Making Room for the Messy and Visceral in Advent Storytelling

As I sat down this week to prepare a message for a Christmas Eve service, what loomed large in my reflections was the birthing and nursing mother as an icon of love, and how complicated this imagery is in society and also in church communities.

In her recent book The Biblical Mothers Deliver, Nancy Klancher cites a “job description” published in a New York Times piece in anticipation of Mother’s Day 2007.

“Must be exceptionally stable yet ridiculously responsive to the needs of those around you; must be willing to trail after your loved ones, cleaning up their messes and compensating for their deficiencies and selfishness; must work twice as hard as everybody else; must accept blame for a long list of the world’s illnesses; must have a knack for shaping young minds while in no way neglecting the less glamorous tissues below; must have a high tolerance for babble and repetition; and must agree, when asked, to shut up, fade into the background and pretend you don’t exist.”^[1] 

It strikes me that despite whatever protests we might offer, it is the reality of these expectations and the inevitable clashes between them, that gives power to the satire.

Klancher points out how expectations such as these are “powerful and deeply moralistic” and we find them playing out in a wide variety of ways in the stories of mothers in the Bible and in our culture today.

The mother-stories we find in the Bible, Klancher points out, “have given birth to hopes, ideals, group belonging, fears, betrayals, desperation, belief in miracles, kings, messiahs, and even a god made flesh.” And, she wisely notes, “we too have mother-stories today, equally powerful, idealistic, and dangerous.”[2]

This time of year many Christian communities engage with stories of Mary, and celebrate the Word becoming flesh and dwelling among us. These stories are often very sanitized, smoothed out, and otherwise incomparable to actual lived experience. This is one of the reasons I treasure Kaitlin Shetler’s words that went viral a couple of years ago. She started her poem:

“sometimes I wonder

if Mary breastfed Jesus.

if she cried out when he bit her

or if she sobbed when he would not latch”

I appreciate how Shetler, in her poem, did not shy away from mentioning blood, sweat, salty tears, loneliness, cracked nipples, fear, love, hunger, the joy of a baby’s soft head. Was Mary calm, resigned, peaceful, cheerful all the time? Did Mary experience irritation and get annoyed or overwhelmed as she cared for her baby boy? I cannot say, since I was not there. But I think that the stories we tell and how we tell them says a lot about us (and here I include both us today, and the many people responsible for choosing what texts to include in the Bible and how to talk about and understand those texts over the millennia).

As I reflect on my own complicated relationship with motherhood, the many voices inside and outside of my head vying for attention, I recognize in my heart an invitation: A desire to recognize and allow the complexity and hold space for the plethora of stories and experiences that will be gathered this week around dinner tables, in front of fire places, and at carol singalongs. 

I want to approach it all (the stories, the people, the rituals, the moments) with curiosity. And perhaps in appreciating visceral, embodied Advent storytelling, I will find an enlarging capacity to embrace the messiness of my own life and revel in God With Us now without waiting for a change of personality (though I would sure love to be more organized and less irritable!) or for everyone to behave themselves at Christmas Dinner.  

May we welcome both joy and sorrow. K J Ramsey recently wrote on Instagram, “No matter how many times we observe Advent, there is sadness in the space between our longings and our actual lives.” That was true for Mary, I imagine, at many points in her life; as it is for us. As Ann Reed sings, "I gather my blessings from the light and the dark, and welcome them into my grateful heart." 

[1] Natalie Angier, “For Motherly X Chromosome, Gender is Only the Beginning,” New York Times, May 1, 2007 https://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/01/science/01angi.

[2] Nancy Klancher, The Biblical Mothers Deliver: The Chosen, the Saved, and the Disavowed, xiv.