Five years ago, I attended a Catholic Christmas Eve service at the Cathedral of Mary Our Queen in Baltimore, near where my parent’s live. It was a midnight service, lit by candle light and there were plenty of Christmas carols sung to add to the holiday atmosphere. The  bishop gave the homily that evening and he spoke of being in the holy land, in Bethlehem the year before for Christmas. He described breaking bread with other Christian leaders at the shepherds fields and together experiencing the beauty and mystery of Jesus’s birth. There was something familiar among the services of these other traditions, yet they were still strangers to each other. 

When I was in high school, I kept a journal of my dreams. The journal only ended up having a few entries in it, but I remember one of the dreams vividly because of the practice. It was an image of a group of people walking up the windy path of the side of a mountain. A city lay in the valley, but everyone was walking up to the top of the mountains and every single person was carrying a candle. All over the mountains around the city, there were streams of light from other people walking and carrying candles. Everyone was also singing—though I couldn’t make out the words, it felt like the mountains were humming. 

During this time of Advent, we turn our spiritual imagination to the birth of Jesus as well as the pregnancy of Mary. I gave birth to my own son a little over a month ago, which makes my mediations on Mary’s birth particularly special. As I listen to the song “Mary did you know?” I find that I am brought to tears—especially with the lines “That the child that you delivered will soon deliver you.” and “when you kiss your little baby, you have kissed the face of God.” Quakers believe in an incarnation theology, the belief that there is that of the Divine, that of God in each of us. So that in essence, when I kiss my son, that of God in me is kissing that of God in him. It is a holy moment. When I was pregnant with him, such a sense of having the Divine within was magnified as I felt this miracle of creation move inside me. Mary’s exclamation of God’s magnificence in the passage of Luke glorifies this miracle even as it is embedded in the mystery and fear of her pregnancy! 

The picture at this top of this post is The Peaceable Kingdom by Edward Hicks, a Quaker in the late 1700’s and early 1800’s who traveled as a Quaker minister for many years until settling down to paint later in life. (His cousin Elias was responsible for the Quaker split and the term Hicksite). Edward painted over 60 versions of The Peaceable Kingdom which was inspired by the passage from Isaiah 11:6-8 giving illustration to the God’s call for a right and redeemed society.  It is a picture that has hung in just about every Quaker meeting house that I have attended; an icon of the Quaker pacifist stance—a call for us all to work to bring the Peaceable Kingdom into reality. 

As we enter this time of Advent there is much talk about expectation. Expecting the birth of a child, a child like Jesus, is often a time of excitement, fear and awe as the birth parent's body changes and the baby grows and the family prepares the space and their hearts for their new arrival. Yet, the scripture of this week from the Gospel of Matthew speaks of being prepared for the unexpected, describing the surprise of the people left behind when God flooded the world and suggesting that there will be a time when some are "taken" and others are "left" with the coming of the Son of Man: " For in the days before the flood, people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, up to the day Noah entered the ark; and they knew nothing about what would happen until the flood came and took them all away. That is how it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. Two men will be in the field; one will be taken and the other left."