Celtic Advent - Day IX - November 23

 

Celtic Advent - Day IX - November 23

"Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it,

I must listen to my life telling me who I am."

- Parker J. Palmer, "Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation"

As I look ahead at the thirty-one days of Advent that stretch out before me, I've been thinking today about the way I felt about two or three days into my pilgrimage on The Camino. 

We had only walked about 6 or 7 miles the day before but the hills we had to climb as we left San Sebastian were steep. Very steep. 

At several points, I thought that either my lungs were going to explode in my chest or the muscles in my calves and thighs were going to pound their way out of my legs. Or, perhaps, both. I had to sit down and rest at several points on the way up. 

I didn't feel too bad about it as I continued to pass several of my fellow pilgrims who were much younger and in much better shape having the same struggle. Even so, it lead me to question whether or not I could make it. 

Troubling questions stalked me as I huffed and puffed my way up the steep incline of the hills above the beautiful beach at San Sebastian. Had I made a mistake? Was it arrogance that made me think I could be an actual peregrino? Or, was I being delusional? 

Well, I made it through the first day and wasn't even the last person to finish the trail that had been set out for us that day. We were then loaded into the van and drove less than an hour to Bilbao where we were to spend the night and start off early in the morning.

I found my room and had a long, hot shower and started to feel better, but I knew - because I had read the preparation book - that the second and third day were going to be the days when my muscles would complain the most.

So, after a delicious dinner, I returned to my room and took another hot shower and a couple of Tylenol and fell into an exhausted sleep in a most comfortable bed. 

Just before I woke up, in that Land of Haze between sleep and reality, I heard my mother’s voice. She was telling one of her favorite stories about me. I don’t remember it but she did. Apparently, in my semi-dream, she still did.

The story goes that the summer before I was to start my first day of school in the first grade, I was so excited that it was all I talked about all summer long. I had to pick out a special “outfit” which my mother put on layaway at Arlan’s Department Store. 

I had a pair of blue – not, brown, not black, blue – Mary Jane shoes. I had white anklet socks which my grandmother hand-trimmed with white lace. I even had the breakfast I wanted and had picked out for the morning, just to start the day off right.

"Hen in a Hole". Well, that's the rough translation. It was a thick slab of my grandmother's Portuguese bread, with a hole cut in the middle and slathered with butter and grilled on one side. The "bread hole" was also grilled to perfection. 

After my mother determined that magical time when it was perfectly toasted, she flipped it over and then cracked an egg in the middle of the hole. When the egg was cooked to perfection, she slid it from the spatula to my plate where I immediately broke the yolk with the toasted "bread hole". 

Oh, my. I can taste the buttery, eggy deliciousness of it, even now. I wondered if there was a restaurant anywhere in Spain that might have a close replica of that breakfast.

My mother’s story of my first day of school has even more detail than my breakfast but the bottom line is that my first day of school was a great success. 

From all reports, I loved it – even the walk to and from school which was approximately a mile each way. I came home for lunch, gobbled it down and went straight back to school, skipping along the way.

The next morning, my mother reports she woke me up for the second day of school. “Get up, Elizabeth,” she called. “Time to get ready for school!”

“School?” moaned I as I rolled over, “I already went to school yesterday.”

Insert uproarious parental laughter here.

It was just about that time, early in the morning, snuggled deep in my bed in Bilbao, Spain, that I felt the first wave of queasiness in my stomach - just as I had so many, many years before on my second day of school. 

“C’mon, get up!” I heard my mother’s voice say, “You have to go to school.”

I opened my eyes and thought, Right! It’s the second day of The Camino. Of course my subconscious brought up that story. But, boy, it sure felt like my mother was right here in the room with me in Bilbao.

I've often wondered if Mary had second thoughts. I wonder if, as she was walking from her home to the hill country to see her cousin, Elizabeth, that she felt the queasiness that hits you in the pit of the stomach at just the same time reality hits. 

Maybe it was morning sickness. Maybe it was reality. 

Saying 'yes' to a challenge, making a commitment to that challenge, is no small task.

I've discovered that this is part of what makes a commitment strong. It is the deepening of the reality that begins to work its way into every part of your body. 

This is part of what the incarnation means: it is the 'enfleshment' of a dream or an idea - perhaps it was something you didn't even know you wanted or needed, or in a form which you never expected - which burrows its way into your body so that you can begin to live into it and out of it. 

Ask any woman who has been pregnant. She'll tell you.

You don't need a pregnant woman to tell you, however. 

Ask your life. 

Take some time during this Celtic Advent, as the days stretch out before you, to do a little inventory of the stories of your life. Look back and into those times when you made a commitment to do something: 

Start a career. Take a new path. Begin a relationship. End a relationship. Start of new life.

See if you can find and name the times when an idea or dream sparked in you, when you made a commitment to it, when that commitment became incarnate in you, how you lived differently because of your choice. Has the memory of that experience come back to visit you when you were about to make another decision, another commitment in your life? 

Spend some time writing in your journal about what you dreamed. What you felt. How your body responded. What you experienced.

Here are some wise words from Frederick Buechner for tonight's meditation.

Listen to your life.

See it for the fathomless mystery that it is.

In the boredom and pain of it

no less than in the excitement and gladness:

touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it

because in the last analysis all moments are key moments,

and life itself is grace.  ~ Frederick Buechner