BREATHE LISTEN NAME

SOUNDS:  I heard my first robin of the spring Monday morning, yesterday morning, and once again today.  Usually it takes a couple days before I see one, but it joys me to know they are there.  Schools are closed, and we can’t do our artistic residency, but yesterday evening, I could hear neighbor children down the block laughing and screaming.  A blessing.

On the other side of sound, my wife Luisa is organizing the thousands of myriads of glass she uses for mosaic.  Yesterday, while I was meditating upstairs, she dropped a box of them on the floor.  It’s happened before, so I wasn’t too alarmed, but it made me think about all that is being broken in our world right now: bodies, families, businesses, our social life.  There will be time and imagination to make beauty out of this brokenness, but first we have to be in the brokenness.

BREATH: Today is the Feast of the Annunciation, nine months before Christmas Day.  It almost always falls in Lent, the time of pilgrimage leading up to the death of Jesus on the cross, and his resurrection.  Angel Gabriel says to young Mary: “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you”. In Greek (as in Hebrew), the word for spirit and wind are the same.  I imagine Mary breathing in the spirit of those words of Gabriel, and letting the power of the most high overshadow—from inside her, inside her very guts.  Not just her womb, but her entire body, her whole life becomes the shelter of the holy.  Considering the Greek word is δύναμις, from which we get the word “dynamite”, that must have been quite a breath!

I’ve been practicing a meditation technique the past couple of days, where I take deep breaths. I do that often, but in this practice, you hold your breath (which I think is holding yourself) for awhile after you’ve breathed it all in.  And you hold your breath, your self, for awhile after you have left it all out.  I found that when I hold my breath, myself while I am full of breath, I can feel the pulse in my head and I start to get nervous until I let it out.  When I hold my breath, myself when I have emptied my breath, I feel calm.  There is wisdom in this, wisdom that Mary knew.  Emptying ourselves makes our selves be more open to grace.  I did discover that it helped to open my mouth just a little when my lungs were full of breath.  Maybe that made me—literally—a little less full of myself!

NAMING:  Gabriel also says to Mary: “therefore the child to be born will be holy; will be called Son of God.”  I think you could also translate that (my Greek is very rusty, but I have no qualms about making things up) something like: “because of the Spirit coming upon you and the power overshadowing you, the one who is to come will be holy, will be named Child of God.”

There is a lot we don’t know about what is to come with this virus, the economy, our world.  But I believe we can breathe this word that hung from our baptismal fount in church from Advent until almost Lent:  “All children are holy”.  That was the theme of our Posada this past December, that as we come seeking posada, shelter for Mary, Joseph and the little one who is coming, we come bearing this undeniable peace: that all children are holy, that each life is precious, and that we all have within our bodies, our selves, a remarkable inn, a beautiful and cozy sanctuary in which we can shelter the holy breath.

And that holy breath comes with incredible power to love, even when we are kept apart.

The poem below is from my book “The Devouring Land”, which is NOT on Amazon, but you can purchase from me. 20% of my cut goes to ministries with immigrants, who stand the most to suffer from the economic recession,

Be justice, be mercy, be listening, breathing, naming.

Patrick

THE EGYPT OF MARYS WOMB *

A small town.  A back door.

A young woman at her work

chopping, searing, holding.

A flash, not so much of light, as

the chorus of sight that light trails                 

as it passes by.  A strange

word, an aspiration,

a slight bow of the head,

a warm wrapping of wings.

There will be lions, later.

There will be swords.

But tonight, your flesh

is reed and pitch,

bitumen and straw,

floating on the great river,

eyes open, naming,

one by one, all the stars

of the vast, quaking world.

* Title from a poem by Robert Bly