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CHRISTMAS CONTEMPLATION
Wondrous Beloveds,
It sounds so peaceful, so deceptively simple. “And Mary pondered all these things in her heart.” Luke 2:19. But since when does the mother of a new born have time for anything, much less ‘pondering.’ This fully human, fully God, baby, like other newborns, probably gave her the standard new parent gifts: frequently interrupted sleep, meals, and bathroom usage attempts. Her contemplation around this miracle of the Incarceration, possibly looked less like a prayer retreat and more like being aware of and savoring God’s work and Presence in fleeting moments. The thought of Mary doing quick breath prayers, and pocket contemplation, and under her breath, praying bits of collects memorized from the Book of Common Prayer (Mary was Episcopalian) gives me hope.
Maybe the invitation to Christmas contemplation is praying as we can and not as we can’t, allowing for life circumstances, individual temperaments, and our living relationship with the Divine to dictate what our pondering of the nativity looks like. May you ponder all these things in your heart. Merry Christmas!
Love and peace,
Mo. Nikki
Christmas Poem
by Mary Oliver
Says a country legend told every year:
Go to the barn on Christmas Eve and see
what the creatures do as that long night tips over.
Down on their knees they will go, the fire
of an old memory whistling through their minds!
I went. Wrapped to my eyes against the cold
I creaked back the barn door and peered in.
From town the church bells spilled their midnight music,
And the beasts listened–yet they lay in their stalls like stone.
Oh the heretics!
Not to remember Bethlehem,
or the star as bright as the sun,
or the child born on a bed of straw!
To know only of the dissolving Now!
Still they drowsed on–
Citizens of the pure, the physical world,
They loomed in the dark: powerful
of body, peaceful of mind,
innocent of history.
Brothers! I whispered. It is Christmas!
And you are no heretics, but a miracle,
immaculate still as when you were thundered forth
on the morning of creation!
As for Bethlehem, that blazing star
still sailed the dark, but only looked for me.
Caught in its light, listening again to its story,
I curled against some sleepy beast, who nuzzled
my hair as though I were a child, and warmed me
the best it could all night.
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