The Inconceivable Consequences of the Annunciation.

I have a signed copy of Luci Shaw's book of poems, Writing the River. It occurs to me that a number of those poets whose work resonates most sympathetically with many of my own questions, and who reach deeply and disturbingly into that place within us where deep longing and spiritual perception come together, are women.  They include Elizabeth Jennings, Denise Levertov, Mary Oliver, Luci Shaw, Anne Stevenson - and recently discovered after a nudge from a fellow bibliophile, U A Fanthorpe.

In thinking through the points of connection and collusion which open poetry and theology to each other, I suppose it's obvious that the nature of the relationship between these two ways of speaking the world, and our place in it, might be significantly affected by the gender of the writer. Or is that not so obvious? Are there insights, ways of knowing and articulation, ranges of human experience and capacities for feeling and thinking, that presuppose not only differences of personal history, but differences of gendered embodied experience?

While I want to think this through much more thoroughly, it's simply the case that some of the insights I value most into the nature of God, what it means to follow faithfully after Christ, and how this is lived out in community within and beyond the church, have come from women poets and women theologians. And I can speculate with the next person as to what that says about me, my theology, my approach to the Bible, my understanding of ministry and the pastoral and personal relationships that underlie meaningful spiritual friendships. But I'd rather consider than speculate, and I'd rather illustrate than argue.

So here's a poem by Luci Shaw. It is called simply, "Virgin". Could a man have written this poem? Leave aside for a minute all the theological conundrums that surround the Incarnation, and what James Denney once called "Chalcedonian metaphysics". How else but in the experience of embodied womanhood could we have any sense of what the Annunciation meant and felt like, its implications from the inside of one particular woman's experience? I find the "as if" of this poem utterly heartbreaking in the positive sense of that phrase. The vulnerability and the courage, the gift and the given, the tenderness that has immeasurable consequence, the patience and the urgency that enables the birthing of human life - and these only some of the untold and inconceivable consequences of this requested incursion into the life plans of a young woman. And the radical surrender of "Let it be so...."

As a poem read at Advent, it places this young woman at the centre of the mystery of Emmanuel.

Virgin
As if until that moment
nothing real
had happened since Creation

As if outside the world were empty
so that she and he were all
there was - he mover, she moved upon

As if her submission were the most
dynamic of all works: as if
no one had ever said Yes like that

As if one day the sun had no place
in all the universe to pour its gold
but her small room

Luci Shaw, Writing the River, (Pinon Press, 1994), page 27.

Comments

[Brigid]

Insightful questions. Fabulous assessment of that suspenseful moment. I do agree that women poets bring a broader understanding of Mary's courage and vulnerability in answering "yes". Thanks for these thoughts. I'll carry them into this Advent.