A Reflection for II Epiphany
All Saints’ Church, Southern
Shores, NC January 15, 2017 Thomas
E. Wilson, Rector
A Pre-Natal Resonating Remembrance
In Isaiah’s servant song for today,
a prophet of the School of Isaiah sings a song of encouragement to the
returning exiles. They are leaving their exile in Babylon, to which they had
become accustomed, to return to a home they had never known. He sings that God
had not forgotten them while they were strangers in a strange land, but had
visions for each of them from before they were born. He sings remembering being
named while he was in the womb being formed: “The Lord
called me before I was born, while I was in my mother's womb he named me.” A
couple weeks ago I spoke of how the Hebrew people took “ to name” seriously:
for to name someone had the power to know the fullness of the being who was
being named. The name was not just descriptive but determinative as the being grew
to live into that name. The singer knew he or she began life being loved. The
name “Isaiah” has a meaning similar to other names like Joshua, Jesus, Hosea,
and Elisha; all of them are ways of
saying in Hebrew “God is salvation”.
I have been blessed in the
last year by three of my nieces giving birth to children - River, Marlowe and
Liam - and “Old Uncle Tom” gets several pictures of these three children each
week as they explore the new world they live in as the parents are surrounding
them with their love. All the pictures the parents take help us who are so far
away see how they are growing, but also help the children remember as the years
go by that they were once the center of love. These children, like their parents and their
Uncle Tom, will grow up loved, but there will be a time when they will say they
want to be out of the parents’ tender embrace - and yet often long to return. Novelist
John Updike wrote: “Children are not a zoo of entertainingly exotic creatures,
but an array of mirrors in which the human predicament leaps out at us.”
We all need to remember that
we were loved outrageously. What was the earliest thing you can remember in
your life about being loved? Tolstoy in his “Reminiscences” wrote that he remembered being an infant all
swaddled in a blanket and the look on his parent’s faces as they tried to
figure out why he was crying.
Do any of you remember
anything from the womb? I read accounts of people remembering certain events
before they were born. I’m not that deep that I can remember pre-natal things
in my conscious life, but I do have flashes of images in my dreams coming from
the pre-conscious treasury. Every experience we have, and the experiences of
all who have come before us, have been kept in some memory in our DNA.
When I was in Grad School at
the UNC School of Social Work, I was once given an exercise to use my imagination
to explore the birth experience. The school had been heavily influenced by the
work of Otto Rank, a colleague of Freud, who differed from him in seeing that
therapy needs to be in the here and now of helping people trapped in fearful neurotic
repetition of behavior that doesn’t work to unlearn the old patterns so that
they might be free to learn and engage the world in a new way. However, we need
to understand that the new, which requires a union with an unknown present, might
also produce fear. Rank suggested the “Trauma
of Birth”, where we had to adapt to a new environment, was the model of
growth throughout life - a bouncing back and forth between the fear of
separation and the fear of losing oneself in a new union. I remember one of our
assignments was to write an account of our birth, and when we looked at it, we
could see that our account seemed to fit the way we approached new ideas.
We are called to live
productively, constantly creating a new and deeper way of life. This is what is
happening to the Baptizer John and his Disciples, in the Gospel lessons. They
had come out to the wilderness to get away for the influences of the culture,
living on the fringes. However, Jesus enters their lives, and John and some of
his disciples see a new reality. John gives the disciples permission to grow
and see what is inviting them in the person of Jesus. One of them, Andrew, will
go and bring his brother Peter. The story that will happen, as told by the
community of the Beloved Disciple, who wrote the Gospel of John, is that they
will also bounce back and forth between the fear of separation from Jesus and
the fear of union. They fear that they will lose their individual identity or
that they will lose their life in following Jesus into death itself.
This is what happens in the
church. People come and see something that intrigues them, but in order to join
in union with us, and perhaps even in union with God, they have to face the
threat of giving up some of their freedom to do whatever they want. Some are
reliving the trauma of being dragged to church where they were barely tolerated
as children. Some are leery of uniting with a group that will force them to
believe things that don’t make a lick of sense or they have a hard time
agreeing with. Some of them have suspicions of a religion of peace and love
that seems to spend so much time fighting with and condemning others, where the
identity of “Christian” can be a warning rather than a welcome. Some are
nervous that they will not be up to that dying to self that must precede living
to a new life. Some think that love has a finite quantity which there might not
be enough to replenish. For some the more they are known means the more they
are vulnerable.
This is the day of our Annual
Parish Meeting where we will look at the budgets, goals, and plans of the
preceding and coming years and elect new lay leaders for the vestry. It is the
time, as it always the time each day, to make the commitment to join in union
together to live in the here and now, loving our God and our neighbor by our
worship of God and service of neighbor. Today, like all days, it is time to
leave the past and enter into a new future.
God, grant us the serenity to
accept the things we cannot change, the courage to change the things we can, and
the wisdom to know the difference—just for today.
A Pre-Natal Resonating Remembrance
The foot moves as it stretches
the wall
causing mother’s stomach to
bulge out
upsetting cup, spilling hot
drink on bed.
Mother regrets muttering oath as
a pout,
vowing never again to repeat
that squall
in front of any child later in
years ahead.
Child hears the expression of
annoying
but senses something else, not
an ear
sound but deep resonances of a
bloom
between beats of blood
coursing here
to all the different parts of
the growing
hiding in a comforting crowded
womb,
message of not taking to heart
projection
of the others' internal
struggles on to them,
“This'll happen often in the
coming years,
but hold fast time of your own
Bethlehem
to balance pain of own
Jerusalem rejection
to calm all of the moments of
fleeting fears:
you are being loved beyond all
measure,
as all will be redeemed as
your treasure.”
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