A reflection among the Storydwelling community on December 8, 2024
Luke 1: 46-55
And Mary said:
“My soul proclaims your greatness, O God,
and my spirit rejoices in you, my Savior.
For you have looked with favor
upon your lowly servant,
and from this day forward all generations will call me blessed.
For you, the Almighty, have done great things for me,
and holy is your Name.
Your mercy reaches from age to age
for those who fear you.
You have shown strength with your arm;
you have scattered the proud in their conceit;
you have deposed the mighty from their thrones
and raised the lowly to high places.
You have filled the hungry with good things,
while you have sent the rich away empty.
You have come to the aid of Israel your servant,
mindful for your mercy–
the promise you made to our ancestors–
to Sarah and Abraham
and their descendants forever.”
I come from a long line of women who passed down to me
a particular kind of wisdom that said: no matter what is happening,
no matter how hard things are,
get up in the morning. Brush your teeth. Make your children breakfast. Do your job.
And I’ve told you about these women–my grandmother, especially, a daughter of the Depression– who survived three husbands and raised two girls on a meager living.
Do you come from this kind of line of women?
Or of men– who grit their teeth and bear it?
Most of the time, I have tried to be better than this grit-your-teeth inheritance–
it has seemed so… pre-feminist. So, anti-mental health. So, pro-burnout. So, mom rage-y.
And yet, there are weeks when I am grateful for the grit
that is in my blood and my bones that tells me to
get out of bed, make breakfast for my children, go do my job.
It is in gratitude to their grit, probably, that I was born at all.
Despite death, despite addiction, despite miscarriage and loss;
they got out of bed in the morning
and here I am today.
Here you are today. Thanks to someone’s ability to endure.
This is the same sentiment I read this week as I followed ACLU lawyer
Chase Strangio, the first out trans person to argue a case before the Supreme Court–
a case out of Tennessee that could provide scaffolding for
bans–or not–on gender affirming care under the Trump administration.
As he prepared to make arguments before the court on Wednesday,
he posted on Instagram some wisdom from his friend, the actor LaVerne Cox:
Allow our ancestors to speak through you. You are never alone and your strength is infinite when you invite them in. They are right there inside and around you.
Chase Strangio was inside that courtroom this week
thanks to someone’s ability to endure.
And someone–one of our children or grandchildren–
will perhaps owe their courage or their very lives to his actions this week–
whether or not he is successful in the courtroom–
he is succeeding in being an alive human with his vocation so clear.
So our descendents, hell–we!–for I know my freedom is bound up with the freedom of my trans friends, neighbors, family–
will one day wake up, feed their children breakfast,
thanks to the ability of Chase Strangio to endure.
Thanks to his endurance.
Thanks to the mercies that reach from age to age
buoying people up to keep going, to stay in it, to stay alive.
And in this way, Chase Strangio, dare I say,
sings Mary’s song– the inheritance of anyone doing the work of liberation who wants to claim her as their mother.
Her gift to us, the gift of endurance–
is not, I don’t think, the commandment to endure it all, no matter what–
to work ourselves to the bone, to be battered and exhausted–
but which is the kind of endurance which means to be able to place oneself in time.
To have a spiritual sense of what and who have come before
and who may come after.
When Mary sings that God’s mercies reach from age to age,
she is placing herself in history–
her own history and genealogy, which can be traced back to Abraham and Sarah–
and her people’s history, a story of struggle and promise.
You see for Mary and her community, in every age, there was a leader, a teacher–
someone who would reilluminate the heart and the worth of the people.
For Mary and her community, God was engaged in every age,
keeping the movement going.
She is naming that she is not the first, nor is she the last,
to understand lived oppression and to still feel the hope that resides deep in her belly.
And this is, perhaps, what it means to endure;
not to martyr ourselves, or lose our grip on our mental health for the sake of keeping the household running–
but to place ourselves in time, understanding that we are not isolated, by ourselves, ever.
Mary, I don’t think, could do what she did–
carry a mysterious, at best, pregnancy to birth,
without the deeper kind of endurance that comes from feeling connected to one’s place in time.
Someone in our community told me just this week,
that years ago, when she was in the delivery room,
in the moment just before she just about gave up,
she felt the legacy of millions of women before her who had done just this–
bring new life into the world–
and she was urged onward by this sacred sense of occupying her particular
beautiful
space in time.
And the babe in Mary’s womb, the incarnate symbol generations would hold up as
Emmanuel God with us–
carries his mother’s grit and endurance within him.
It is not endurance that sends him to the cross; that is Empire doing what it does.
But it is endurance that initiates the movement to reilluminate love and justice in the world–
the movement that teaches me daily that re-making the world is not a sprint,
nor is it a marathon–
but it is a relay, each of us showing up as we can when we can,
and releasing what is not ours to carry.
I know there is a lot right now. There is too much.
Ugh, and now it’s Christmas too, and
we’re going to get up and make breakfast and make Christmas magical for other people–
meanwhile, we are raising teenagers, which is beautiful and hard.
We are teenagers, which is more beautiful, and harder.
We are undergoing chemo and we are falling down;
we are undervalued or underpaid or both;
we are bored, we are wondering what the hell we’re supposed to be doing.
We are grieving. We are addicted. We love people who are addicted.
Our elders are dying. Some fast and some slow.
The arc of history does not feel like it is bending toward justice.
And this is a snapshot in time that I do not know that I can endure
if I am the first to experience it and need to be the final one to fix it all.
But IF this is a more sacred sense of time– in which I can touch on either side of me
the beloveds who come before me and will come after,
IF my shoulders can brush on either side of me you and you, here and now,
and given day you can give me what you cannot do anymore
and I can pass along to you that which still needs doing–
IF this is a more sacred soil in which we are planted–with roots that are deep–
inside the belly of the Mystery that surpasses all understanding,
IF that God touches every point in time, holding it in Her own womb place–
IF I can remember to place myself in the ongoing movement–in the relay–
of liberation and tender care,
then I can endure. And I will.
What a gift. What a sacred gift. To be held in the belly of God’s sacred time.
I truly trust that we have been given all the tools;
we have forgotten them, or no one told us;
they are hidden deep somewhere we cannot usually access,
but they are there.
Endurance is there.
Like the cicadas who lie in wait 17 years before rising to the surface to sing their song–
we know in our bones what it is to be patient and to keep going;
what it is to move more slowly, to rest a bit more often, and yet keep going.
We let the cicadas be our ancestors.
We let Mother Mary and her babe be our ancestors;
we brush shoulders with them on either side of us–
we draw on their wisdom, their grit, their endurance–and we pass the baton.
Today I will grieve for those who will not be okay. And then tomorrow I will fight to make it better. I don’t have answers but we have blueprints. And I will never stop fighting. For those who taught me and for those who will follow.
I have been cast aside, but I sparkle in the darkness.
I have been slain but live on in the river of history.
I seek no conquest, no wealth, no power, no revenge:
I seek only discovery
Of the illimitable heights and depths of my own being.
– Pauli Murray
Recent Comments