Held by Spirit
by Lucy pierce
DELIVERING THE DIVINE UNTO THE WORLD
As Christmas approaches and I listen to the sweet voice of my beautiful daughter singing songs of donkeys and mangers, of holy mothers and miraculous babies and luminous stars, the mysterious mythic interface rises through my resistance to meet me where I stand. This is what she shows me.
Sometimes, even though we are virgin and sovereign and self-sustaining, we are also pregnant with something that is bigger than we are.
Sometimes, our bodies heavy and pendulous with what has gestated within, we roam the landscape, lost, looking for somewhere to rest, somewhere to lay in the warm straw and give birth to the gift that has grown unseen inside of us. We search high and low for the manger that will hold the elusive offering of our treasure.
Sometimes the resting place, the shelter from the dark night eludes us and we despair. Sometimes we feel far from home and so very alone and so very full of the thing we have grown that is asking to be birthed into a world that does not necessarily value what we hold inside.
Sometimes the culture within which we roam, looking for safe harbour, is hostile to what it is that awaits birth within us.
Sometimes what awaits birth inside of us is the very thing that will help to change the culture, to make it a more accepting and less hostile place.
But for now we have to hold it alone, in the dark unknowingness, we have to learn to love what we do not understand inside of us, which grows from the seed of divinity. Sometimes we are asked to be guide and protector of She who is seeking a place to give birth to that which will change the culture.
Sometimes the child is not our own, but that of the great mystery, it is a child conceived of an energy that moves far beyond our scope and means, but we say yes, and we hold space and we guide and protect, we lead the way and relentlessly seek the path and the place for the new to birth itself into the now.
Sometimes we stand beside and hold the space for the mystery to be born through another.
Sometimes we are the donkey, and we must endure the back breaking work of supporting the body, providing the passage, for the one who is pregnant with mystery, the one who in that moment is birthing the sacred for us all.
Sometimes the only place we can find to rest and to begin our birthing song, is a lowly place.
Sometimes it is not what we’d hoped for, barren or plain.
Usually the animals are there, arrived before us to pave the way, wise and accepting, where often our fellow man is not.
Sometimes all that comes present to bear witness to our miraculous birthing, of that which is beyond us, through the visceral pathways of our own messy embodiment, in that lowly place that is all we have to accommodate the untenable nature of our gestation and the wholehearted devotion required of us to bring that through, is the bright starlight, incandescent and pure, and the humble animals and the unseen winged ones, the imperceptible flutter of their flight, who know things beyond our vision, who see things too big for us to see.
Sometimes the wise men come and sometimes there are gifts, but by then the work has already been done. We have already walked alone in the barren land. We have already grown full and ripe and heavy with a vast and unknowable fruit. We have already knocked on the doors of our kith and kin, who could not understand the urgency of our need. We have already been turned away. We have already found our lowly place and our animal kin. We have already said yes, to the inconceivable birthing, to the standing by and husbanding of that birth, to the holding within our humble skin, the vast mystery of creation, the holy miracle of a love that is bigger than us.
Sometimes, these days, we walk the path alone, no husband by our side.
Sometimes we have a donkey to ride, but sometimes our feet are bloodied and sore from the flint of our wayward paths as we seek and we seek and we seek the place to lay our untold and awkward gift down, even as we are turned away, still we seek, to finally find the place to belong, to open our bodies and to let the thing free, the thing that god seeded within us, that has grown full term, that the angels await, and the stars swell toward.
Most of the time, the thing that is wanting to birth itself inside of us, the thing that was seeded by god, in our virgin and sovereign power, is love. A love bigger than our frail humanity and our awkward brokenness. A love bigger than what we thought we were capable of. A love that will change the world. Sometimes there is no shape in the world we know, for the love that is birthing itself from within us.
Sometimes the love we birth lives unrecognised. Sometimes it is misunderstood and brutalised.
Sometimes in the end it is crucified, but always the angels are watching and the animals know, and sometimes the unknowable thing we are seeking to birth, is that which will become our saviour.
Image and words by Lucy Pierce © 2019
Image and words by Lucy Pierce © 2019
