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a decade of waiting: Advent in the body

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Advent is a season of strange stories and wonder-full waiting. Angels. Dreams. Miraculous pregnancies. Surprising visitors.

But in a season of powerful Scripture and symbols – light, darkness, watching, waiting – we can forget that the first Advent was embodied, too.

Without pregnancy and birth – messy, physical experiences – Christmas could not have happened.

What can bearing, birthing, and caring for babies teach us about the Incarnation? How might pregnancy, labor, and nursing shape our understanding of God becoming human?

A few of my favorite questions. Turns out I can’t stop thinking about them this time of year.

. . .

For ten years now, I’ve been pregnant or nursing during December. (That realization alone was enough to startle me.)

A decade of Advents spent in changed relationship to my body as it expanded and contracted, filled and emptied, nourished and nurtured new life into being.

Becoming a mother through these biological experiences changed my spiritual journey, too. Eucharist became embodied. Mary went from stranger to companion. Sacrifice and surrender were written into the cells of my body.

Journeying through Advent as a mother has taught me about the brilliant light and the devastating darkness that this season of the church holds in pregnant, potent tension.

Gathering ten years’ worth of writing, I can see how this season invites us to carry the sacred and the mundane, the holy and the ordinary, the divine and the earthly. Incarnation shining through all of it.

. . .

2008. We learned we were expecting our first child in the deep dark of cold December. A moment that transformed Advent from the physical yearning of empty waiting to the shocking wonder of powerful promise. “Advent came alive…In the span of one season, one calendar month, my world was transformed from infertility to fertility.”

2009. Our first baby was a newborn; so was I. Sleep-deprived, struggling with nursing, still in awe that motherhood was mine. Learning to accept the daily reality of what I had been given. “My Advent challenge today is to be an acceptant parent, spouse, friend. To allow God and other people to surprise me, upend my expectations.”

2010. Pregnancy announced itself for the second time in the midst of an epic snowstorm. Advent took flesh again. I meditated on Mary’s yes in clearer light: everything she agreed to carry and let go. “I wonder if she knew the time was coming. Could she feel the readying, both the baby’s body and her own preparing for the passage ahead?”

2011. Baby in the house again meant little sleep, extra love, gift of self. Nursing was easier but tending two children was harder. Stretch, sacrifice, surrender. “Even when the child is hoped for, longed for, prayed for, we still find ourselves overwhelmed by emotions. Joy. Fear. Love. Anxiety. Wonder. Despair. Hope. Is this Advent’s reminder to us, year after year?”

2012. Still nursing our second, surprisingly. Learning to let go of expectations, live in the moment, focus on the child. All Advent truths taught by a toddler and a preschooler. “I remember holding a child close to my chest, his tears darkening my shirt as he sobbed. And I realized that what matters most about Christmas is not that Jesus didn’t cry, but that he did.”

2013. Miscarriage came and went that bittersweet summer. I was pregnant again, once-easy hope now edged with fear after loss. But when I first felt the baby kick on the Feast of Guadalupe, I fell in love. “Maybe this is why we need feasts of signs and wonders. Because we are human. Faltering. Forgetting. Maybe today’s Guadalupe celebrates the same truth as a kick I can feel from the outside.”

2014. Our baby was a bouncing boy by Advent. Up late and up early, nursing him at all hours, I learned that December to embrace darkness and light together. Warmth of mother and child in the midst of cold. “Some parents call a child after miscarriage their ‘rainbow baby.’ But for me, this baby has been a full moon. Pulling my eyes back to its light whenever they stray. Casting its glowing shine onto a cold world waiting below.”

2015. Pregnant with twins. Everything turned upside down. “I’m learning about the darker side. The vulnerability and uncertainty and mystery of what that first Advent must have meant.”

2016. Our daughters were born and died in February. Grief carved into scars on my body. After loss, we waited nine months to try again. A hard Advent all its own. November’s end brought light: new hope and baby on the way. I wrote these words while pregnant but no one else knew. “Stay tuned, whispers every story of resurrection. Wait to see what comes next. Right when everything looks like the end, everything is only beginning.”

2017. He was here, this baby of promise. Safe in our arms after months of fear. Siblings and parents alike delighted in him every day. Advent crept in with quiet joy, the promise of still-good days ahead. “Once upon a time I did not believe I would feel the pure shine of happiness again. What grace of a second chance. What gift from grief.”

2018. As I enter into Advent this year, now my eleventh since that first pregnancy test blurred positive, I lean back each night into the worn rocker. The baby settles to nurse, his legs curling round my side, his hand patting my face. We are quiet, together. For how much longer, I don’t know. This season at least, at last.

We rest in the dark. He drifts to sleep while I dream of writing. More on this someday, bearing and birthing and becoming a mother. For now this is enough. Advent is always enough.

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Comments

  1. Diana C Giard says

    6 December 2018 at 8:08 am

    For some reason, your reflections always bring tears to my eyes.

    Reply
  2. Jayne says

    6 December 2018 at 8:32 pm

    This is so beautiful

    Reply
  3. Emily says

    12 January 2019 at 7:05 am

    I have never read a blog so perfectly descriptive of the intertwined joys and self sacrifice of pregnancy and motherhood, but you have such a gift. I have also never experienced these deep losses of yours, but I feel the deep wounds on your heart. Know of my prayers for you and your God-gifted souls! I’m excited to follow more of your posts!

    Reply

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I’m Laura Kelly Fanucci. Mother, writer, wonderer. This space is where I explore mothering through writing. It’s where I celebrate how God shows up in the chaos of raising children. It’s where I love to build community with readers like you. Read More…

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thismessygrace

thismessygrace
Nearly 20 years ago (!) these crazy kids graduated Nearly 20 years ago (!) these crazy kids graduated from Notre Dame. Now we’re thick in the midst of life-with-kids, celebrating middle school & preschool & everything in between. 
 
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“How did you do this?” I want to ask her. “H “How did you do this?” I want to ask her. “How did you let your heart break a thousand times?”

I want to call my mother and ask her impossible questions, to probe her heart that held five children and let each of us go in the hardest ways. But I know what she will say, “It’s hard. But you’re doing a beautiful job.” She can’t give words to the deepest yearnings and groanings. None of us can.

I wish I could ask my grandmothers, each of them gone for decades now, each of them matriarchs who raised big broods of their own. I never got to know them as an adult, but I have heaps of questions: How did you do it? How did you not lose yourself or your way? Or did you, and that was precisely the point?

I want a whole book of answers to impossible questions, and none exists. So I send my thoughts to the mothers of faith whose short stories, mere snippets on pages, have sparked small lights to guide me along. To Sarah and Ruth, Hagar and Rachel, Mary and Elizabeth. Every unnamed anguish the holy ones carried, every treasure of love they held in their heart.

Is it any coincidence that birth often brings both cries and screams, laughter and joy?

We hold it all within us. We cannot give words to the enormity of what it means to mother.

I sit outside a coffee shop two blocks from my children’s school on a sunny afternoon, the last day of the year. I wipe away tears for the natural nostalgia, but I also feel the gutting grief welling up from my own wounds of motherhood to know a deeper truth: marking milestones with love and longing is nothing compared to the gaping loss of not having your child here to break your heart in a thousand tiny ways.

So I resolve again, a hundred times again, to let this vulnerability become the strength that keeps me fighting for all children to have what I want for my own: life, love, health, safety, support, opportunity, community, hope. This is how parenting asks us to change. To let the particulars of our lives stretch us to love more widely.

I once thought “to mother” meant to have and to hold.

Now I know it also means to let go.
Many of you asked me to save these suggestions I s Many of you asked me to save these suggestions I shared after the school shooting in Uvalde.

Remember: we can’t do everything, but we can each do something.

Just because we can’t eradicate evil overnight doesn’t mean we can’t take small strong steps toward change.

Any work for justice and peace is long and hard. But we can build this work into our daily lives in concrete ways.

Look at the children in your life. What would you do to keep them safe and alive?

Start there. Let your life and love lead you.
When women meet, the world changes. Today is the When women meet, the world changes.

Today is the Feast of the Visitation. A day when we remember the meeting of Mary and Elizabeth.

Two women pregnant with new life, blooming with prophetic power.
Two mothers called to change the world.

What would happen if we gathered together like this today?
How could the world change if we made Mary’s song our own?

“He has shown strength with his arm;
he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.
He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly;
he has filled the hungry with good things,
and sent the rich away empty.”
(Luke 1:51-53)

Imagine if we stayed in this holy space—not for a moment’s meeting, but for months together—to gestate the dreams God was waiting to birth through us.

Imagine if we let ourselves be filled with the Holy Spirit to shout out with loud cries.
Imagine if we lifted our souls with prayers of justice and joy.

Imagine if we gave each other strength and service, courage and compassion, as we kept asking how to answer God’s call in our ordinary lives.

When women meet, the world changes.

If you want to know how to fight for justice for your children, for your people, for this world, look to the Visitation.

The mothers will show us the way. They already have.

(Image from the “Windsock Visitation” by Br. Mickey McGrath, OSFS, commissioned for the Monastery of the Visitation in north Minneapolis.)
Here’s what I wish I would have heard preached t Here’s what I wish I would have heard preached today on the Ascension.

Right now is a time to be prophetic and pastoral, a time for each of us to ask how God is calling us to act.
I am writing this to us next week. When our right I am writing this to us next week.

When our righteous anger will have quieted down. When the white-hot fury pulsing through our veins will have subsided. When the news cycle will have moved on.

Do not forget how we felt tonight.
Stay angry. Flip tables.

We cannot live like this. Literally—our children are dying. Our elders are being murdered. We have accepted violence as—a way of life? An unfortunate side effect of freedom? A helpless shrug?

No. I am not resigned.
Stay angry. Flip tables.

Remember how it felt today to hear the news and feel the world crack open—again, for we have heard it a hundred times now. Remember how you felt sick to your stomach. How the children around you glowed, alive and fragile, miraculous and vulnerable.

Remember how you wanted to do something, anything, how you wanted to act, how you wanted to stop and scream for it to end, how every cell in your body cried out that this was evil and unjust and horrific and cannot continue.

Press into that memory like a bruise.
Stay angry. Flip tables.

The only way anything changes is if we change. Change what we believe. Change who we support. Change how we vote. Change where we give. Change how we act. Change how we speak. Change how we pray.

There are no easy answers to terrible, complex problems—which is what gun violence in the US has become. But the lack of easy answers makes it all the more urgent and vital that we press into our righteous anger and say NO MORE.

Stay angry. Flip tables.

I am writing this for us, for tonight, for next week. And I never want to write it again.
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