On the second week of Advent my true love said to me “Shush!”
Speak tenderly to Jerusalem,
and cry to her
that her warfare is ended,
that her iniquity is pardoned,
that she has received from the Lord’s hand
double for all her sins. A voice cries:
“In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord;
make straight in the desert a highway for our God.
Every valley shall be lifted up,
and every mountain and hill be made low;
the uneven ground shall become level,
and the rough places a plain.
And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed,
and all flesh shall see it together,
for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.” A voice says, “Cry!”
And I said, “What shall I cry?” *Isaiah 40.1-6
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Maybe the gift we all need this Christmas is a mirror. Not a full-length or even a hand-held oval style, but a simple thin strip of that reflective magic material that would allow each of us to only see our eyes. Taking a good long look in such a mirror might show us something about ourselves and the systems that prevail in our country, systems that have prevailed for far too long now.
I invite you to read the thoughts my friends Kelly and Winn are sharing today around this same passage. The ones below I claim solely as my own.
A voice said Cry this Advent, o privileged one!
And I said What words shall I cry to comfort your people?
And the voice said Shush! Put aside your words for now.
Those white pressed releases say
outrage, outrage when there is no real outrage.
No, for now you must stand in shouldered silence
as the pavement absorbs the killings, and wait.
Wait until you are leveled and straightened by compassion
so that you cry actual tears from your actual eyes.
Then and only then can you even hope
to begin to speak tenderly to the wound
of your beautiful black brothers and sisters.
To speak of such things dry-eyed is to mock the song.
No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.
And I said Then, after the tears, what shall I do?
The voice said Then, through your tears you must disrupt with words.
You must proclaim that there is another kind of freedom,
the freedom to take care of yourselves and of each other.
Tell them I have declared this, and I AM the judge
of all the living colors and the dead. And I AM not blind.
I am breathing in all these words…
Speaking only as one with privilege in most places in her life, your words are exactly the ones I’ve been searching for. Thank you.
Amen.
“Wait until you are leveled and straightened by compassion
so that you cry actual tears from your actual eyes.”
I have a friend who considers eye contact to be essential to spiritual direction. It’s awkward, but I believe there’s something there. The eyes don’t lie, unless they do, and that itself is telling. It seems to me that the ability to weep is so deeply tied to the ability to laugh, both of which impact the eyes. The more I cry, the more I laugh, the more I weep, the more I open to rejoicing and the teeny tiny crows feet sneak in to tell me so.
Thank you for the permission to wait to speak, to wait until we have something necessary to say and that waiting is not a betrayal, but a way of honoring the depths of what is.
These are so good.