“And Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart.”—Luke 2:19
Tim and I found out I was pregnant with our first child at the beginning of Advent in 1986. I announced the pregnancy to my family on the same day I was ordained, November 20 of that year. We had just bought a house, and I’d recently started my first called position as Pastor and Mission Worker to Women at Meeting Ground, Inc., a ministry to homeless people in the upper Delmarva Peninsula (region of Elkton, MD and Wilmington, DE). We were in the midst of many “new beginnings” and just beginning to make friends and build a community.
I remember vividly when I would tell other people I was expecting – people I didn’t know all that well, who were not necessarily particularly connected to me in any way – how happy and joyful they would be in congratulating me. This included many homeless and otherwise marginal people I worked with at Meeting Ground. It took me by surprise several times – why would it matter so much to them that I was going to have a baby?
Going through that season of Advent, I heard all around me the familiar verses: “For unto us a child is born,” “Emmanuel, God with Us,” and “Good news of great joy for all the people.” And it dawned on me that, in a small way, my child was a source of “good news of great joy” for people I didn’t even know all that well, simply because of the hope new life brings. So—how much more was this the case when the child to be born, Mary’s child, was indeed, God with us in human flesh.
When that child, Keith, was born, I remember feeling like a new chamber had opened up in my heart, one I’d never known was there, filled with a love different from any I’d ever known. “So THIS is how God loves us!” I remember thinking. Only of course, so much more, and so much more perfectly. And I felt I had a new understanding of the verse that says, “Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart” – all the predictions and promises she heard about her son. She took them in and held them in that new chamber in her heart, loving him as her child, of course, and also aware of the responsibility she’d been given, to raise this child who was indeed, Emmanuel, “God with us.”
I believe that God’s heart has many chambers, many spaces where love for all people dwells and grows and Is manifest in moments of joy and birth and hope, and of course, in the miracle that is human love – parent for a child, partners for one another, siblings, friends, and most particularly in the person of Jesus, who in this season we know just a tiny, helpless babe who needs to be cared for and protected with love. May we share that love with one another, even as we lovingly protect those who are most vulnerable in our world.
Love came down at Christmas
Love, all lovely, love divine
Love was born at Christmas
Stars and angels gave the sign.
(Christina Rosetti)
