Fear Not

I love reading and writing Advent poetry because Advent is itself poetry. It’s both looking back and looking forward, celebrating and mourning, waiting even as we know the wait is over. The King has come but we long for the King to come. Creation groans in eager expectation. The sacred divine dwells in ordinary human space. The one who spoke the world into existence by a word learned to speak as a baby. The one who holds creation in his hands grasps his mother’s finger with his tiny hand. The true light, knowing he would be unrecognized, rejected, and hated, came to save his own. Only poetry can hold such tension in this liminal space.

So here is the poem I’ve composed for Advent this year. I won’t say much about it, except glance over the classic Christmas story passages in Scripture (Matthew 1-2 and Luke 1-2) and note how many times the people are told, ‘do not be afraid’ or ‘fear not.’ Clearly, God was telling us something…

Fear not

A command I fear I cannot follow
Two words meant to negate this paralysis
that leaves me frozen 
To calm the frantic beating of a heart hurried by panic

Fear strangely transforms vision, 
It blinds, it tunnels my sight 
And the match I strike to light my stump of a candle 
Sputters out, leaving me in the darkness 
Or it distorts and twists, so that I see only the reflections of a warped mirror
And I have to hide because it is too much 
For my little unbelieving soul

But then 
he told me
Everything I ever did
With such love in his eyes
And kindness in his voice 
As he said my name 
My name 
It turned my head and then my heart
To the gardener
And the truth of it all swept me from my hiding place
Bursting through
In a chorus of stars come down from their lofts
Fear forgotten in the waters of living life 

See with a new kind of fear
This little soul magnifies the Lord
As it was in the beginning
For the handmaiden who bowed her head
and said 
let it be to me
and Held
that Word with fear and pondering
Close to her heart

Then the song is over, the last echoing notes 
Bouncing around the chapel 
A solitary figure kneels at the altar
Cold reassuring stone beneath
High vaulted ceiling above beckoning 
Prayers heavenward
Evensong gives way to the dayspring 
dawning eternally on the horizon