filled

Some invitations take a while to receive, and this one had surely waited for me, the corner of an old letter just barely visible at the edge, below a stack of things desperate for sorting, until came the day when, all that clutter finally gone, I at last took it up in my hands and began to read those dear old words, and they came fresh, like a curve of relief.

…know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.

Intimate, these words, the kind that, if honestly received, can make a person blush, really, and so, I let the invitation ride up against my heart for a while, as I considered it, and meanwhile, Christmas was due any day.

I dragged a box stuffed with our Christmas tree—the branches poking out at the corners and seams—into the middle of the living room floor along with two plastic bins of ornaments.  On the top of one, I had written winter toys in black permanent marker and then crossed it off again, this reminding me of the years when my children were small, when I used to rotate toys in and out of their playroom with the seasons to create opportunities for rediscovery.  Now the bin stores a whole different kind of winter toys, and the rediscovery is always mine, year after year, the pulling out and putting up, the packing away again.  It’s as though I can hear our cloistered memories whispering.

Thinking mostly about my own forgetfulness and a desire to remain, especially in an unending season of Advent celebration, about how I always seem somehow to lose the magic through the middle of the year, I had paused, perched sock-footed on the edge of our ottoman, to rearrange the plastic letters on a letterboard I like to use, digging into my stash of extras to recreate a Dickens quote from A Christmas Carol that is a particular favorite.

Honor Christmas in your heart and try to keep it all the year.

I remember wondering, however briefly, as I did this, if such a thing were even possible—to keep Christmas, or more specifically, Advent, in my heart all year–since Christmas seems annually for me to be a kind of playful production, an artful arrangement of experiences designed to illustrate a greater reality, to tell the Truth, anyway, as art always aims to do, to bring Christmas to my family.  As an artist, I enjoy that aspect of the season, the storytelling, the creativity, but also, I feel throughout a certain tension between my creative self and a disciplined awareness of consistent responsibilities which produces in me an endless tug-of-war over available resources, my energy and time in particular, and every year I end up overspending on both.  So, as much as it depends on me, I had to acknowledge, right there on the sentimental edge of everything, that there seems to be a limit to how much Christmas I can bring and for how long.

Fast forward, and just days before Christmas, we pack up our cars and travel to my parents’ house for a long weekend celebration, and I am bringing Christmas there too–in glittering packages and trays of sweets, in cheesy appetizers and festive clothes, carols murmuring on the stereo, sparkles like pixie dust shining on my cheeks, and for that joy set before me, when we pull into the seashell-lined drive in front of their house, all travel rumpled and crumpled, and I jump out to see my parents, my smile is wide and real.  But in every physical way, I also feel fresh-carved and hollowed-out, only too aware of how empty of myself I can be, and not just during the holidays.

So often, I feel too worn to bring much of anything to anyone at all.

But still, that blushing invitation whispers against my skin on the way in the front door, even though I’ve hardly found time enough to receive it.

…know this love that surpasses knowledge—

I can’t quite connect the dots, at least not right now, as we tromp up the stairs with our arms full of all my doing, that Jesus came for love, without any human help at all, into the empty womb of woman, and so, the question, getting right down to it, seems to be whether I want to bring Christmas or bring Jesus, because any Advent, any celebration of the coming of Christ, ultimately must be a celebration of the filling of humble caverns of mortality by holy incarnation.

—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.

I had in fact been prepared to carry Christ more than I had been preparing to carry Christmas, reduced down as I was then to a poverty of spirit.

But when we arrive at Mom and Dad’s, I still don’t understand this, that the real preparation for bringing Christmas, if Christmas really is for me a time for celebrating the wildly marvelous incarnation of Christ, isn’t so much bound up in what I carry with me as it is in all I’ve left behind, as it is in the cavernous honesty of my own weary weakness, the emptiness of myself into which the fullness of the Savior always comes and is always made complete.

My mom lifts a hand, knotty with arthritis, calls out a hello from her screened porch, rising, but only slowly, as our feet hit the stairs below.

These last months have been even more emptying for Mom than they have been for me, she having waded day after day into floods of pain, having been whittled down to awaiting much needed surgery.  If I feel hollowed-out, I’m thinking, on my way up those stairs, she feels even more so, she, moving slowly toward the door, and both of us only finally filled by the Spirit of God, to the measure of all His fullness.

So, I come, bringing Christmas, and she sits, bringing Christmas–bringing Jesus, but when she rises out of her chair and I fling open the door and we embrace for joy, maybe neither of us fully comprehends how that could be so, how we who’ve felt our own barrenness could actually be utterly full of God.

There is this scrabbling fear, this gnawing, that comes with what these days we call a ‘scarcity mentality,’ what the apostle Paul called living in want, which makes us shake our heads over the idea that emptiness or temporal exhaustion or coming to the end of ourselves could inspire our gratitude before God, that we could even take joy in our own weakness because we know that His strength, His presence in us, can only under such circumstances fill us completely full.

I will hear in a sermon, during the days just following this trip, that no one except Mary would’ve called Mary blessed when she became the one to carry the incarnated Christ. The holy moment came with ostensibly so little magic, but instead with scandal and suffering that likely left that young, impoverished mama feeling more bereft than filled, and still she sang, from now on all generations will call me blessed.

Even if intellectually I should know better, somehow I always go looking for Christmas to come full, with romance and twinkling lights, not expecting the full of scripture–a full that starts out looking and feeling everything like empty, empty seeded with Christ, empty carrying only the miracle of Him to a carved-out people.

I wish I had thought to whisper a thank you, my hand flat pressed against the door jamb as we left home, and me feeling all that undeniable readiness for Christ, but honestly, I only whispered a prayer along the lines of how in the world and hoisted my suitcase into the car. I didn’t really understand then that our everyday Advents are these hollowed-out days, when His strength comes complete, when we carry only Him to all the waiting world.

…know this love that surpasses knowledge—

Something in me jumped when I embraced my mom there on her front porch, remembering suddenly a passage I’d double-underlined in pen in Ann Voskamp’s book before we set out on this trip:

Anytime you’re a safe place for another soul or you open and conceive grace—you become a womb for God.  …What if someone sees…how empty I am?  How I am not enough, how my gifts are not enough, how giving all I’ve got is never enough?  How there are empty places in me, gaping places in me—all these hollow, starving places?  And Mary nods to you…  Only one thing is necessary—be a space for love to come.

My mama has only ever been a space for love to come to me, and here she is, empty-armed except for a cane, and yet those aged arms still powerfully safe, her hair a silver sparkle around her face, full of everything I’ve ever needed—the Spirit of God Himself.

Though emptied, she’s full of the fullest full, and she opens her arms to give Him to me.

And all at once I’m receiving God’s invitation again like a gift—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.

Suddenly, I can see how in the world it ever happens that we honor Christmas in our hearts, that we honor Jesus and His coming, and keep it all the year, because this—empty mama and empty me holding each other and both of us bringing only God, this is Christmas, not wrapping the presents or making the sweets or filling the stockings in the last hour of the night, but being emptied of ourselves to become a space for love to come full; feeling God make fertile ground out of the barrenness of us—becoming a womb for God, to carry His love to each other.  This is what it is to bring Christmas all year.  These are our everyday Advents, this trusting that the emptying of self always gives way to the coming of God, this overflowing, celebrating faith that He always fills—to the full–our emptiness with more of Himself to give away.

So, when I get back home and in the last week of the year begin to pack all the Christmas decorations away, the letter board stays, propped against the wall in our entry way, reminding me to give thanks.