Expecting Emmanuel

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This Advent I’m expectant. Expectant for the birth of Christ; and expectant for the birth of a friend’s baby (a boy, due on Christmas Day). I’ve had the joy and honor of walking with this friend, a single-mom who goes to my church, through this: her first pregnancy.

As I’ve watched her middle become as round and beautiful as the earth, we’ve been talking a lot about Mary’s journey as a single-mom. We’ve debriefed what it must’ve been like for Mary to feel pregnant and alone. We’ve read her story in the gospels, imagined what it was like when her baby, Jesus, met leaping John the Baptist – through layers sin and flesh and uterus – for the first time.

We’ve talked about the surprising way Mary – an improbable teenage girl – wound up carrying God’s child . . . carrying God within herself . . . And how all of us carry divinity within us. CHRIST IN US THE HOPE OF GLORY.

The magic and mystery of God coming near in such an unlikely way has struck us organically as my friend (full and beautiful with child), nears her Christmas due date, prepares her nursery, and tries to survive these last few days where sharing a body with a big baby boy are becoming arduous and exhausting. As we wait and expect her looming day of deliverance, we’re awed at the ways Jesus Christ, Emmanuel, God-with-us has come to be close to us.

A poem by Rowan Williams, titled Advent Calendar, helps us as we wait:

Advent Calendar

He will come like last leaf’s fall.
One night when the November wind
has flayed the trees to bone, and earth
wakes choking on the mould,
the soft shroud’s folding.

He will come like frost.
One morning when the shrinking earth
opens on mist, to find itself
arrested in the net
of alien, sword-set beauty.

He will come like dark.
One evening when the bursting red
December sun draws up the sheet
and penny-masks its eye to yield
the star-sowed fields of sky.

He will come, will come,
will come like crying in the night,
like blood, like breaking,
as the earth writhes to toss him free.
He will come like child.