Bearing Forth a New World - First Week of Advent
Becoming Mystical Mothers this Advent
“We are all meant to be mothers of God. What good is it to me if this eternal birth of the divine Son takes place unceasingly but does not take place within myself? And what good is it to me if Mary is full of grace if I am not also full of grace? What good is it to me for the Creator to give birth to his Son if I also do not give birth to him in my time and my culture? This, then, is the fullness of time. When the Son of God is begotten in us.”
Advent is the season of the traditional church calendar that leads up to Christmas, and it begins this week. It’s marked by four Sundays of anticipation and expectation, waiting for the arrival of the Christ to come. In many Christian traditions, this first Sunday is marked by hope for the second coming of Christ. In other Christian traditions, it is the beginning of the weeks of Annunciation, or the announcement of divine presence coming into the world.
As Christian mystics, we may perhaps feel a little dissonance with this. For we already know that Christ has come, again and again, in each time and in each one of us. Christ is present in all things. The barriers that are put between the divine and ourselves are not ultimate reality—including time. We don’t have to wait.
And yet still, we realize that there is more to come. There is a longing for Christ to come in more fullness within ourselves and our time. For a new world to come forth. For reality as we know it to become more than what it appears to be now. For new life to be born.
So who will bear this new life? Who will hold the generative potentiality within, nurturing the gestation and incubation?
Who will be the bearers of Christ in this time?
Christ is not just Jesus
Before we answer that question, it will be helpful to remember that whenever we are talking about “Christ,” we are not talking only about Jesus. As Father Richard Rohr has so strikingly reminded us: Christ is not Jesus’ last name. The Christ is “another name for everything.”
At the time of Jesus, the word “Christ” referred to “the anointed one” or “the messiah.” It was seen at the time more from a temporal and political understanding. But Jesus brought forth a much more cosmic and universal comprehension, as the apostle Paul explained in many of his letters.
More recently, Teilhard de Chardin has illuminated the evolutionary and cosmic implications of this universal understanding of Christ, present in all matter and consciousness. It is drawing forward the universe, and it is still unfolding, still being born forth continuously. As he put it, “Of the cosmic Christ, we may say both that he is and that he is still growing.”
Christ is still growing, still being brought forth. In the material world. In and through all matter, including all of humanity.
“In the humanity which is begotten today, the Word prolongs the unending act of God’s own birth; and by virtue of God’s immersion in the world’s womb, the great waters of the kingdom of matter have, without even a ripple, been imbued with life. The immense host which is the universe is made flesh.”
—Teilhard de Chardin
The incarnation of Christ—both then and now—is the divine interfused with the material. The universal eucharist. The body of God in the great web. The holy communion of divine oneness.
And it is the divine being made flesh not only all things but every single thing. Including you.
Your Annunciation
“Greetings, you who are highly favored! The Lord is with you!”
Yes, you. I’m talking to you. Each one of you. All of us. We are the new mothers of God.
This is what Meister Eckhart was trying to point us toward. Call it sacrilege if you like, and in some ways it is. Mystical sacrilege. Eckhart was tried as a heretic after all.
Holy Mary, mother of God, the Lord is with thee.
Do not be afraid, the divine spirit is upon you, and you will bear the Christ. You will bring forth the divine into this time and culture. Into the fullness of time, as it is for you and the world now.
I believe we all need this sort of annunciation in our lives. Because the coming of Christ was not just a past event. Nor is it something that will only happen once more in some distant future. It is ever-coming, ever-arising. Now and soon. And in your very bosom.
Sometimes we might feel a little trepidation, a little hesitancy to accept such a personal invitation and calling. Perhaps we feel not ready, or that we aren’t “advanced” enough spiritually, or feel too full of shame, or afraid of the responsibility.
To be “full of grace” is to live within the holding of it all. To accept that perfection was never required. To humbly hold the seeming contradictions and live into our calling. That whatever we might think disqualifies us from being the bearers of God is inconsequential—and in fact even very much belongs.
That is what this messenger is declaring to you. This messenger is calling you forth into the participation in the divine nature, announcing your divine conception, your part to play in this world.
Bearing forth exactly what you have to bear. Your unique DNA interfused with the divine DNA, creating new life.
What good is it to me if this eternal birth of the divine Son takes place unceasingly but does not take place within myself?
What is yours to do in this life? What is given to you to bear and bring forth into the world, full of love, care, and devotion? What is your charge? What is your annunciation?
“I am the Lord’s servant. May your word to me be fulfilled.”
Becoming Bearers of Life
What does it feel like to carry the Christ waiting to be born again in the fullness of time in this moment now?
Here we must enter the space of the womb. The deep awareness of intuitive knowing and sensing that is often preverbal—or we might say it is postverbal, beyond words.
Not only do we find it difficult to speak of, we can find that we don’t need to. It is literally an under-standing, coming from a place deeper than our usual cognitive dominance. We call it “wombfulness.”
Cultivating and nurturing wombfulness is a capacity of consciousness that we can learn to develop. It is an often neglected and under-appreciated form of awareness and knowing.
While we may have some recognition of our instinctual depths, and maybe even some development into our intuitive knowing, there is also a possible a movement into generativity.
This is a latent potency within to bring forth, to move with the deep flow coming from the divine source, the wellspring bubbling forth from our ground of being, the “rivers of living water [that] will flow forth from your womb” as Jesus put it.
We feel this deep within, rather than trying to define it. We soak in the possibility and the potentiality. Just as a mother-to-be does not “know” who exactly she carries, or what they might become. So too do we often have to hold the unseen becoming yet to come.
We might keep them close, treasuring up and pondering them in the depths of our inner being.
Life Coming Forth from Our Spiritual Wombs
And so we become bearers of life.
Drawn forward by the eros of invitation into a new romance of spirit.
Conceiving consciousness of new ways of being.
Receiving the quickening in the coming together of the divine and human, from within our very own manifested person, full of grace.
Pregnant with possibility, penetrating any malaise of despair.
Bearing the new forms as they gestate and generate, often unseen but not unknown.
Giving birth to a new world.
I’d also like to share a video created by Jonathan Jelfs as part of our Nurturing Wombfulness process. The poem and music were written by him and is a beautiful offering calling for a new world from our spiritual womb. Please do yourself the favor of giving it a listen:
We’ll continue on our wombful journey through advent next week, with a writing from Vivien Claire.