that he seeks the economic arrangement of a family without seeking love.
I want to subvert this image. I want Mary to have more impact on his life, to be an active player in the small drama of their marriage. If we imagine him actually falling in love with Mary, then we also must spend time wondering about the qualities in her that drew his affections. I refuse to see her as a kind of puppy in the snow, a waif in need of a savior. I don’t want him to love her in a way that feeds his ego.
My poem is an attempt at reversing our assumptions. What if it is Mary, and not Joseph, who guides and shapes the relationship? The angel appears to her first. It is her great “yes” that leads to the incarnation. That “yes” must have been infectious. It must have given her a deep charisma. If we exalt her, why wouldn’t Joseph exult her as well? Let us imagine that he falls in love with her vision. That he is a disciple to her teachings.
Those teachings might be mostly domestic. She doesn’t get up on a box in the public square and start declaiming. She doesn’t start healing people or casting out demons. She knits. She cooks. She prepares the nursery. She offers these simple acts as forms of healing, of protection. The savior of the world will be safe within the sphere of her labor and influence. She will be a good mother.
And she will teach Joseph to be a good father. He can still be a simple man. He won’t write a book, or sing a majestic song. He won’t petition the king or collect a band of followers who will go with him as he makes his daily rounds. He’ll make good furniture. He’ll be careful and attentive in his relationships. He’ll pay attention to dreams, and learn to see the world as Mary sees it.
It is enough. It is beautiful. It is the kind of marital love that anyone would be happy to have.

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.

This is my son John.
In summer, he will wear a buffalo robe,
or bury himself in an anorak or a ski-jacket,
snow pants and a hat with ear flaps.
In winter he’ll walk naked.
His skin will be blue.
When he’s out in the wilderness
he might sit on a pole,
or roll himself up like a hedgehog
and live in a tree.
He might insist on being walled up
in a church or a tomb.
People will come from all around
to hear his raw visions of winnowing forks.
He’ll appease our lust for divisions.
In all ways he’ll be wrong
when he describes his divine cousin.
He’ll wear the face paint of a clown.
No one will know him without feeling eerie,
as if chaos is a bee in his mouth,
as if God is a flood as well as a season,
an earthquake and the waxing of the moon.
My child, O my child,
you will live such foolish truth.
Cry out the dangers that shadow our safety,
become the poet of the shrouded dooms
that hide within our complacency.
God chose you to say this to the world —
we will always need strangers
to judge us and love us.
We will always need gooseflesh,
the pinprick of the uncanny,
the locust mystery, the bizarre, the unearthly.
We will always need some raw character
to wave at us from a river. We will always grieve
when our children become strangers.

Illumination

About a decade ago Steven Charleston, the Bishop of Alaska, wrote a remarkable book. Charleston is a member of the Choctaw Nation, and his book, The Four Vision Quests of Jesus, reflects on the life of Christ in terms of what he calls the Native Covenant. He understands Native culture as a text that Jesus speaks into, in the same way that Jesus’s life and teachings spoke into and out of the text of the Hebrew Scriptures. This is a wonderful and liberating claim. For a long time I’ve insisted, along with many others, that a Christian must read and draw lessons from the “book of the world” as well as from scripture. Charleston takes this claim further. Culture, he says, is always a text that Jesus interacts with, and a culture’s understanding of Jesus illuminates the Gospels as powerfully as the epistles, the psalms, the prophets, wisdom literature, apocalyptic books, and the Torah do.
Part of the Native Covenant that Charleston brings to his reading of the Gospels is an understanding of necessary strangeness. Whether they admit or not, every culture has a deep need for strangeness. In Christian history, many figures have arisen who have intentionally estranged themselves from the world around them. In the 5th century, a man named Simeon lived on a pole near the Syrian city of Aleppo and was given the nickname of Stylites. In the 12th century the Belgian mystic Christina the Astonishing lived in trees and rolled herself up like a hedgehog to sleep. In the 13th century the Italian mystic Angela of Foligno would scream in church and block doorways as she stood frozen in place, weeping over the sacred mysteries. There are many, many other examples, including St. Francis, who was treated as a stranger both by his society and by the order he founded.
Bishop Charleston points out the idea of necessary strangeness was more easily accepted and venerated in Native tradition than in European Christendom. He writes about two types of necessary strangers, the koshares who lived among the peoples of the southwest and the heyokas of the Plains peoples. Both were clowns, people who played important cultural roles and were welcomed because of their differences. Koshares would interrupt dance ceremonies with provocative, scatological, and even lewd behavior. Their actions would “break the barriers of convention and…fracture (sic) the religious perceptions of the participants.” They would shock people out of their ordinary conceptions and deepen religious experience by introducing a necessary sense of chaos to ritual. Heyokas served a similar purpose, but in everyday life. They were “contraries,” people who deliberately did “the opposite of the expected.” On hot days they wore the warmest clothes, and on cold days they went naked. They walked and rode horses backwards. They sometimes wore the clothing of the opposite gender. Their actions and choices exposed the dualities that are present within day to day existence.
John the Baptist clowned in a similar way. He wasn’t much of a prophet, since his predictions didn’t come true. He spoke of winnowing forks and divisions, and claimed that the Messiah would burn “the chaff” away in an unquenchable fire. Yet Jesus, in his ministry, spent most of his time among those who might be considered “chaff,” his society’s unloved and unwanted. His life on earth didn’t end with a grand and dramatic threshing, and for two thousand years some churches have spent a lot of time wondering why all the people they don’t like are still allowed to live in the world. They want the threshing and divisions, but Christ seems very reluctant to get around to winnowing people. Yet if the Baptist wasn’t a prophet, then what was he?
If we accept him as a clown, we can name him as a stranger rather than a prophet. He isn’t there in the story to make profound predictions. He’s there to make things weird.
In a wonderful passage, Charleston speaks of John’s embodiment of the “chaos of God:”

(The chaos of God) is earthly, seminal, disruptive, and energetic. It weaves through a more stately ceremonial of evolution, like strands of DNA, holding life together, but always capable of producing the unexpected. Sacred clowns are the electric energy that arises when order meets chaos. They are spiritual synapses, firing off the creative power between life and death. They stand in exactly the same place John the Baptist occupies by the banks of the Jordan, with one foot in life and the other in destruction. John’s call to repentance is more than a call to change. It is a call to face the reality of existence, the exact point where to be and not to be meet.

John is a liminal figure, standing on the border of the possible. He creates a contrast with Christ. As Charleston puts it, John “paint(s) the background so the figure in the foreground may stand out even more clearly.” This is what strangers and strangeness always do. With their strangeness, they bring the expected into high relief. Because of their chaos, we come to understand the ways we order our life. It’s part of why the church tolerated and even celebrated people like Christina the Astonishing and Simeon Stylites. Every group and society needs a critique of their idea of order.
An argument could be made that Jesus, also, is very strange. Those who opposed him found him chaotic. He came to disrupt the corrupt and indecent orderliness of his time. He works to disrupt the unjust and venal orderliness of our time. John doesn’t quite describe Jesus’s strangeness correctly, but he is right to claim that Jesus is strange. Christ’s strangeness has more to do with embracing rejected people than it does with the winnowing fork and the unquenchable fire. But, as the Gospel story will go on to prove, both kinds of strangeness are dangerous to the authorities.

Both John and Jesus had mothers, and Luke spends a good amount of time on these mothers in the first few chapters of his Gospel. Later poetry and song will go much further in elaborating on Mary’s life, describing moments when she celebrates and mourns for her son. I wanted to do the same for Elizabeth. In my poem, I present her as someone who sees and understands her son, and the role he will play. In the last line, I hope that her grief is clear as well. It is part of the grief of all parents, but amplified. All parents know that our children will come to live inner and outer lives that have little to do with us. We will become at least a little bit estranged through no fault of our own, and no fault of our children. Can we see past this grief to the great revelations that our children’s strangenesses offer to us? Can we celebrate the ways that they reveal the contrasts and dualities of our lives?