A reflection on intentions and babies for the 4th Sunday of Advent

“…such was his intention…”

--Matthew 1:18-24

 

We all have intentions, our hopes, our dreams, our plans for the day, for life—even for the holidays.  Maybe we intend to get up earlier, to start the day with a healthy breakfast, to eat more broccoli, to do core exercises every day before heading off to work…  When I was in 4^th grade a teacher asked me what I planned to do with my life.  I told her I wanted to be a singer!  My intention was to be another Donovan… or maybe another Davy Jones, even another John Sebastian.  Later in high school, hoping to impress a young lady, I tried singing for her.  She listened a moment, then asked (with some concern), “Does it hurt when you do that?”   My singing aspirations have been much more private ever since.

 

As the saying goes: If you want to make God laugh, tell Him your plans. Or sing to your girlfriend.

 

In the Gospel for the 4^th Sunday of Advent, we hear of Joseph and his plans, his intentions.  Oddly enough, this story begins with Joseph original plans crumbling to pieces.  He was planning to get married but, right in the first verse he discovers that his bride has become pregnant and the baby isn’t his.  One can imagine his shock and probable disappointment, however, instead of lashing out or seeking justice, he comes up with another plan. It would seem that he still has some feeling for Mary, and so he plans to spare her any public scene. He intends to divorce her quietly, and protect her from the shame and possible consequences of being accused of adultery, which (at that time) might have included being dragged to the city gates and stoned to death. 

 

Joseph’s intentions were honorable, they were good, they were even merciful, and yet they were not God’s plan, not God’s intention.  God’s intention was to put a baby in Joseph’s house.  Think about that.  And maybe ask yourself: In some way, isn’t that the real point of Christmas?  To let a baby into our house, into our heart, into our life…

 

Consider, what happens when a baby comes into the house?  Speaking from experience, everything changes.  Sleep schedules, diets, volume levels, washing schedules, and even personal hygiene.   The baby makes demands on our time, our energy, our attention, our budget, our love.  A baby demands that we change our expectations, our intentions, our life for it.  Even our TV schedule! I never would have imagined a life that included Barney the Dinosaur and Teletubbies. We have to humble ourselves and do things we never wanted to imagine ourselves doing; i.e. listening to Wee Sing cassettes in the car, or changing a diaper on a city bus, or cleaning up an unexpected mess, and trying to figure out which end it came out of!!

 

A baby demands that we put our own needs and desires aside, for its sake, for its care. That we lay down our life for the sake of another.  And strangely enough, it is the baby that teaches us that this isn’t a curse, this isn’t an agony we want to avoid.  What we learn by caring for a baby, is that the more we sacrifice for a child, the deeper we love it; the more we give ourselves away to their care and their needs, their smiles and their laughter, their peace and their delight, the more we are filled with such things ourselves.

 

Some of my most blessed memories are of waking at 3 in the morning to walk with one of my daughters.  I was exhausted. Often, I was confused. My intention had been to get at least a few hours of sleep, but instead I would hear the cry, or the call from down the hallway and I would climb out of bed—sometimes a little grouchy—but always (in the end) renewed by the chance to comfort their need; in fact, by the gift of their need.  And through that gift,  I was fulfilled. Because somewhere in all that middle of the night walking and swaying and carrying of a baby, I began again to sing.  I became—at least for a time—the singer I had always wanted to be. Walking the floor, or even the neighborhood streets, singing old Bob Dylan songs or folk songs, hobo songs, and especially, “Goodnight Irene.” In my three daughters I had a very appreciative, and a very captive, audience for about 8-9 years—about as long as the Beatles lasted.  I can still remember a time when one of them, by that point a toddler, said to her mother, “No.  Let Daddy sing.  I like it when Daddy sings…”

 

This Christmas, are you ready to let your life be upended? All your plans and intentions disrupted, maybe even utterly and completely changed?  This Christmas are you ready to let a baby into your house? Your heart?  Your life?  This Christmas, don’t just focus on the gift wrapping and the Christmas lights, the traditions and the trappings of the holiday.  This Christmas, take a little time to focus on the baby. Imagine it.  God took flesh and became not a king or a prince or a mighty hero, but a helpless baby, crying in a manger, a baby became completely and utterly dependent on the humans He had created.  Think about that as your Christmas gift… This baby needed feeding, cleaning, needed to be held and to be comforted.  And all He asked was that Mary and Joseph set aside their own plans, their own expectations and intentions and let themselves be changed, blessed and fulfilled beyond their imagining, by the love of a child.

 

This Christmas, let a baby come into your life. 

 

It will change everything.

Learning to sing --remembering my mother-in-law, the silence of God and the wisdom of Psalm 13

“How Long, Oh Lord, will You forget me? Forever?

How long will you turn away Your face from me?...

 

As for me, I trust in your faithful love, Oh Lord.

Let my heart delight in your saving help.

Let me sing to the Lord for His generosity to me,

let me sing to the name of the Lord the Most High.”

--Psalm 13:1, 5

 

Lynne’s mother passed away about two weeks ago.  It was beautiful and quiet and the whole family was with her when she died. But the aftermath has been strangely difficult. Lots of tears, of course. Lots of sighs.  But it’s the silence and the emptiness that stand out. Lynne and I are both having trouble with sleep. She has difficulty settling down and going to sleep. I have trouble staying asleep.  This mirrors our shifts as caregivers.  Lynne would stay awake with her mom until 3-4 in the morning, and then I would get up and take over so she could sleep.  Well, two weeks later, I am still waking up around 3am every morning to take that second shift. But there is no one to relieve, no one there for me to care for, except perhaps the cats—who sense me stirring and think that means it is time for breakfast. 

 I am still feeling a strange and inexpressible absence or emptiness when I step outside in the morning with my cup of coffee and my bag of peanuts.  These days, Lynne joins me. The two of us sit there watching the squirrels and sipping our coffee. But we know something is missing.  In fact, there is that extra cup of coffee we bring out with us every morning, to remind us.  Walking this journey with Carol was a strange and often overwhelming blessing. I think we are all still grappling with the gift of that blessing. The blessing that comes from surrendering to the needs of another. The blessing of the demands her dying body made upon us as a family. Demanding that we put down everything else and really pay, wake up and really live—not for ourselves, but for the love of another.  I know I will be pondering this gift for the rest of my life and probably writing about it for quite some time.  Anyway, those comments are by way of an introduction.  Here is a piece that I began working on while Carol was still alive.  I just finished it this morning.

 A few weeks back I wrote about sitting with my mother-in-law and sharing the psalms over our morning coffee.  In that piece I wrote about how Psalm 31 seemed to open her up a little and got her talking about her faith—a little.  Anyway, the very next day as we sat there with the blue jays and the squirrels and Bobby Darin singing from the I-pad, I opened up my book of psalms and found myself staring at Psalm 13—and it just seemed like fate:  31 / 13… Why not? So I began to read.  When I finished, I asked her whether any part of the psalm spoke to her.  Without looking at me she said something that sounded like: the singing.   She didn’t say anything else.  Nothing about God forgetting us, or about the enemy delighting in our every stumble.  She just very quietly said: the singing.

 Okay, I thought. I can live with that.  And so, I tried to just sit there with her, listening to the blue jays calling each other, and Bobby Darin singing about somewhere across the sea, but despite my best efforts I kept going back to that lament: How long, Oh Lord? How long? How long will our life be governed by sleepless night, bedside toilets, medicine schedules, and an overabundance of cats!

 After a bit, the song changed and without realizing it, I found myself softly singing along with Nat King Cole: 

 Smile, though your heart is aching….
Smile, even though its breaking….
You’ll see the sun coming shining through,
if you…  just... smile…

 And then I heard another sound, a soft whispering voice, and realized Carol was singing with me. We were sitting there together in the quiet of a Tuesday morning, coffee in hand, and both of us hesitantly, shyly singing…together.

 That was when I realized what a wise woman my mother-in-law was, and how she was still teaching me things—even in her silences, even through her shy singing.  Without any fanfare or self-aggrandizement, she was humbly and graciously teaching me to listen to God.

Here’s what I mean:  when I read that psalm I got stuck on the pain and the anxiety of the first part; the fear of being abandoned by God and overwhelmed by life. I even feared for Carol. Worried about how she must feel, what she must be thinking... There was a brief period when her symptoms seemed to subside; she seemed to be getting healthier and her appetite returned to something like normal. In the midst of that, I found myself not feeling grateful and thankful but worrying: What does this mean? How long will this last? She still needed our care and 24/7 attention but what if she just stays at this level. What if/ What if? A How long could we manage this schedule? Sleeping in shifts? Surviving on 4-5 hours of sleep a night? nd where was God? Why wasn't He helping us? As Jesus warns, I was worried about many things (Luke 10:41) … And high on that list was the desperate question: How long?

 But Carol seemed at peace. Despite the fact that she was unable to sleep at night, and that she was –in truth-- growing weaker, she awoke every morning ready for her coffee and the porch. And our psalm.  And the singing. As we sat there listening to the crooners she loved, she would always find something to praise. She would tell me how good the coffee was, or how the muffins I made were the best she’d ever had, or she’d simply tell me what a good job Lynne and I were doing taking care of her. Sometimes she seemed almost overflowing with gratitude and praise. 

 Looking back, I think she was becoming a model of presence for me, an example of living in the moment.  Instead of getting lost in fear and dread, she simply lived in the moment, simply enjoyed what was right in front of her, accepted everything as gift, as grace. While I was reading psalms in search of profound insights and answers, she listened to them with an openness and innocence, ready to receive whatever God had to offer. And, I think it was that approach that led to her always looking for something to be grateful for, and something to praise.  And something to sing about…

 Looking back now, I have been struck by how obviously that was/is the point of the psalm.  The psalmist cries out that God is distant and silent; that God has abandoned him to the enemy and everything feels hopeless. Sound familiar? It does to me.  And, on top of that, the psalm offers no apparent response to this lament. Instead, the psalmist simply tells us that despite God’s absence, he will be grateful and he will sing God’s praises.

 Gratitude and praise.  Suddenly I realize it: that is the answer. That is the lesson Carol was trying to teach me.  Gratitude and praise.  Yes, life is hard. Sometimes it is unbearably hard. And unfairly hard.  And there is nothing you can do to change that. But you can change yourself. You can begin to change the way you look at life, at the world. Despite your hardships, your struggles, you can begin to look for things to praise, things to be grateful for. 

 And when all else fails, you can sing.  It helps. It’s scientifically proven. Here is an article from the BBC to explain. Something to do with endorphins, I think.  Whether you have a weak voice, or sing like Pavarotti, you will be amazed at how much better you feel when you look at life through the blessing of a song.

 Sitting there –on the porch-- singing that mournful song about smiling through the heartache, and the pain, I suddenly felt better. I suddenly felt a little more grateful for the time I had with Carol, for the mornings together. And I began to realize that I wasn’t alone. That there was even someone who I wanted to praise and thank for such a gift. And so I kept on singing, even after Carol stopped. Me and Mel Torme singing an old Fred Astaire song: They can’t take that away from me.  And it’s true.   

And I am so grateful.   

Thank you, Carol, for teaching me how to listen and how to sing.