“Mary” Christmas

A few weeks ago, I talked about this story, about John the Baptist, leaping for joy in Elizabeth’s womb. But this last Sunday of Advent belongs to Mary, the mother of Jesus, the mother of God. The young woman whose faith allowed her to birth an unexpected savior. This Sunday also belongs a bit to Elizabeth, her cousin. When Mary came to her, scared, she met her with compassion for Mary’s fright. But, thank God, she also was filled with hope. She had longed for years to feel a child quicken within her womb.

Gosh it must have been terrifying to be Mary.

The closest I will come to Mary and Elizabeth’s story

As a cis man, I will never know what it is like to carry a pregnancy. I won’t know what it is to feel the vulnerability and power of my body as another body grows inside. I won’t know what it is like to be unexpectedly pregnant, vulnerable to the judgement of my family of my neighbors. I won’t know what it would have been like to be Elizabeth either, scared I would never conceive. I won’t know this feeling. But a few years ago I had an experience that might be the closest I will come.

In 2017, Ellis and I completed our training to be foster parents. We had spent every Thursday night, for something like two and a half months, in a classroom in St. Louis with about 20 other foster-parents-to-be. The training was tough, emotionally, there was a lot of talk of trauma in those hours of classes.

But what was tougher were the meetings with the social worker to prepare our home study. This document was the official conclusion of the training, the state sign off on our candidacy to be foster parents. The study would be read by the workers representing the kids, helping them to decide if we were a good home.

The home study talked about our physical home, about bricks and mortar, but the study also sought to tell our social-emotional history as a couple. By luck of the draw, the worker assigned to write our study was overworked. She had far too large a caseload, and on top of it, she was struggling to get back on her game after a long medical leave. The classes wrapped up in late November, and it wasn’t until the 22nd of December when she gave us the draft of our homestudy.

Even signing up for the classes hadn’t been easy for me. I was a busy rector in my first parish. I wasn’t sure I was ready to be a parent. But Ellis was sure. And our dog Oscar was sure. Every time he saw a child in the park near our house, it wasn’t just his tail that wagged, his whole body wriggled with joy expressing just how much he wanted a kid to share our home. Oscar was just one of the signs I saw that fall as I prayed and listened I finally felt “yes it was time, we could do this, I could do this.” And then the study came.

Reading the worker’s report devastated me. She had several major inaccuracies, including our ages and details about our families of origin. She described my relationship with my father in ways that made me sure she had confused me with someone else. Worse, she characterized what I thought were charming anecdotes about Ellis and my disagreements over trivial things, like whether he should try and improve my great grandmother’s banana bread recipe, (for the record, squash does not go in banana bread but it turns out a tablespoon of vanilla extract is a great addition), she treated this anecdote we shared as if it was a major problem in our marriage. I thought I detected a bit of stereotyping of us as a same gender couple, and not in a positive light.

I had worked hard to be presentable. It’s taken a lot of life and a lot of therapy to realize, I have a streak of perfectionism that comes from trying to earn love. Like many LGBTQ+ people, somewhere deep down I thought it was my job to earn the love of all of those people I was scared wouldn’t love me. So this study hit me square in my place of fear and vulnerability.

Within moments after reading it, I knew intellectually that the study was bogus. I knew we would fight to get it corrected. But somehow in that moment, I also just felt crushed. It felt, in those last days before Christmas, when I was working 60-hour weeks to get ready, like our chances of becoming parents were disappearing.

So I went to yoga. Moving my body is usually a good idea when I’m frustrated, or sad, or just need to get out of my head. The class was with a teacher I’d never met. I signed up anyway. Partway through class his playlist brought up a song from my childhood, John Denver’s cover of the Beatle’s “Mother Nature’s Son.” Something in my body just clicked, and I crumpled onto my mat and started to weep. We’re talking ugly snotty crying. I don’t cry easily or often, so this was disorienting and embarrassing. And so needed.

The teacher just walked slowly over and sat down. He kept on teaching but put a hand gently on my shoulder. I cried for another 10 minutes. Before the end of the class, my breathing steadied. I found my way into a couple of the poses.

After class he caught me in the hallway. I tried to apologize. He said, “don’t be sorry. It happens. Are you going to be okay?” I said, “I think so.” He said, “You will be.” We never talked of it again. I kept taking his classes. A year and a half later, Josh was one of the first people I told about Silas being placed with us. He gave me a huge hug.

There are times in life when the road ahead seems impossible. There are times when obstacles come, disease, illness, grief. There are moments when we are borrowing time. In those moments we are reminded of our vulnerability. We are reminded that we are finite, limited, not in control.

We need some time with Mary

I believe, in these last days of Advent, these last moments before Christmas, we need some time with Mary. Mary learned the hard lesson of the spiritual life…Faith is not about having it all together. Faith is not about having answers. In fact, if you have all the answers, if you have your life all together, you don’t need faith.

Faith is for the confused and the frustrated. Faith is for those of us who find ourselves brokenhearted. If we’re honest, that’s all of us sometimes. We all, all of us, have our moments. Faith is not about intellectual belief. Faith is about longing. Faith sometimes looks like a yoga mat covered in tears. Faith looks like a hand reaching out to hold another. Faith feels like a long slow breath in the face of difficult news.

Christmas can be a tough season for folks who are feeling a little lost. Christmas can be tough. All the pressure to feel joy to the world, all that sentimentality, can feel like a bright spotlight on those of us who don’t feel perfect. If you’re a little down around the holidays this year, you are not alone. You’re not a grinch. You are welcome, even in your grief. Thank you for being honest. Thank you for being real. Christmas is a story for you too, maybe more for you.

I think we need to spend some time with Mary, the real Mary, because she helps us understand what it means to be a person of faith in a dark time. So, as an Episcopalian, as a Protestant Episcopalian, I gotta tell you, I believe in Mary, a scared teenage girl who ran away when she found out she was pregnant. I believe she felt humiliated and frustrated. I believe she felt like her world was coming to an end.

And I believe God met Mary, in those frightening months, like God meets us. I believe God comes to us in what can seem like the most disorienting moments of our life. In the midst of fear, in the midst of frustration, when we are at our wit’s end, that is when we need God.

You see something happened to Mary, between the lines of Luke’s Gospel. Mary changed from the scared girl who ran away into the fierce and faithful woman who sings the Magnificat. Between the lines she became the Mother of Jesus, strong enough to bear with God through the most humiliating circumstances. Mary’s most ancient title is theotokos, the God bearer. This idea is one of the most difficult and beautiful teachings of the Christian faith. God chooses to be born in the toughest circumstances. And God chooses to be born to someone who found faith enough to sing “God lifts up the lowly. God remembers the humble and meek. God fills the hungry with good things.”

Mary, in the midst of the most frightening time of her life, sees the big picture. She sees that her faith is what will carry her, and that her faith won’t carry just her. Her story is caught up in the wider story. Her hunger for justice, her longing for peace, her longing for the wrongs to be righted, that longing isn’t just about her. She has faith that the world itself can be lifted up.

So in these last hours of the Advent season, we spend a little time with Mary. We turn to Mary asking her to teach us how to hope when hope seems so unlikely. Teach us about a faith that doesn’t paper over grief or loss or fear. God doesn’t need us to hide any part of ourselves. God doesn’t need us to try to present some picture-perfect image of our life. God chose Mary. And Mary can teach us to see the wider story, that God chooses to be born when life seems so unsure.

So this year, if you can’t have yourself a Merry Christmas M-E-R-R-Y, have a Mary Christmas M-A-R-Y. Know that in loss, in confusion, in fear, God can still be born. Mary helps us to know: if we are a little blue before Christmas, if our emotions are complicated, if we don’t have it all figured out, it will be okay. Have faith. We’re not alone.