Rev. Linda Simmons
Dec 7, 14
Waiting for Forgiveness
The ancient hymn, The Akathistos, meaning the one who is seated, is a hymn to Mary, the mother of Jesus, used in the Eastern Orthodox Church. It is written in the now dead language Ancient Greek, as is the New Testament. When I was in divinity school, I read the hymn in Greek and then I danced it during a service of students and professors. I will spare you both and skip right to the English.
An angel of the first order, an arch angel, was sent from heaven to the bearer of god, Theotokos, to say: Rejoice! And with voice belonging to the unembodied one, seeing you O Lord becoming embodied, he stood outside of himself in ecstasy and he stood crying out to her:
Hail, you through whom joy will shine forth.
Hail, you through whom ruin will come to an end.
Hail, the redemption of the tears of Eve.
Hail, the height that cannot be scaled by human reason.
Hail, the depth that cannot be looked upon even by the eyes of angels.
Hail, because you possess the seat of a king.
Hail, because you endure all that is to be endured.
Hail, you through whom the creation is made new.
Mary is said to have been 14 at this time. Can you imagine such an experience? One might get a little heady after such an interaction I imagine. But in this story Mary does not grow arrogant. She grows ready.
Many people contest whether an angel came to Mary and whether she was a virgin or not when she birthed Jesus. I think this matters for many women, especially, who need Mary to be good and human, beautiful and desirable, strong and accessible. And there are others, women included, who defend Mary’s virginity and find it a necessary component of Jesus’ life story.
I cannot know the truth. I stand with Joseph Campbell who says that myths matter not because they are true or untrue but because they allow us certain possibilities of belief and action, they ground us in stories that we can fashion our own lives around and they open us to our own gratitude for life. I think the myth of Mary, using myth in these ways, does all of these things very well.
When I was a little girl, Jesus was my best friend. I had a children’s bible that I would pour over. I can still see those pictures of that blue eyed, blond haired Jesus who I was sure could hear all of my thoughts and prayers and the pictures of Mary, so pure, so unblemished, so full of grace. I longed for her in my life. I looked for her in myself and others, to no avail. She was inaccessible to me.
But images and stories of Jesus guided me through many rough waters. His humanity drew me in. Some have suggested to me that I am as resilient as I am because of this early relationship I had with someone who never let me down.
The annunciation, or the announcement by the angel Gabrielle to Mary that she will conceive Jesus, heralds a time of waiting for the birth of Jesus in the Christian tradition, or in my interpretation, for the birth of forgiveness for that ultimately is the meaning of Jesus that I find in the stories that have been handed down to us. Jesus offered us ourselves back again, allowed us to forgive ourselves and each other and promised we could begin again in love.
Advent, which means arrival or approach, and includes the 4 Sundays that lead up to Christmas, is a pregnant waiting that is supposed to be lived in preparation of the Christ but can also be, in my world, in the way the Christmas myth moves me to make sense of life, the way it grounds me in meanings that I can fashion my life around, the way it opens me to gratitude for all of life, becomes a preparation for forgiveness.
And how does one prepare to be forgiven? What are the conditions that make this possible? Must we build a manger of sorts and cloister ourselves from the glaring eyes of others who stand in judgment of us? Or should we gather frankincense and mirth which for us is probably a good video and some cozy slippers? Or must we walk for miles following a star?
I don’t know about you but the only star I have followed for a long time is the one on American Idol. How can the story of Mary inform us today?
For me, the story of Mary embodying the Lord asks me to embody forgiveness for myself. Not the forgiveness of another through which we are made more whole. This is about forgiveness of self, that old illusive place of the miracle of seeing ourselves with eyes of love. And there is that word, miracle. I do consider self forgiveness a miraculous occurrence. The older I get the more miraculous it seems to become.
Unitarian Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that a miracle is what is already present in life, all around us, if we are only attentive enough to notice. He says that if we need a miracle that is outside of nature to convince of us that the divine is in the world and in ourselves then we’ve missed the point.
So, where do we find the place of miracle, the conditions of miracle from which to practice self forgiveness? Called by the Akathistos Hymn to this question, I have been reflecting on the conditions of a miracle and the sacred place of waiting, the soft and vulnerable place of waiting where I allow myself not to be bombarded by writing, reading, television or computer; where I do not make lists, plan the future or organize anyone else’s life. That last one is really hard to let go of.
Have you noticed what a mess everyone is when you are not telling them how to live their lives? The act of waiting as a sacred act. It is the stilling of our lives that creates the grounds to hear the angel within ourselves awakened to tell us we are worthy, all of us, of embodying forgiveness.
UU Minister Kate Brauestrup in her book Here if You Need Me offers another condition of a miracle. She writes that a miracle is not only an extraordinary event, which is of course subjective. Many in Jesus’ time were not impressed with his healing of the sick or raising the dead. The prophets of the Hebrew Bible had already done all of those things and there were many who walked about in Jesus’ day proclaiming that they were the new prophet and healed the sick and raised the dead.
A miracle, according to Braeustrup, is about a willingness to accept the good that is happening around us and know it as part of who we are, as part of life. When we can do this, then all the beauty we miss, all the love we miss, all the humanity we miss becomes visible and our hearts open wider.
Pema Chodron, the American Buddhist nun, tells a story of one of her friends who was traveling in the Middle East. The young woman found herself surrounded by people jeering, yelling and threatening to throw stones at her because she was American. She was terrified and then suddenly her heart opened and she identified with every person throughout history that had ever been hated. She understood what it was to be despised for any reason: race, color, sexual preference, gender, ability.
She was cracked wide open, as Pema Chodron writes, and suddenly she could identified with millions of oppressed people and was even able to see the humanity of her tormentors.
I think of what is happening in our country now, especially after the failure to indict the officer involved in the death of Eric Garner whom he put in a choke hold and repeatedly said he could not breathe. Eric Garner died on that street. Can we stand in the shoes of our African American brothers and sisters and imagine what they are feeling? Can we open our hearts and minds wide enough to feel their suffering, sense of persecution and injustice? And then what, some say, and then what happens after that? What is the use of feeling all that sorrow?
What happens then my dear friends is that the conditions for the miracle of self-forgiveness become possible. We have all participated in excluding another because of race, class, sexual orientation, gender, ability. We have all participated and when we can feel this pain and do the work of self forgiveness, we can come into life more able to stand against injustice because we have known it within ourselves, we can become more ready to speak out when another is being treated unfairly, more able to stand between another and the harm of racism, sexism, homophobia, ableism.
The conditions for the miracle of forgiveness are presence, showing up with enough courage and stillness to hear the voice of our own soul, and then, right there, to humbly, simply, bow to the immense struggle of being human.
What would have happened if Mary said to the angel, Look Gabrielle, I am 14 and engaged but unmarried. Joseph is really going to lose it when I tell him this, especially since it’s not his child, and on top of all of this it’s a not a great time in history to be an unmarried, pregnant teenager.
Without pride or defeat, without arrogance or a self erasure, when we grant ourselves permission to sit in the pain and the beauty of life and just be there, with all of it, and see ourselves as we are.
Forgiveness comes as our hearts break open and we see not only our own humanity but the humanity of everyone around us and know capable of good and bad, being open and closed, kind and cruel. As we silently bow to life, it becomes possible to see ourselves in the immense web of humanity and forgive.
We must wait with faith, using faith like a blanket in the cold, like a sled on a snow covered hill, faith like a glass of hot chocolate when we are shivering with the impossibility of being made of flesh and bones on a winter’s day.
And inside of this waiting, this soft trusting of life, this faith- forgiveness will be born like a child in a desert, against all odds, in the manger of our souls, nothing fancy, nothing ornate, just the stillness of the night and the breath of nature.
And right there, right inside of that tender flesh of forgiveness, is gratefulness itself, in this season of gratefulness and miracle and pregnant waiting, in this season of loss, memory and grief.
The myth or story or truth of Mary depending on where you stand and what your life stands on, is the promise that when we are attentive enough, open enough, grateful enough, we are able to receive even what we cannot understand, even what is hard to accept, and from here we can birth forgiveness.
There is so much we cannot know, so much we can know, so much that we remember and forget. May we find the stillness to know ourselves as human, as good enough, as whole and holy worthy of life, this time, this togetherness.
Amen.
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