We tend to tell stories in straight lines.
You work hard, and then you succeed.
or, I once was lost, but now I’m found.
or, in Advent we wait, and then little baby Jesus arrives, the end.
But we rarely actually experience life this way.
You work hard, fail a whole bunch, give up, try again, get lucky, and then you succeed, and then you fail again.
We’re lost and found, lost and found, damning ourselves and getting saved a hundred times over.
Or December 25 comes around, and it turns out you’re still waiting. Again.
This August I actively labored with my son for almost 24 hours before our unplanned C-section. In the hospital afterward, moments and memories from labor kept flooding over me, and I resolved to write down everything I could remember. I scrounged up a little three-by-five notebook and scribbled in between feedings, my own ravenous meals, shaky bathroom visits, and doctors and nurses.
I had no intention of making anything of it except a long stream-of-consciousness diary entry—in some ways, just a vehicle for my tears to well up and out. But I still found myself struggling because I was trying so hard to place everything—some of the most intense moments of my life, experienced through wrenching pain and remembered via an incredible torrent of hormones—in correct chronological order. I couldn’t finish writing until I stepped back and reminded myself that no one was reading this, and they definitely would not be interrogating my timeline.
We’re all so used to the linear narrative. We know the cadence of “this, then this, then this.” We’re primed to look for cause and then effect, and to interpret the world accordingly. And we know instinctively that a nonlinear story is less like to be understood—or believed. These patterns are so ingrained in us, we police ourselves into making our stories fit them; we feel ashamed when the stories themselves resist.
In one sense, a birth has a clear beginning and end. But as it is taking place, it is a spiral; at each stage you are drawn deeper into yourself. Giving birth is traveling to a plane on a razor’s edge between life and death. Time warps there; moments can stretch indefinitely, while long periods blur into each other.
What was Jesus’s birth story? How would Mary have told it?
A lot of Christian theology envisions the universe and all of Time as having a neat beginning and end. God created the world on April 23, 6214 B.C. or whatever, and it will all end in some bizarre-o apocalypse scenario, and we are in between just barreling straight on through.
But that’s not the story we find in the Bible at all. The stories in the Bible are disjointed, told from multiple points of view, full of gaps and inconsistencies and leaps in time, with characters, tropes, and themes that loop forward and back in surprising ways. The beginning is written in myth, and the ending is scribbled in secret code, with a songbook halfway in between.
The linear version is someone’s attempt to impose their own “order” onto all of it, and missing the whole point in the process. It tells us less about the Bible or about God than about some very specific, rather strange obsessions of men in modernity.
The God of the Bible, on the other hand, is eternal. What use does God have for chronologies like that?
As ubiquitous as the linear narrative feels to me, there are actually as many ways to understand time and stories as there are human cultures past, present, and future. A great many of them envision us all as traveling along some version of a cycle or a spiral. If the patterns of history, the generations of a family, or the movements of our own lives seem to rhyme, it’s neither a coincidence nor a sign that we’ve gone “backward.” Instead, we’re witnessing fractals in time, themselves echoes of so many others in nature.
From a standpoint that privileges the straight-line story, living a repetitive cycle seems boring or self-defeating. Everything is supposed to be getting bigger and better, not starting over again!
But from the standpoint of the God who was and is and is to come,
whose longest Psalm simply repeats and repeats that his love endures forever,
who crosses the plane at the edge of life and death,
who reveals Godself to us through the indignity of infancy,
a cyclical story is not one that goes nowhere.
It’s a rhythm in time with the heartbeat whose song makes galaxies dance.
Advent comprises the first four weeks of the Church’s great cycle, the Christian liturgical year. And now it is over; our vigil is ended; Jesus is here.
And (as theologians physically cannot stop ourselves from saying), “we live in the already and the not-yet.” We still yearn for peace to reign on Earth. We still beg the Christ to come. We still sing, Hosanna, save us. Every year, the darkness returns. And so many of those years, the light that is born seems so desperately small.
So many of us endure an endless Advent on a personal level, too. The world keeps turning, but the wait lives on. And on, and on, and on. We know how we want the story to end, but in the meantime we don’t really know how to tell the story we have.
When I wrote MenstruWaiting in the midst of ongoing infertility, I wanted to tell my story before I knew the ending. It would have been so easy to turn my body’s cycle into my enemy, but I wanted to choose embrace. And when I did, I found that the rhythms of my body gave shape to the waiting. I never wanted to find myself starting over with another period—but the act of shedding also made space for my grief. I felt like I was ready for a new story to begin—but I also began to see how every cycle offered some small opportunity to grow more ready.
The illusory “bigger and better” story threatened to make my story feel repetitive and small. But when I lived the cyclical story on its own terms, I found a sort of grace there, in the way my body had been created to offer hospitality back to me.
Still, I left the book itself without an ending. I didn’t want to pretend that the cycle wasn’t…cyclical. At the time, I felt I had to resist the urge to force a resolve.
The arrival of Christmas does not mean we have to sing happy shiny songs, face the new year resolutely, and stuff our longings and aches back in the attic with the ornaments and stockings. It is not a failure of faith to find ourselves once more barely holding hope here as winter descends. So many of the stories that matter most travel many times through cycles as familiar as this well-worn path around the sun.
Rediscovering the dignity of the cyclical story also does not preclude us from feeling its recurrent heavy hurt. If the joy and hope of Jesus’s birth feel hard-fought, it’s because they always are. To celebrate the Incarnation is always to hold a paradox: we are on one hand simply welcoming a baby into the beautiful, breathtaking world—and on the other hand, recognizing the humility of God in choosing to share this heartrending human experience with us.
We’re in pain here. Christ took on the ultimate act of solidarity and joined right on in.
Because all he wanted was to be with us.
And though the Holy Spirit is here, now, the embodied Jesus’s wish goes unfulfilled.
On a different dark night, “he took a cup, and when he had given thanks, he gave it to them, saying, “Drink from it, all of you. This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins. I tell you, I will not drink from this fruit of the vine from now on until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father’s kingdom.” (Matthew 26:27-29)
However many Christmases bear witness to your wait, Jesus is beside you in the long ache.
peace, love, bread, and wine,
Lyndsey