Advent-on a more personal note
December 8, 2011
This Advent season, I’m feeling a little bit like Zechariah. The Bible tells his story of the altar boy personified. We find him in the temple going about his perfectly rehearsed rituals. He is soaking in the words that have been embedded on his heart and his mind, the faith that he has inherited. And he sees a vision of an angel. He hears news of a coming birth that takes the breath out of him. And in an instant nothing will ever be the same. He is speechless. The priest, the preacher, the prophet, has run out of words.
Have you ever had that happen...when the truth has come to visit you, and there are no words that can touch it?
I lost a friend recently. She once asked me to pray for her Cancer to be gone, for her to get better. And for a moment, I was mute. And then miraculously the prayers tumbled out, “God, may your yearning for life, and our yearning for life be winding their way to one another”. Her unspoken prayer was always that she would not let go of life, that she would not give up. And she became the answer to her own prayer. These prayers became her chemo. And although I didn’t know it at the time, they were also a balm for my soul.
Since she has gone, I am having trouble finding words...lost in an irrepressible longing for the thickness of silence. Maybe it will be quiet enought that I can hear her praying into me, until the words come again, and there is something worth saying, until God’s language that rests and resides in us, startles, and stings, and softly coaxes me into holy speech.
Maybe by the time Christmas comes, there will be just enough room around the lump in my throat to choke out the songs hailing the birth of the one who is “the Word made flesh”, who is both beyond words, and for whom there will never be enough words.
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