Advent III
In our advent texts for today there has been a shift from a call to watchfulness and then repentance to joy. We have moved from the key words hope and mercy to the key word – joy.
In Isaiah 61 and Psalm 126, the people represented there cannot contain their joy.
Those who have gone out weeping, bearing the seed for sowing, have come home with shouts of joy, carrying their sheaves.
And the voice of the one in Isaiah who greatly rejoices in the Lord, whose whole being exults in God, does so because God has clothed that one with garments of salvation and a robe of righteousness so that like a bride and bridegroom they are decked out with garlands and jewels.
Let the celebration and dancing begin.
This talk of shouting for joy or exulting in God with one’s whole being etcetera might be cause for discomfort for normally constrained Mennonites. In my traditional and fairly conservative Mennonite upbringing the only thing that would have caused more discomfort than overtly expressive joy would have been overtly expressive joy in the form of dancing.
If I think of the church that I grew up in and try to picture the most joyfully expressive person I remember, it would have to have been one of the song leaders and then only because at least this particular song leader actually looked joyfully and seemed to enjoy leading our singing with large and expressive arm movements.
But this is not to say that joy was not a part of our lives in the church I grew up in or in my life as a child. Could it have been a quiet joy?
I was led further into this contemplation of joy by our primary text for today – the song of Mary or the Magnificat, in Luke chapter 1. In this song, her soul magnifies the Lord and her Spirit rejoices in God her Saviour because, she says, he has looked with favour on the lowliness of his servant. (she is speaking autobiographically) From now on all generations will call me Bless-ed for the Mighty One has done great things for me and Holy is his name. This ends the autobiographical part of the Song – the rest is about what God has already accomplished. First, in verse 51 he has shown strength with his arm, and then in the great reversal of fortunes in verse 52 and 53, He has brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly;
1:53 he has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty.
What God has already done? This song names as already accomplished what we normally expect will happen at the end of all things. Traditionally, in theological terms, when we talk of our relationship to the Reign of God, we say we live in the tension between the already (the already accomplished) and the not yet (the groaning of all of creation for a completion of what God’s salvific acts have begun).
However, in this song, one that echoes songs of praise found in the Old Testament,
the overwhelming sense of joy is one that comes from a deep awareness of what is already true despite apparent evidence to the contrary. In the Mary story, there is lot’s of evidence to the contrary; an unexpected pregnancy and a dangerous economic and social predicament are only the beginning
I want to talk about this joy and awareness of what is true despite appearances to the contrary by becoming autobiographical myself for a bit and tell you about my own personal relationship to joy and dancing.
Despite my fairly conservative Mennonite upbringing, on occasion, I have experienced the joy of dancing. As a young girl, maybe age five or six or seven, I remember listening over and over again to one record album that my parents had – it was an album of the Glen Miller orchestra. For those of you who are too young to remember or maybe of a different culture, the Glen Miller orchestra played big band swing music and the song I remember best from that album was called, “In the Mood.” My younger sister and I would get ourselves some costuming, full length gowns and suit jackets seemed appropriate for some reason, and we’d glide and swing around our big farm kitchen, stepping up and down off the couch as necessary and playing pretend trombones and trumpets; whatever was required to express the mood of the music. My emotional memory of this is the completely uninhibited joy of song and movement. This type of joy is innocent joy. It knows no real hardship.
My childhood like everyone’s was followed of course by awkward adolescent self awareness and since dancing was frowned upon occasions for it were rare and so as a youth and young adult I don’t recall experiencing uninhibited joy quite like that again.
This is not to say that there wasn’t a simple or basic joy to my life, like background music, it was there as I moved through high school, university, early years of marriage and the birth of three sons, I just wasn’t expressing that joy in dancing. And in general it was a fairly innocent joy. But innocent joy rarely lasts forever. For some, this innocent joy passes much sooner than for others and is usually occasioned by an event outside of one’s control. Illness, an accident, depression, the loss of someone you love, any type of seriously unjust treatment, abuse, bullying, the loss of hope, shattered dreams, loss of trust in someone you have loved, other types of brokenness in relationships, the loss of a job … and the list can go on….the things that happen to you that wake you up to the reality that living a good life, making good choices, and even following Jesus don’t and can’t protect you from loss and being wounded. I received my wake-up call to the realities of loss in my late twenties. I’ve heard this experience of loss described as the moment that the music of your life stops and everything is changed.
When the music of life stops if only for a while – what happens to joy then?
In one of the most profound surprises of my life, in the moment of most profound loss, by the grace and love of God, out of the silenc
e grew an awareness of new music and an invitation to new dance steps and a deeper experience of joy than I could have imagined. In theological terms I began to be aware of the “already in the midst of the not yet.” I would have to say there wasn’t one moment when this happened. What I’m going to try to describe to you about new music and new dance steps took place over several years. But there were some key ingredients to those years that made new music and dance and joy possible.
The first step when the music stops, when innocent joy is lost, when one realizes that one is not as invincible as one thinks, is acknowledgement and embrace of loss and finding a way to mourn. Contrary to this message, we live in a world that encourages us to stay in control, remain stoic, ignore the pain, pull up our socks and move on, but the message to ignore the pain and “soldier on” is part of the darkness in the world that wants us to carry on with the illusion that we are in control. And our already experiences of the Reign of God reveal to us places where we have been touched by the love of God and that there is a deeper truth in the realization that we aren’t in control. In that place when we allow ourselves to know an emptiness that only the Spirit of God can touch we find a way to claim that we belong to God and that we do not belong to the darkness of this world and our own illusions of control. Part of this embrace by God and experience of the healing power of God, the “already” in the midst of the “not yet,” only becomes possible when we allow ourselves to mourn, lament and cry out along with the Psalmist our longings for redemption.
“Blessed are those who mourn,” is what the verses in Matthew and Luke say, not “Blessed are the stoic.” When we mourn we bump up against our own experience of what I think Mary meant by her use of the word “lowliness.” This is not self-abnegation but a realistic awareness of self in the presence of the divine. God looks with favour on all of us but sometimes it takes a sense of our own lowliness to be aware of this favour and rejoice in it.
In my own experience, when I fully acknowledged my losses, for me it was loss of the relationship with my first husband and the father of my sons. That loss was combined with loss of dreams and hopes and particularly of the way I had envisioned family and this included a really significant loss of my sense of identity as wife and mother in the family that I had envisioned and for which I had hoped. Despite all of that I will forever remain grateful that God provided safe places to mourn with friends, sisters, an excellent counselor and persons at church and for the constancy of God’s love and presence throughout. The time to mourn and the time to dance became the same time as I took tentative steps towards new life. These steps towards new life included learning as if for the first time what it meant to love and be loved by God, what it meant to forgive and be forgiven, and how to celebrate all that was still good despite the occasional and necessary tears of sorrow.i
It was near the end of many years of healing from this loss that I went on a journey to Crete with Martha Smith Good (a retired Mennonite pastor) and some others exploring the role of Mary in the history of the church and the history of divine feminine beliefs and images. On that journey I learned again how to dance but this time with renewed joy in the power and goodness of God to heal and to bring about new and abundant life. We were a group of women on this trip, but even so we learned traditional Cretan dances. These dances included very simple elegant, joyful movements and we danced these folk-like dances on a fishing village street, on a roof top terrace and anywhere else we had a chance. I felt a freedom in dance on this trip that I hadn’t experienced since the big band swing days of my early childhood. And to top off this experience on our last night in Heraklion, we came across a street celebration where two children – aged five or six or seven, were simply letting themselves glide and swing with each other through the street lost completely in the uninhibited joy of song and movement. This type of joy is innocent joy. It knows no real hardship. And yet the very real hardships of life cannot dampen a deeper richer joy of the “already present” Reign of God among us. It is this awareness of the already present Reign of God that causes Mary’s soul to magnify the Lord and her spirit to rejoice in God her Saviour.
And her song continues:
For he has looked with favour on the lowliness of his servant, for the Mighty One has done great things for me, and Holy is his name. His mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation. He has already shown strength with his arm, he has already scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty…
The “already” presence of God for Mary was growing within her and her overwhelming sense of joy expressed in this song was one that came from a deep awareness of everything that was already true despite apparent evidence to the contrary.
May we be granted the grace to model her lowliness and a way to dance ourselves into her joy.
i My thinking here is significantly influenced by an article based on a presentation by Henry J. M. Nouwen, called “A time to Mourn, A time to Dance: A celebration of the Spirit of Healing,” shared February 4,5 1992 at the 25th anniversary celebration of Christian Counselling Services, Toronto, Ontario.