Fourth Wednesday of Advent, Christmas Eve
Scripture Reading for Today:
Emmanuel, God with Us
by Elle Pyke
On November 11, I trudged slowly through freshly fallen snow, to the front door of the long-term care facility, my Mom’s home for almost three years. The walk was slow, deliberate, knowing this would be the last time I passed through the door. Before sunrise that morning, her caregivers called, well acquainted with moments like this, letting us know it was time to return after days of keeping vigil by her bedside. My mother’s long journey with dementia was nearing its end.
There is a liminal space that opens when someone is passing from this life into what comes next. I anticipated in my heart that this day would come. I practiced every contemplative prayer and breath prayer I knew. But the experience itself resisted my attempts at rehearsal. Apparently, you only arrive into that thin holy place not with the mind, but when your fleshly body is present.
Watching my Mom take her last breath, surrounded by those she loved most, was indeed a holy affair. There were offerings of tears and joy, sorrow and surprise at the altar of her bedside. She was fully present for my first breath, and it was my deepest honour to bear witness to her last.
As I sat with today’s lectionary reading from Luke 2, my attention lingered with Mary. I wondered what it was like for her when what she had held in her imagination became material reality before her eyes. What did she feel in her body as Jesus took his first breath? What was that thin holy place like when her flesh was present to it? She had prepared as best she could. She had pondered these things deeply. And yet, the moment itself, much like death, would have arrived unpracticed.
The beautiful mystery of the incarnation that lies at the heart of the text today is not that God escaped the body, but that God embraced it. We are reminded that Jesus comes through flesh and breath, hunger and touch. The flesh discounted by the world is exactly the kind of body that Jesus took up residence in. He speaks the language of our flesh. And somehow, the gift and utter absurdity of it all is that our fleshly experiences are marked and sustained by the inbreaking of the presence of this same God. Luke’s words, of a baby born to Mary, draw us back to a faith rooted in embodiment, a Word that can be held, one that can be felt, through our first breath and last.
I do not know what this year and season have held for you - where sorrow has met you, where you are quietly expectant, or what cobwebs from life you are still dusting off your bones. But what I do know is that the wisdom of Advent makes room for all of it. Whatever you bring, you do not bring it alone. The God who comes in flesh meets us where we are, not where we wish we had been or where we imagine ourselves to be.
Emmanuel - God with us - is not a future promise we must reach for, but a gift of presence given in the present moment, whether we walk into it or are thrust there. It is the kind of presence Mary knew in the first cry of her newborn son, the kind the shepherds encountered in the night when the angel announced glory to God and peace on earth, and the kind I knew when love placed its arms around my shoulders in my mom’s long-term care room that day.
My prayer for you, and my prayer for me this Christmas season, is simple: that we might pause long enough to notice this attentive presence of God. That we might let Advent’s invitation to bring slowness to the soul do its tender work. That we might sit with a good cup of tea - like my mother so loved - and linger in the quiet fleshliness of God with us, here and now. And that we might learn to trust that this present moment, however magical or mundane, is somehow holy ground.
God with me.
God with you.
God with us.
The coming anticipated light, yet somehow still known in part.
O come, O come, Emmanuel.
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