Con-spiracy

 

Meditation for Christmas Lessons and Carols

Thompson Memorial Chapel – December 6-7, 2008

 

 

            As you make your way through the twilight, carefully picking your way across the paths, watching for stars, watching for ice, you can feel the sting of the freezing air as you draw it in.  The shock of cold makes you wonder about the ability of lungs to break the fierce grip of temperature: how is it that so gentle a thing as a breath can split the air open and drink the little molecules that life requires into our blood and marrow?  But there it is, against all odds, when you breathe out: the print of your own lungs against the night, a cloud of the vapor of your respiration like a little flag that says back to the winter darkness, just for a moment, there is life going on here...  And then it vanishes, and you have to breathe again, endure the prickle in your nostrils and the piercing cold in your chest again in order to keep your defiant little testimony of life to the freezing winter night going.

 

            Whether or not it ever snows in Bethlehem... whether he was born in the bleak midwinter or in lambing-time in the spring... whether or not angel songs were audible, or gifts were left in the straw, or the sky was clear enough for any stars at all, let alone one whopper, or whether or not there’s ever any such thing as a miracle...  Whether or not any of those things, nevertheless there was a night when, in the midst of the pain and blood of labor there was breathing where there hadn’t been breathing before, and a certain set of lungs began to reiterate the primal miracle of respiration, splitting the atoms of air and drawing breath from them for moving, and breath for growing, and later breath for speaking, and finally breath for leaving the print of that certain life not only upon the air, not only upon that night or upon thirty-some years of life, but upon time itself.  Breathing is miracle enough by itself - as you know if you’ve ever seen it start.  Or stop.

 

At the end of his life, at the end of those thirty-some years – as he drew and finally exhaled the very last breath, one of the ones standing nearby who’d helped to execute him said, “Truly this was the Son of God.”  But back at the very beginning, when he drew his first breath in the cold of the stable or wherever and however it was, there was no one except his mother (always the mother) to name the miracle of the first breath as it went in – and no one at all to guess that, in the fullness of time, we’d come up with a name for all the breaths he ever drew, a name for the sum total of them.  We call them: Incarnation. 

 

            This is the feast of the miracle of the breath.  This is the festival of holy respiration.

 

            You come to it, picking your way carefully across the street or across the quad or across the minefield of what you know about this precarious world, and what you know about yourself.  You make your way past all the twinkling lights to hear the fanfare we’ve made to decorate almost beyond recognition such a simple thing as a birth.  You make your way through the economy we’ve made to milk it all for all it’s worth – and the milk of that economy now gone sour.  And is it really any harder to believe that God comes to live with us in the midst of all of this than it is to believe that so gentle an act as breathing can crack open the very air and draw life from it?  It is really that much harder to believe one miracle than the other?

 

            Breath, like all miracles, takes place along an edge where life meets death – so it is a dangerous blessing.  Breathing is not something we have to think about doing; but its danger lies precisely in the temptation to be thoughtless about it.  The act of re-spiring, re-claiming the moment-by-moment miracle of living, is so gentle, so subtle and so much of the essence, that it’s possible to lose track of where it’s going on altogether, and pile all sorts of things on top of it until it’s more lost than the car keys ever were, more lost than the reading glasses or the mis-labeled file or the sheet with the scribbled essay notes have ever been lost.  This sounds like a metaphor, I know; but there are few, I think, in this room who don’t know that quite literal feeling of a crushing weight on the chest as a result of too much living, too much doing, too much promising, too many things. 

 

            We seem intent on awarding prizes for Olympic feats of anaerobic living: days piled so high, doing laid on so thick, that the beauty of breath is utterly obscured.  The idea of stepping back from the front lines of a day or a week or a year long enough to notice that it is alive, that it breathes, seems almost a crime against the culture we’ve made.  Recently I heard a student say, “If I keep achieving at this rate, how will I ever have time to think?” 

 

            For it does seem that the essential nutrients from which we draw life, for which we often starve even in the midst of such abundance - it does sometimes seem that the essences we crave are frozen too tightly to be broken apart to free the elements that inspire us back to life.  Time for what matters - frozen into splintered crystals of calendar.  Forgiveness – gone rigid in immoveable lines of defense against any need ever to apologize.  Peace - frozen into hard pragmatism.  Community – chilled into indifference by words we scrawl here and there to belittle each other, choices by which we cheapen ourselves.  Sometimes when we breathe this life in, it stings the tenderest inmost tissues of our spirits - and it would seem all but a miracle if respiration could split the chill and release into the bloodstream of the organism of this human family enough warmth to huddle a life around.

 

            But whether or not you can find the stable anymore...  whether or not you can hear intimations of angels in the cadences of the old story or the old songs... whether or not any of those things, the pang of breath is sign enough of God’s presence, like a little flag that says back to the winter darkness and chill against all odds there is life going on here.  It was planted in us, this breath, breathed into our nostrils in the garden, so the old story goes, at the beginning of time.  It is our surest, simplest testimony of divine intervention, going on below the radar of intellect and skepticism, radiating animal warmth beneath the blizzard of appointments and tasks still to be done: respiration, the print of God on each moment of each life.  In.  Out.  In.  Out.  Respiration: the medium of God’s most ingenious of all the loving, stubborn, steadfast efforts to save us down through the ages - the print of God’s consummate inspiration breathed out tonight even amid the pain and blood of labor in the world tonight, splitting the air to let out the grace within the very structure of things, breathed out tonight so that we might breathe it in.

 

            For we are breathing together now.  God, us.  In, out.  We are breathing together - and this con-spiracy, this collaborative respiration, will bring God’s life to life in our lives if we can pay attention to the breath, if we can kindle a reverence for breath.  For there is no earthly respiration that does not speak of the presence of God.  And maybe something about the particular chill that makes breath visible – the print of our breath in the winter air, and the print of God’s breath in the holy story – can help us to see it at last for what it is, and to conspire with it.

 

            God is breathing, now, in a cold and poor place hallowed by the steam of animals and the tears of labor.  God is breathing, now, in a place where even the taxation of tyrants cannot force good people to pay out one iota of their integrity.  God is breathing, now, in a place that draws those who keep their tender watch over the flocks of this world all through the long night.  And because care is the essence of those shepherds’ way of seeing they will recognize God caring now, newborn and breathing, in this birth.  And it will cause them to glorify and praise God for what they have seen and heard of the breath of God breathing on earth at last.

 

            They – and perhaps we too - and perhaps even the monarchs and sages who in time will find their way across the streets and quads (late as always) with the stab of cold in their lungs to remind them – perhaps we all will from tonight on be part of the con-spiracy, the with-breathing of God.  Perhaps we will learn the true human art of respiration from this one who is born tonight: breathing in pain and breathing out healing... breathing in threats and breathing out peace... breathing in loneliness and breathing out communion... breathing in tyranny and breathing out justice.  Even something as gentle as God’s breath can split the rock-hard frozen world and get it breathing together.  And deep within us respiration will work its simple miracle: cracking the air open, drinking the grace it contains into our marrow, and leaving a warm smudge now in the freezing winter night to testify: there is life going on here.  God is alive here.

 

 

 

The Rev. Richard E. Spalding

Chaplain to the College

Williams College

Williamstown, Massachusetts