Curations: The Irrational Season

This past Sunday I shared a poem in worship by the author and poet, Madeleine L'Engle, called "After Annunciation." (It's actually the poem that gives the title to "The Irrational Season," a book of her writings tracing the church's calendar from one Advent to the next.)

This is the irrational season

when love blooms bright and wild.

Had Mary been filled with reason

there’d have been no room for the child.

"How God Shows Up" by Lisle Gwynn Garrity

And there is plenty about this season that is irrational...plenty about Advent that doesn't make sense. A virgin birth? God showing up as a baby? Angels and dreams and supernatural stars? A season of waiting and anticipation for hope and peace and joy and love...especially while the world is in the state that it is (you know: war, violence, death, hate, fear, etc., etc., etc.)?

And yet that is precisely when God decides to be born among us, captured in another of L'Engle's poems. Maybe we, too, can take the risk of allowing love to be born in us, even (especially?) when it seems irrational to do so.

- GJD

"The Risk of Birth" by Madeleine L'Engle

This is no time for a child to be born,

With the earth betrayed by war & hate

And a comet slashing the sky to warn

That time runs out & the sun burns late.

That was no time for a child to be born,

In a land in the crushing grip of Rome;

Honor & truth were trampled to scorn—

Yet here did the Savior make His home.

When is the time for love to be born?

The inn is full on the planet earth,

And by a comet the sky is torn—

Yet Love still takes the risk of birth.