A VOICE SAYS, “CRY!” And so I prepare to lift my voice to cry. But, like the holy prophet, even as I take in breath to make my cry, I wonder, “What shall I cry?”
I’m guessing that this must be the unceasing prayer of the prophet; it is certainly the unceasing prayer of the poet. I would suppose that very few poets turn out to be prophets, but what I gather, even so, is that the two share a common complex of desires; both are driven to hear and to respond; both are compelled, that is, to witness.
As a poet hovering over the open page, I know in my bones the ache to find the words; I know, as well, the ache of uncertainty about which words.
It could be that we all share these complementary desires. We want very much to apprehend God’s will, and we hope to respond to it in a way that will please him.
We ache to receive and we ache to give.
Like the prophet, we would seek to comfort his people. We would speak tenderly to those of the holy city, that their warfare might come to an end, that their iniquities and our own might be pardoned. We, too, would “prepare the way of the Lord,” had we any clear sense of how that might be done.
In the Gospel according to Saint Matthew, we find a stunning account of the Father’s compassion for the wanderer in the wilderness. Jesus asks, “If a man has a hundred sheep, and one of them has gone astray, does he not leave the ninety-nine on the mountains and go in search of the one?” Jesus tells us that “if he finds it, truly, I say to you, he rejoices over it more than over the ninety-nine that never went astray. So it is not the will of my Father who is in heaven that even one of these little ones should perish.”
Does the answer to our puzzle wait for us here?
Is there a clue here as to what it is that we should cry?
Isaiah writes, “All we like sheep have gone astray. We have turned everyone to his own way.” For most of us, this isn’t exactly news, and it isn’t exactly comforting. But Isaiah follows this cry with another: “and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all. He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth; like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shearers is dumb, so he opened not his mouth.”
That the Shepherd should condescend to become one of the sheep is as appalling now as then. That the God of All should condescend to take on what was, until that moment, all-corrupted flesh is a fearful notion. That therefore, our own bodies partake of his perfection is what I now wish to cry aloud and often as I may.
~From Scott Cairns, “Second Tuesday of Advent,” GOD WITH US: Rediscovering the Meaning of Christmas, edited by Greg Pennoyer & Gregory
