Leaping in the Womb, Questioning in the Prison
When I was an undergraduate at the University of Tennessee there was a restaurant called “The Bahoo Container.” The interior of the restaurant was light, airy, with high ceilings, clean-lined windows, and beautiful batiked fabric swooping in the space between floor and ceiling.
One day, when Sheila and I were having lunch there, the owner came by the table to see how we were enjoying his restaurant. I asked him about the name, what did it mean? He said, “Everything in the world is held within a container; it matters what the container is. Sometimes we are not aware of this.”
I have never forgotten his words, and have returned to them many times over the years, trying to be aware of the containers in which I exist, the influence they have on my attitudes and perceptions.
The Gospel reading for Third Advent has brought this back to mind for me:
Matthew 11:2-11
When John heard in prison what the Messiah was doing, he sent word by his disciples and said to him, "Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?" Jesus answered them, "Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them. And blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me."
As they went away, Jesus began to speak to the crowds about John: "What did you go out into the wilderness to look at? A reed shaken by the wind? What then did you go out to see? Someone dressed in soft robes? Look, those who wear soft robes are in royal palaces. What then did you go out to see? A prophet? Yes, I tell you, and more than a prophet. This is the one about whom it is written,
`See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you,
who will prepare your way before you.'Truly I tell you, among those born of women no one has arisen greater than John the Baptist; yet the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he."
This year, for the first time on reading this familiar story, I thought of the container from which John speaks, a prison, and immediately thought of the completely opposite container in which we first meet John – the dark, nurturing womb of Elizabeth.
In the latter, John leaps with joy at the presence of Mary and the Messiah-to-be in her womb. I think now that it is Elizabeth, the living, loving woman who bears John who enables this unthinking joyful reaction to Emmanuel.
And likewise, I think that the questioning response of the prophet John, shut up in an enervating, frightening darkness, the antithesis of the womb.
The container, however, whether womb or prison, while powerful, is not all. As Christians, and as Christians in this season of expectation and hope, we believe that God can lighten any shadow, show up in any cell.
Twenty-seven years ago, in Jerusalem, as Sheila and I were getting ready to go to Ein Kerem, the traditional birthplace of John the Baptist, I found a poem by Thomas Merton on the visitation of Mary to Elizabeth, while both were pregnant. Here is one of the concluding stanzas, that expresses well the sense I have of this One who transforms our containers, transforms our lives with, as John knew, Spirit and Fire:
Night is our diocese and silence is our ministry
Poverty our charity and helplessness our tongue-tied
sermon.
Beyond the scope of sight or sound we dwell upon the air
Seeking the world's gain in an unthinkable experience.
We are exiles in the far end of solitude, living as listeners
With hearts attending to the skies we cannot understand:
Waiting upon the first far drums of Christ the Conqueror,
Planted like sentinels upon the world's frontier.
