Love Being Born

From Advent Newsletter, 2008

By Marie Goodyear

Madeleine L’Engle wrote, in a poem titled, “The Risk of Birth, 1973,”  

“This is no time for a child to be born,

with the earth betrayed by war and hate…

That was no time for a child to be born,

in a land in the crushing grip of Rome.”

When is the time for love to be born?

The inn is full on the planet earth.

and by a comet the sky is torn.

Yet Love still takes the risk of birth.”

I thought of this poem when I was reading Nora Gallagher’s, Things Seen and Unseen: A Year Lived in Faith, in which she talks about Advent being the time “to find, not perfection, but possibility.”

We get so caught up in looking for perfection, in trying to be perfect ourselves, in insisting on perfection in others, in waiting for perfection before we act.  We wear ourselves out searching for perfection and we miss all the possibilities that surround us.

Advent is the season of waiting—but not for perfection.  Had God waited until humanity was perfect before coming to us, Jesus would simply have been a good man.  But Jesus was more than that—he was God’s love incarnate.  He was God taking a risk on imperfection.  He was God saying “You are all worth taking a risk for.”  He was God using humanity’s possibilities to live out the Kingdom of God in this imperfect world.

And so, if we are to be Advent people, we also need to stop waiting for perfection and start recognizing the possibilities that are already before us.  We must put all our eggs in one basket—even if the basket has a few broken weavings and a handle almost coming off—and trust and hope that the basket will hold and the eggs will be able to nourish us and help us to live full and abundant lives.  We must risk trusting God to use our imperfection and the imperfection of our situations and our world to help us build something, not perfect, but full of possibility.