Second Wednesday of Advent
Do we not all have one Father? Did not one God create us? Why do we profane the covenant of our ancestors by being unfaithful to one another?
Malachi 2:10
Advent: Week Two
Laboring Continues: Is Love Alive?
When It's Just Not Turning Out the Way You'd Hoped
Second Wednesday of Advent
December 9, 2020
Song: Winter Song
Soul Friends,
We enter life's long labors young, full of ideals and grand visions. Whether these long labors are our professions, our marriages, family life, our own healing, or activism, our visions keep us going.
Until they don't.
Who among us hasn't hit the wall of utter disappointment and despair, the moment we realize that it is NOT going to all turn out the way we had imagined? We hadn't accounted for what we didn't know. We hadn't accounted for the opposition (our own and others'). We hadn't accounted for the wounds (our own or others'). We hadn't accounted for a battered economy, an illness, a disaster, a death.
And now here we are, stuck, uncertain of how we might ever live into a future that is so much less than we dreamed for, hardly even palatable.
These are tender and incredibly vulnerable moments, requiring loads of self-compassion and the mature root of self-understanding, gifts we may or may not possess. These are the moments we wonder, as our song this week puts it, Is Love alive? These are the moments we face a choice: Do we, or can we, remain faithful?
Today's lectionary readings depict two pathways through such situations. In the first, Israel breaks covenant and jumps ship on the love-dream of their youth. So prophet and healer Malachi draws Israel's attention to where they first started going wrong: they forgot their beginnings. They forgot that both they and the one whom they've divorced hailed from the same Divine Beloved. They forgot the One to whom they belong, in body and spirit. They forgot that the longing for their love-dream sprang from a deeper longing: a longing for intimacy with the Divine.
And this forgetting paved the way for Israel’s hypocrisy, just as our forgetting paves the way for our own. It is this forgetting that allows us to appear faithful — still making the right sacrifices, expressing the appropriate emotions, speaking the right words— long after we have left the long laboring of a lifelong commitment. It is this forgetting that hollows us out and robs us of our ultimate fertility. It is this forgetting that will ultimately, God reminds us through Malachi, end in violence.
The second story, of Zechariah and Elizabeth, depicts an alternate response to lost dreams. Zechariah and Elizabeth are a well-worn couple, in the way only a couple who has suffered deeply together becomes. Having lived a lifetime of the lost dream of having a family, their infertility —like so many unrealized dreams— has likely placed a strain on the marriage. Still, they have remained faithful. The writer, Luke, takes pains at the beginning of the story to emphasize their shared origins in the priestly line of Aaron, and their righteousness. I wonder how often over the years of deep disappointment — and quite possibly anger and bitterness, and the particular loneliness of that particular grief —each one of them had to retrace their steps back to their beginnings.
I always laugh at the point in the story when the angel who greets Zechariah in the temple declares, "Your prayer has been answered!" I imagine Zechariah thinking, What prayer? Here's an old man who offers prayers for a living and who has certainly long since quit praying for a son. Who could have imagined that his love-dream was still very much alive in God's plans?
But let us not fall down that slippery slope of meritocracy, by holding up Elizabeth and Zechariah as the Ideal. Let us not cling to the illusion that, if we want Love to born through us, we had better do it all right all the time. I redirect you to the very end of the passage from Malachi, when the Lord Almighty says to Israel, despite their forgetfulness and failure, "I will send my messenger, who will prepare the way before me. Then suddenly the Lord you are seeking will come to his temple; the messenger of the covenant, whom you desire, will come."
Despite Israel's forgetfulness and failure and hypocrisy, the Lord will COME. In the midst of dreams deferred, the Lord will COME. In the midst of the labors that no long animate us, the Lord will COME. Love is alive after all. Soul Friend, consider this possibility today.