“St. Augustine says, ‘What does it avail me that this birth is always happening, if it does not happen in me? That it should happen in me is what matters.’ We shall therefore speak of this birth, of how it may take place in us.”

—Meister Eckhart (1260–1327)

"In the context of the Cathedral and the liturgical calendar, we speak of the Nativity, the birth of the Divine Child in the manger, the Incarnation, and yet in the highest and deepest sense of a calling, the Nativity is not confined to Christmas Eve, nor to Bethlehem.  Whether or not we listen or hear, aren’t all of us called to continue bringing something sacred to birth in ourselves, in our communities?   In speech, in ideals, choices and endeavors?  This includes our friendships, communities, the world!  Through image and word,  I would love to cultivate meditative dialogue on Incarnation and on The Incarnation by walking with Mary, the mystical rose, with the Child, with the midwife, with the three Wise Men, with the shepherds in the fields and with the Holy Spirit.   Mystical texts describe the whole participation of the natural world too.  It is said that the forest and trees, springs and even the stars quivered at The Incarnation, and if we trace those threads with love and awe, with wonder and humility, the Divine might be reborn in us too.” 

— Therese Schroeder-Sheker

Several of us associated with the Cathedral and several from elsewhere throughout the U.S. were blessed this Advent to engage in a small group four-week online retreat with artist-theologian-clinician Therese Schroeder-Sheker, the visionary founder of music-thanatology and the Chalice of Repose Project.

In our first week, we meditated on what virginity means archetypally. As a “virgin forest” is untrammeled and without commodification, full of both living and dying things which make it fertile, we were asked to ask ourselves, Who am/was I when I was unburdened, before I was filled with outside influences?, and to think of Mary as one “true to her own special congruence, which is fecund……and her Virgin consciousness as One unto oneself.”

Through her consciousness of word and image and of creating and holding a womb-like space, Therese nurtured us into awareness and articulation of an “I-Thou relationship of the ‘One and the Envisioned.’” We were encouraged to, like Mary, have the courage to protect the vision we must learn to hold before speaking of it too soon.

Protecting, while held in an assurance of revealing, we spoke of visions we may not have spoken of to anyone else before, or in many years.

Providentially for me, I began to correspond with Therese early this year in preparation for her Lenten retreat and within days of becoming a hospital chaplain intern. I have since watched myself reach for and hold visions of Beauty in the hospital, increasingly aware of the Thou facing me at all possible moments of life and death, potentially recognizable inasmuch as my inner sight has grown in capacity to behold it.

The image above is of The Dormition of Mary (ivory, circa 900). (This scene was written of by (Pseudo-) Dionysius circa 500, possibly reflecting an earlier tradition I am unaware of.) In our retreat, we marveled together how the death of Mary above is like a birth, with her Son as midwife.

Perhaps the images in the art of this post are good to hold especially if what is called “the holidays” seem commodified and sterilely indifferent to love, loss and grief. Even while we live at the dim thresholds of the winter solstice and of our own lives, these frame in us the vision of the Light which ever holds all creation alive in God’s sight.