Foreboding Joy
Foreboding Joy
Ryan Diaz
Anticipation is a funny feeling. It is a deadly combination of dread and excitement, an ominous sense of expectation that settles deep in the pit of our stomachs. This time of year, I sense a foreboding joy that fills the air around me. After two years of pandemic and personal transition, including a new job and a new church community, I am now faced with the daunting task of settling down. There is an ease to limbo, a comfort found in the liminal space between prayer and promise. One can get used to the waiting. For two years I have been waiting. 2020 began by uprooting my wife and I and now as 2021 comes to a close we have finally found the regularity we were searching for. But after all the praying, longing, and crying for direction, I find it hard to deal with the sudden arrival of answered prayers. It is one thing to desire something, to pray and yearn for it, it is another thing to have it fall into your lap. And yet, here I am, on the other side of my prayers, a sense of foreboding coloring the joy I hold in my heart.
The Advent season acknowledges the reality that joy and fear often go hand in hand. Waiting, even for a good thing, can be a liminal space that hangs between what is and what could be. Each year, the church turns the bend of fall and precedes into the dark clutches of winter, faced with shorter days and colder nights, we are once again called to wrestle with the paradoxical reality of the Christian life. We are held between epochs by the foreboding joy of Christ's return, where the waiting cannot lead to passivity, but rather an active participation in what Christ is doing now, longing to find fulfillment upon his eventual return. While this foreboding joy is present every time the season rolls around—this Advent, I feel it like I've never felt it before.
*
Recently, my lectionary readings confronted me with the event of Gabriels’ Annunciation, as depicted in St. Luke's Gospel. Imagine with me what it must have been like for a young virgin girl in a podunk part of first-century Palestine to hear the words declared over her, "Greetings, O favored one, the Lord is with you." After 400 years of silence, the God of Israel speaks to a virgin betrothed to be married, undermining every expectation in religious society across time and culture.
Here Gabriel uses the language of YHWH's beloved Israel. Like Israel, Mary too has been favored by God, and Gabriel hammers this point home by announcing that God is with her. Yet, Mary is troubled, and she has every right to be. God's calling is not without cost. Mary is filled with a mix of trepidation, anxiety, and apprehension, all forming a knot in the pit of her stomach as the angel goes on to declare, "You will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus." The hope of Israel has come; at last, the salvation of her people is nigh, the messiah is near, and all Mary can muster is "how can this be?" There it is: Foreboding joy at the centre of human history. Mary's question bears more than the weight of simple human biology—her question carries the burden of being an unmarried pregnant woman in the first century. The joy set before her only comes after significant personal cost. Despite the questions that stir and unsettle, the beginning of her Magnificat is forming in the depths of her soul, "He has looked on the humble estate of his servant… all generations shall call me blessed." Somehow Mary can hold together her foreboding and her joy, acknowledging both the cost of God's call and the glory of his promise.
*
I find myself in the middle of another major life transition; a new job, awaiting me on the other side of December, the question of kids hanging over my wife and I like a heavy cloud of penchant rain, the fear of childlessness, a specter hovering in the corner. I look to Mary and take comfort in her experience of foreboding joy. In many ways, Mary foreshadows the reality of the church and every believer who calls God’s people their own. In this way, she is indeed our mother, serving as an example and exemplar for all those who have been called by God to hold Christ in their proverbial wombs. Mary teaches us that the life of faith is not without fear. Often these two things are treated as opposites, opposing forces, dichotomies on polar ends of the spiritual journey. Fear has never been the opposite of faith. In fact, fear is often faith's constant companion. To be called by God is to enter into the unknown, the great expanse of mystery that sits between us, and the great cloud of unknowing that is God himself. To walk into this unknowing should fill us mortals with dread. Like Isaiah, we find ourselves in the throne room of the Ancient of Days and proclaim, "woe is me." It's in these moments, true faith is birthed, overwhelmed, and awestruck we enter into a new reality, a new way of perceiving ourselves and the world. Though we know that we have to leave all we know behind, we trust enough to know that what lies before us is better than what lies behind us. It's at the crossroads of life that we find God, and it's here that he calls us, like Mary, into a relationship of trust so that he might work out his purposes through us. The sense of foreboding we feel has nothing to do with our faith in God but everything to do with the cost that comes with the calling. But despite our fear, we are filled with great joy, the joy that comes with knowing that God has not abandoned us to annals of time but instead is present with us in the present, working in us and through us to restore all things.
Advent invites us to ponder the mystery of our foreboding joy--the great mystery of faith, faith that exists despite the presence of fear and is often the child of fear's reverent awe. And so I sit here writing this feeling that same sense of foreboding joy that filled Mary's bones as the angel declared to her, "You shall conceive a son." Maybe you're like me. You are sitting on the precipice of promise and fulfillment, unsure what lies beyond but sure enough to know that you cannot turn back. Giving birth is no small feat and indeed, holding the God of the cosmos in one's belly is no small task. The joy will be great, but it will come at a cost, but this season is here to remind us that joy and foreboding are the foundations of faith. It's to you I offer this final reflection, a poem encapsulating Mary's foreboding joy. For as the old saying goes, poetry loves to speak when prose is at a loss for words:
NATIVITAS
No one ever talks about the pain,
Her labored breathing filling the stable,
Sweat and blood making mud out of earth.
The pain is so intense she forgets her name
And knowing that tonight could be fatal
All she thinks about is surviving the birth.
But this is the cost of redemption,
Searing pain surging through a woman’s navel
As she’s covered in animal refuse and dirt--
The all too human work of descension,
The timeless bound up in her belly’s girth.
(From Ryan’s forthcoming collection, Skipping Stones.)
Ryan Diaz
Writer & Theologian
Ryan is a poet, writer, and theologian from Queens, NY. He is working on a poetry collection with Wipf & Stock entitled For Those Wandering Along the Way which is due to be released in the near future.
Photography by Patrick Hendry