Pour Out Your Soul cw: pregnancy & birth

God, I confess that sometimes I don’t have it in me to pour myself out in front of you.

It’s hard to find the time, or the place or the emotiona energy.

And I confess, God, that I don’t want this to be intergral to the advent season. Why must I empty myself before you?

How can I empty myself for your?

But I know, that before I breathed my first tremolous breath, before I screamed out my first cry, before I even was formed in the womb–you made room for me.

You emptied yourself enough to make room for every single person in the world.

Mary made room for God, she cleared a space to become a magnification of God’s work in the world. A beautifully, justice screaming, baby carrying, patriarchy challenging woman who fully embraced it all and poured herself out to make room for the magnificat dreams.

So as I try to pour out, and I can’t, or I won’t or I only half-ass it….If I find myself stuttering over justice, or acquiencing to hetereo-normative white colonial Cis-Patriacrchies as I tumble through advent to do lists and forget what it was I was supposed to do next…

I pray that in those moments you will hold space for me. I pray that you will send dark and beautiful time and space and room upon the wings of the Holy Spirit.

I pray that it will sing to my soul, and sound through my body, and tremor in the stillness before me.

I’m praying for holding space, and pouring out, and stillness all to find pockets within the mess (after all we women love pockets).

I am praying for all of this, because I am convicted and convinced that this is how Christmas will come.

Alleluia to the stillness and the space-i-ness and the dark.

Alleluia for the mess to, for you were born in the mess of things, so alleluia anyway.

Amen.

Image

Author: katyandtheword

Pastor Katy has enjoyed ministry at New Covenant since 2010, where the church has solidified its community focus. Prior to that she studied both Theology and Christian Formation at Princeton Theological Seminary. She also served as an Assistant Chaplain at Trenton Psychiatric Hospital and as the Christian Educational Coordinator at Bethany Presbyterian at Bloomfield, NJ. She is an writer and is published in Enfleshed, Sermonsuite, Presbyterian's today and Outlook. She writes prayers, liturgy, poems and public theology and is pursuing her doctorate in ministry in Creative Write and Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. She enjoys working within and connecting to the community, is known to laugh a lot during service, and tells as many stories as possible. Pastor Katy loves reading Science Fiction and Fantasy, theater, arts and crafts, music, playing with children and sunshine, and continues to try to be as (w)holistically Christian as possible. "Publisher after publisher turned down A Wrinkle in Time," L'Engle wrote, "because it deals overtly with the problem of evil, and it was too difficult for children, and was it a children's or an adult's book, anyhow?" The next year it won the prestigious John Newbery Medal. Tolkien states in the foreword to The Lord of the Rings that he disliked allegories and that the story was not one.[66] Instead he preferred what he termed "applicability", the freedom of the reader to interpret the work in the light of his or her own life and times.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this: