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Health & Fitness

Birthed into Life

Genesis 12:1-4a  John 3:1-17          

Nicodemus was frustrated with this wild mystical rabbi he encountered late at night.  Jesus was not giving him standard, expected, and literal answers to his questions.  No, Jesus was being agonizingly poetic and head-in-the-clouds….a person must be born again by the spirit of God to find renewal and salvation.   How absurd!  How can an old guy like him be re-birthed by his wrinkled mother?   This is not only fantastic and insane; it is also really gross.   Yuk.   Here’s two people in conversation with each other, talking past each other, speaking a language the other doesn’t understand, their words whizzing past each other, like fireflies in the night.     

 

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Maren Tirabassi & Joan Grant wrote this poem to express this encounter:

I came in the night to you, a dark walking prayer,

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terrified of giving life to myself— life so bloody and naked and new.

I come in the night to you, with my questions and my logic and my fear of the wind, and you meet me with world embracing love, world-relishing love,

and you open your womb, your warm, soft, deep-red womb,

to hold and expel me – a birth and blessing.

 

Birth and rebirth…what is all this talk about birth and rebirth – being born from above, born by the Spirit?   It sounds esoteric, bazaar, mysterious.  If we take it literally, the way Nicodemus does, it sounds wacky.  Jesus obviously didn’t and is speaking from a spiritual place, from the poetic side of the brain.  Oddly, nowadays, some Christians make it sound literal and simplistic, a requirement: being ‘born again,’ a litmus test as to whether you are getting into heaven or not. “Are you saved?” we hear in a bus-station or airport, are you ‘born again’?   It becomes a code, a formula rather than a mystery.

 

Jesus is speaking about an experience of faith – not a test or a literal rebirth.  He’s talking about transformation, turning one’s life around to embrace beauty, to discover wholeness and peace.   Most of us have been through a kind of re-birth at one time or another, when we’ve re-invented ourselves, faced an enormous rite-of-passage, a time when we were tossed from one life into another.   This can come with a major move or transition, going from one world into another, one life-stage into a new way of being.  It could be a divorce, a death of a relationship, a loss of a loved one, then a painful birth into a new life.

It could be the loss of a job or a terrible accident, or an unexpected illness, or time in abuse or violence; all of which throw us from one life into another.  (Birth is not always a happy thing, ask any mother…birthing is dreadfully painful and life threatening…but thankfully it usually leads to a happy ending in a new, miraculous child.)

 

Here is a prayer, written by Maren Tirabassi and Joan Grant, for women in their later years who have had to be re-born, often against their will, after divorce, or the death of a spouse, or having to start a second or third career.   God…

 

“I am too late to be born again – I have given birth to children and dreams, and the eggs are old and my time is past.

I have given birth to myself – I have counted all the answers for my life and sought no more questions.

I am closer to dying than childhood.   I am wrinkled and not supple. 

I do not easily curl into you, into the darkness….into the cavern of your love for the world.

How can I be swallowed by the ‘lonely-blows-where-it-will’ place in God ---where I am no longer respectable or expectable, where I cannot retire on my honor, nor fold my hands in comfortable wisdom, where there is uncertainty every morning and I lie down to sleep in doubt, where there are no answers, no condemnation, and not one else’s opinion matters?

And yet there in the throbbing-warm place in God, I am not left helpless, fetal-unfinished to float in peace – but must be thrust raw-newborn, vulnerable, wet and cold, wailing for the loss of your heartbeat and my sweet old age, into new beginning and crazy, painful, holy life.”   (An Improbably Gift of Blessing p. 78)

 

Like the woman described in this poem, we can find ourselves being painfully re-born.  And yet, like this woman, we can find holiness and adventure in the raw, painful immediacy of a new beginning.  We can also find sustenance, warmth and connection in God’s love and protection.   Rebirth can be threatening and disturbing, and yet it can lead to new possibilities and new avenues of growth.   

 

I just spent a day-long retreat at the Upper Room Retreat Center in Neptune on Celtic Spirituality with Liz Mueller and my wife, Martha. It was led by an Irish singer, song-writer and mystic, named Carmel Boyle.  One Irish saint that she described was St. Briget, an ancient saint revered and venerated to this day.    Speaking of birth and rebirth, Briget is described as the mid-wife of Jesus.  

(She was a nun in the 6th century…but then again, we are speaking poetically and spiritually…)   She is called Mary of the Gaels…and mother of Jesus. You can say she gave birth to Christianity in Ireland, bringing faith to this part of the world, as Patrick did also.  She was mid-wife, allowing the Christian faith to be birthed in that mystical, pagan, God-soaked country.

 

Carmel talked about how Celtic monks in the 5th and 6th century would travel out into the wilderness to find, what they called the place of their resurrection.   They would wander out into the wild, or they would get into a curough or skin-covered boat, often without oars, and they would allow the wind to blow them to their destination, wherever that might be, drifting according to God’s wind to a place to pray, to work, to die (physically or spiritually), and to be reborn.    Some say that our continent was one place they ended up.   How do we find ourselves blown to our place of resurrection, our place of rebirth and hope and wholeness and peace?  

 

In the Celtic tradition, faith is seen to be a kind of birth from within, rather than a change from outside.  So it is like a pregnancy leading to the birthing of God’s goodness and truth from within oneself.   According to J. Philip Newell in his The Book of Creation, it was the Celtic view that "Sin has buried the beauty of God's image, but not erased it. The gospel is given to uncover the hidden wealth of God that has been planted in the depths of our human nature" (p. xvii).  In Celtic Christianity redemption comes from within and not from outside of ourselves. Newell writes that, "redemption is the journey of being reconnected to the light of God within. It is a journey home that takes us through what seems like unknown land" (p. 11). Alexander Scott calls this desire within us-- "homesickness.”

 

The writer Annie Lamott describes an experiences like this in her book Traveling Mercies, which document her slow and painful rebirth from a life of alcoholism and drug abuse, depression and other addictions in the underside of life.  At one point she describes how she would spend time every weekend in a flea market in Marin City near San Francisco, and how she found her place of resurrection.  

 

 “Every square foot was taken up with booths and trucks and beach umbrellas and tables and blankets and racks displaying household wares and tools and crafts and clothes, much of it stolen, most of it going for a song…This is where I liked to be when I was hung-over or coming down off a cocaine binge, here in the dust with all these dusty people, all this liveliness and clutter and color… If I happened to be there between eleven and one on Sundays, I could hear gospel music coming from a church right across the street. It was St. Andrews Presbyterian, and it looked homely and impoverished, a ramshackle building with a cross on top….But the music wafting out was so pretty that I would stop and listen.

         Finally I began stopping in at St. Andrew from time to time, standing in the doorway to listen to the songs. I couldn’t believe how run-down it was, with terrible linoleum that was brown and overshined, and plastic stained glass windows.  But it had a choir of five black women and one rather Amish-looking white man making all that glorious music, and a congregation of thirty people or so, radiating kindness and warmth.  During the time when people hugged and greeted each other, various people would come back to where I stood to shake my hand or try to hug me; I was as frozen and stiff as Richard Nixon…

         I went back to St. Andrew about once a month. No one tried to con me into sitting down or staying.  I always left before the sermon.  I loved the singing, even about Jesus, but I didn’t want to be preached at about him.  To me, Jesus made about as much sense as Scientology or dowsing.   But the church smelled wonderful, like that air had nourishment in it, or like it was composed of these people’s exhalations, of warmth, and faith and peace.   There were always children running around or being embraced, and a gorgeous stick-thin deaf black girl signing to her mother, hearing the songs and the Scripture through her mother’s flashing fingers…And every other week they brought huge tubs of great food for the homeless families living at the shelter near the canal to the north.  I loved this.  But it was the singing that pulled me in and split me wide open…There was no sense of performance or judgment, only that the music was breath and food.

         Something inside me that was still and rotting would feel soft and tender.  Somehow the singing wore down all the boundaries and distinctions that kept me so isolated.  Sitting there, standing with them to sing, sometimes so shaky and sick that I felt like I might tip over, I felt bigger than myself, like I was being taken care of, tricked into coming back to life.”  (Traveling Mercies, Anne Lamott)

         With God’s grace and with luck, we find our winding way into our place of resurrection, to a place where God will break us open and allow us to be reborn.   This can come in different forms; it may not be in a church, but a new home, a new job, a baby’s birth, a new friend or relationship, a garden, a calling toward art or music or math.   As painful as new beginnings can be, we are called by God over and over again to be reborn and to reclaim life.  

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