Voltage
Wet streets,
shining slates,
indigo on a tremble
as if dew
is wrung from it,
the mistle thrushes
of Paradise Street
nesting in January
on a lamp post
in Liverpool.
Casual, particular
as when Mary
in electric blue
before the angel,
kept the place
in the book she was reading
with her left thumb.
Pauline Stainer, Crossing the Snowline, (Northumberland: Bloodaxe, 2008) page 78.
By the time we get to Christmas Eve we are nine months after the Annunciation. But that moment when heaven articulated the divine love for creation, is the hinge point of salvation history. Overwhelming love refusing to overwhelm, and instead awaiting the yes of a young woman who could have no conception of what it might mean, to conceive and bear the life of God made flesh.
Stainer's poem (and El Greco's painting) is no easy exposition of this pivotal response, nor of the invitation that was not so much a request as an announcement. The freedom of Mary to say no is in tension with the purspose of God to redeem by assuming the flesh of creation; in the divine – human encounter, the will of God and the will of Mary, the condescension of God wins the yesfulness of a woman. But it is her yes to give, and God will not superimpose divine will and intention on human freedom to surrender by, simply taking her for granted. What this poem does, is point to the disconcerting fact that this most significant intervention is understood as no more than an interruption. And Mary keeping the place in the book she is reading signals Mary's intent to pick up life where it was left off to attend to that brief interlude on which the salvation of the world turned. When the angel left, life went on, but this brief interruption, signalled the irruption into history of love both hazardous and purposeful.
So when we get to the nativity story, and coat it in sentiment, there's a need for those poets who won't let us ignore the reality of a young woman, an unexplained pregnancy, and the astonishing risk she took in co-operating with the astonishing risk God was taking. Have a happy, and thoughtful Christmas.
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