The Second Sunday in Advent -- Jane Kenyon
A Reflection on Jane Kenyon’s Mosaic of the Nativity (pp. 118-19)
As we read Jane Kenyon’s haunting poem, which she wrote in Serbia in 1993, it is helpful to remember our history: In the early 1990s, after the breakup of Communism, the former Republic of Yugoslavia divided into competing territories as religious histories and identities took center stage in a bloody civil war that, tragically, replayed religious conflicts that have taken place in the Balkans for centuries. Croats historically are predominantly Catholic, Serbs Eastern Orthodox, and Bosnians Muslim. During this period the world watched in horror as nearly a quarter of a million people died in Bosnia and Croatia and two million were left exiled or displaced, all in the name of religion. And with this bloodshed, the phrase “ethnic cleansing” made its awful entry into our vocabulary.
In the first stanza of her poem, Kenyon takes us back to the idyllic beginning, to Creation, and imagines God looking down from the domed ceiling in a cathedral. God remembers creating humanity in joy, loving these people so much that “everything else I created I made to bless them.”
“But see what they do!,” God wails, as all hell quite literally breaks loose on His good earth.
In the second stanza, God laments: I have seen the bloodshed before, dating back, as it does, to that first murder: Cain taking the life of his brother, Abel, in a fit of jealous rage. God knows, too, how humans rationalize the bloodshed. The evil of violence has become such a part of the human landscape, we hardly care or notice anymore: “what does it matter now if we shell the infirmary, and the well where the fearful and rash alike must come for water?”
Yet redemption comes in the last stanza, if in an exquisitely painful way. God does not respond to human violence with violence of His own; instead God answers in love. God makes an alliance with an innocent and vulnerable girl, and with her obedient cooperation, God becomes a child, knowing even in the womb of his tragic destiny: “God thinks Mary into being . . . and inside her the mind of Christ, cloaked in blood, lodges and begins to grow.”
Can we ever break out of this relentless cycle of violence? Can we pray for a “coming of Christ” this Advent that moves us at least a little bit further toward the “new creation” we know is God’s ultimate plan for his good Creation?
Jane Kenyon (1947-1995) was an American poet and translator. She was New Hampshire’s poet laureate when she died from cancer at far too young an age.
As we read Jane Kenyon’s haunting poem, which she wrote in Serbia in 1993, it is helpful to remember our history: In the early 1990s, after the breakup of Communism, the former Republic of Yugoslavia divided into competing territories as religious histories and identities took center stage in a bloody civil war that, tragically, replayed religious conflicts that have taken place in the Balkans for centuries. Croats historically are predominantly Catholic, Serbs Eastern Orthodox, and Bosnians Muslim. During this period the world watched in horror as nearly a quarter of a million people died in Bosnia and Croatia and two million were left exiled or displaced, all in the name of religion. And with this bloodshed, the phrase “ethnic cleansing” made its awful entry into our vocabulary.
In the first stanza of her poem, Kenyon takes us back to the idyllic beginning, to Creation, and imagines God looking down from the domed ceiling in a cathedral. God remembers creating humanity in joy, loving these people so much that “everything else I created I made to bless them.”
“But see what they do!,” God wails, as all hell quite literally breaks loose on His good earth.
In the second stanza, God laments: I have seen the bloodshed before, dating back, as it does, to that first murder: Cain taking the life of his brother, Abel, in a fit of jealous rage. God knows, too, how humans rationalize the bloodshed. The evil of violence has become such a part of the human landscape, we hardly care or notice anymore: “what does it matter now if we shell the infirmary, and the well where the fearful and rash alike must come for water?”
Yet redemption comes in the last stanza, if in an exquisitely painful way. God does not respond to human violence with violence of His own; instead God answers in love. God makes an alliance with an innocent and vulnerable girl, and with her obedient cooperation, God becomes a child, knowing even in the womb of his tragic destiny: “God thinks Mary into being . . . and inside her the mind of Christ, cloaked in blood, lodges and begins to grow.”
Can we ever break out of this relentless cycle of violence? Can we pray for a “coming of Christ” this Advent that moves us at least a little bit further toward the “new creation” we know is God’s ultimate plan for his good Creation?
Jane Kenyon (1947-1995) was an American poet and translator. She was New Hampshire’s poet laureate when she died from cancer at far too young an age.
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ReplyDeleteWasn't Jesus a healer? Can we bind ourselves to the Hippocratic Oath which ask that, at very least, we "do no harm?"
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