As many of you know K and I have traveled to Austin to meet our new and first grandchild. her name is Elliott Elizabeth Flowers and she is of course the most beautiful child I’ve ever seen. Cory went into labor Monday evening, the day before our departure. They had chosen to use a birthing clinic with a midwife (another conversation). James called us at five in the morning just after we had gotten up to leave and said ” we’re going to the hospital,” which meant in effect that the midwife had decided that the birth was going to be more than she could handle; that there was too little progress going on . So we left for Austin in a cloud of uncertainty. How complicated was this event going to be? James had told us that he had never witnessed such pain that Corey was having to bear during the labor process. My heart ached for them both. So we awaited news as we drove in the predawn darkness…After about an hour as the sun rose we received an e-mail with a photo of a perfectly healthy mother and child…It turned out that once they reached the hospital…the birthing process had re-started in earnest…and the baby came naturally the way they had hoped in the beginning. You never know how things will turn out. The older I get the more I think life is a process of improvisation…God improvising creation into being and we too.
Improvisation takes courage, because improvisation involves risk and uncertainty. What struck me most in this experience was the wholeheartedness with which James and Corey gave themselves to the process. I’m sure they were frightened, but they gave themselves over to the enlightened awareness of what will be will be. Wholeheartness…indeed finds its linguistic roots in the word courage….coeur, which means heart makes the word courage connote something like heart-ness….to live and act from the heart….Courage and bravery mean different things….bravery is the result of being whole hearted…the willing ourselves, fears and doubts notwithstanding, to the what is next…willing the necessity, as the theologian Charles Williams puts it…embracing the circumstance that unfolds before us.
Courage is essential to faith….faith being acting as if this vision we celebrate as a people of faith is true…acting as if… On our way home, we passed a pickup truck with a bumper sticker that read, “Real men Love Jesus.” All my buttons were pushed by this of course…but it got me thinking yet again that we have made an idol of Jesus, an icon ensconced long ago…a magician who answers some prayers but not others.
Jesus is the way, the writer of the Gospel of John tells us…Jesus is a way of life, the life that empowers us with whole hearts willing to live into the improvisation of creation, into the necessities of life… Jesus the way of giving ourselves wholeheartedly to the world for the good of all, which was what his life and ministry was all about, and the life and ministry of the ones who follow him….May we find in this risky, painful and joyful birth this Christmastide, and in all other risky, painful and joyful births, for such is the way of birth….May we find in the pangs of birth the wholeheartedness and the courage it engenders…for such a gift is greater than all others….. the way and the truth and the life.
