Mary's Pondering

"Mary's Pondering"
Luke 2:19-20

I

An old woman opened the door to the stable, with barely enough strength to just get through.  She left the door open behind her.  The daylight from outside lit up the stable.  She stood still, letting her eyes adjust.  She pivoted in a slow, 360 degree circle, scanning the room.  She was looking for something.  She stopped in her circular movement and smiled.  There was the feeding trough.  She took three slow steps over to the manger.  Using a post, she eased herself down to the straw strewn dirt floor beside the tiny feed bunker.  She sat using the post again as a back rest.

She gazed back at the door.  Dust that she had stirred by her entrance was dancing in the light.  She didn’t look at the door as much as she was looking through it.  She wasn’t looking at something as much as she was looking at another point in time, now held only in her memory.

In her mind’s eye she saw a younger woman.  The young woman was walking down the street.  Small groups of women whispered as she passed.  “There goes Mary.  She sinned before her wedding.  Now she’s telling everyone God got her pregnant.  What a hussy!  Does she think anyone is going to believe such craziness?  Poor Joseph.”
“Not, ‘poor Joseph,’” Mary whispered to herself.  Dear Joseph.  At least he believes me.”  She hurried through a courtyard and into her home.  The long months of hurt and rejection washed over her in waves.  She sat weeping into her apron.  She had spent most of the last months in tears.  So much so, she thought she’d run out of tears, but more would come.

She prayed a psalm through her tears.  Each time she cried, she would say these words:
Sing praises to the Lord, you who belong to him; 
praise his holy name.  
Crying may last for a night, 
but joy comes in the morning.  (Psalm 30:4-5)

The words of the Psalm wrapped around her like bandages for her wounds.  She clung to the promise that all of God’s nights are followed by God’s mornings.  Again, as she did at the angel’s visit, she whispered the words, “Oh, yes, my Lord.  Let it be.”

II

Now the old woman stretched out her legs.  She folded her hands and placed them on her stomach.  She looked down at her hands.  She stared at her wrinkled fingers.  They were no longer straight and flexible like when she was young.  Now the knuckles were swollen  and ached most of the time.  The fingers were gnarled and curled by years of hard work and praying.  More like the talons of a hawk than the hands of woman.

She unfolded her fingers.  She stroked her stomach.  Looking out through the shaft of light in the stable door, the old woman again became lost in thought.  Her face was like a rippled stone and her eyes unblinking.

Behind those eyes she saw the young Mary, lying under a blanket on her bed.  Her time was close.  She was praying her bedtime prayers, as she had for most of her 16 years.  She said, “Why, God, have I been chosen?  You could simply speak this child into existence if you wish.  Yet you make me a partner to your work.”  Mary smiled when she said that.  “Yet, to share with you, O God,” she prayed on, “has been the deepest joy of my life.”  She stared at the moon that shone through her window.  She stroked the mound that had become her belly and whispered quietly, “Sleep on, little one.  Very soon you too will enter upon your high and holy partnership with the Lord.”

III

A colt in the stable jostled and pawed the dirt with it’s hoof.  The suddenness of it startled the old woman from her thoughts.  She turned her head.  She looked into the large, dark eyes of the animal.  In the reflection of the colt’s eyes a scene appeared.  The old woman saw Mary.  She was close to full term and ready to have the baby.  Joseph was helping her on the back of a colt.  “Why do I have to go to Bethlehem?” she asked Joseph.  “I wanted to stay back in Nazareth, safe in my bed.  I want to be close to my family.  I could have delivered the child there while you were away.  My mother and my aunts and the mid-wife were there to help me.”

But Joseph did not reply.  He was the man.  He didn’t have to answer.  He just led the donkey onward.  They were like shadows in the evenings fading light, moving in a dream.  A very bad dream in Mary’s mind.

Mary stared at Joseph’s big, wood worn hands as he tugged the colt forward.  Not looking back at his wife on the colt, he finally said, “As sure as I am leading the donkey, God is leading us.”  He looked up at the strange star in the clear purple night sky.
“It looks like a candle in God’s window,” Mary replied, looking at the same star.
Now the sound of the donkey’s hoofs on the path didn’t seem as lonely.  “This is not a journey of fear,” Joseph said.  “It is a journey of faith.”
“Yes,” Mary replied.  “How can I fear the unknown when I travel with the One who is always there to place a lamp in the window, and gently draw us in the right direction?”

IV

The old woman turned away from the colt’s blank gaze.  She turned her head in the other direction.  There was the manger, full of fresh hay, that a calf was now eating out of.  The woman painfully raised her arm and grasped the splintered rim of the small feeding trough, startling the calf away.  Her wrinkled and spotted fingers grasped some hay.  She squeezed it as tightly as her old grip would allow.  She drew the straw to her nose and smelled it.  She closed her eyes with the dusty and pungent odor of the hay in her nostrils, lost the grip of it and let it cascade down upon her chest.  She saw Mary, holding a baby.

“It is finished,” Mary whispered to the infant.  “You are born, little Jesus.”  Mary lay back into the pile of blanket covered hay, holding the baby to her chest.  She was breathless from pain, but exhilarated.  There was wonder on the wind.  The lantern above her made her glow in the yellow light.  The silence was so deep, it was as if they were underwater.

Mary kissed the small face nestled against her cheek.  She counted his fingers, uncurling them one-by-one.  His little heart was beating hard, in rhythm with hers.  Holding the ten, tiny, pearly white fingers, she asked the child, “Oh, human child, whose fingerprints do you bear?  With those fingerprints do you enter the human world?  Who are you?”  That moment seemed to hang on the end of a golden thread held in suspension by God himself.
Joseph put his arm around Mary holding the baby and said, “Our baby’s birth does not belong to us alone.”
“What do you mean?” Mary asked him.
“I just have the feeling,” he replied, “that this baby will be reborn to generations to come.  They will ask the same question you have just asked.”
Mary touched her lips to the child’s ear once more and whispered, “No, our little son, it is not finished.  It has just begun.”

V

The old woman shifted a bit and the straw on her chest fell to the ground.  She pulled her legs up close to her chest and wrapped her boney arms around them.  She rested her forehead on her knees.  She untied the kafia that covered her head.  Her thin, gray hair flowed over the dress that covered her spindly legs.  She drifted from consciousness, and as she drifted, she saw the young Mary, awakening suddenly from her sleep.  She had a look on her face that said, Now I remember; I am a mother!  “Jesus?  Jesus, my baby,” she called out.  “Where is he?”

Across the stable Joseph was cuddling a small bundle in his arms.  “See,” he said to the baby with a smile.  “I told you your mother would be awake soon.”  Softly he walked over to where Mary lay, and eased the baby Jesus into hollowed hay in the manger.
“What a night,” she said.  “Was I dreaming, or were there really a bunch of shepherds here last night?”
“You weren’t dreaming,” Joseph replied.  “There was a whole group of them.  They got down on their knees praying to God, thanking God for our child.  When they left, they were singing psalms to God.”
“I remember that,” Mary said.  “With voices like theirs, I hope they don’t sing very often.”
“And with a smell like theirs,” Joseph butted in, “it was nice to just have the odors of this cattle stall.  “Besides,” he continued, “who would care about their singing except their sheep and the stars?”

Joseph and Mary smiled at each other.  Mary had gotten up, bent over the manger and kissed the tiny nose of their baby Jesus.  Beyond the quietness of the stable were the sounds of the world going on outside:  Conversations about the census; sandals scuffing along the dirt road; children playing in the morning light; wagon wheels creaking.  Mary traced the baby’s face with her finger and softly said, “My precious one, I do not know why you have come.  Perhaps the reason has to do with all the people outside who wander by so casually.”

Mary reached for Joseph’s hand.  As he took it, he said, “God is alive in the world.”
“Yes, my husband,” Mary replied.  “I believe God is.”  Deep from the swaddling cloths, Jesus cried.  Mary bent down and lifted him up to her breast.  Suddenly she had a vision, a much sadder picture, a horrifying visage of Jesus being lifted up, not for nurture, but for death.

VI

The old woman looked up from her knees into a brilliant light.  Someone must have opened the stable door, she thought.  A hand reached down to her.  It had a scar in the palm.  She raised her arm weakly, and the strong hand in the light gently lifted her.  It lifted her not to her feet, but above her feet.  Beyond her body.  Beyond the stable.  Beyond life.  She heard a Voice, a Voice she knew intimately.  That Voice said, “Welcome, my loving and faithful mother.”