A Woman Fit for the Foot of the Cross

Nothing makes me appreciate all that mothers do in the scope of everything that is anything more than my own inertia when I have the flu. On good days, I float through my life, as most of the tasks I must accomplish are tasks I have been successfully carrying out for going on three decades now. More than any of the family members around me, I take the clean and pressed clothes in my son’s drawer (and my contribution to that reality) for granted. I don’t fret over recipes anymore…I seek out challenging ones or I put my brain on auto-pilot and cook completely sans recipe the family favorites we all settled upon years ago. Most elements of my life as a mother entered the realm of “tried and true” years ago.

As I reflect upon Mary and her vast inexperience and youth as she prepared herself on that first Advent for new motherhood, I must admit I sometimes miss the terror of the unknown, the need for a faith when I hear a newborn baby’s cry, the wonder at my own abilities to calm that cry. Yet, I am eternally in awe of all that this experience teaches me on the other side of a season of life. How much peace there is to know that I could easily care for that baby in the manger, at least in the attention to his physical and human needs.

But am I ready to be a mother at the cross? To watch a child of mine endure not needless but essential suffering? Am I prepared for this place where competition is a useless mechanism because first and last and rich and poor and best and worst just got toppled like so many heads? There is not a recipe for, not a birth order to lost, to life that must pass through death in order to flourish.


By Week Three of Advent we are sick of shopping. We are all wishing the presents would wrap themselves. Star-studded sugar cookies make us react with full knowledge of the come-down from the sugar high. Winter is getting colder and the journey is getting old. We’re like children in the back seat of the Ford Fairlane who want to cry at the notion of another round of the license-plate game. With increasing frequency we clamor for bathroom stops along the way, for snacks and water and elbow room. We really feel, deep down, that all of the mess has to be someone else’s fault. We are starting to tune out Christmas music and we are losing the ability to notice lights and Nativity scenes.


Runners know that the most difficult part of any race is the mile before the runner completely gives over to the race itself, that mile when the runner is still trying to keep time and pace by legitimizing the distance, part time-keeper, part god. For a mother, the most difficult moments of mothering are those in which we linger within the reach of the hemline of our own perfection because we, as human beings, can only hope to control that which, without the providence of God, we can create. Let’s face it, that is very little. There is very little in that which would have prepared the Baby Jesus for the cross. There is very little in that which prepares a woman for the real seasons of her own life.


There is very little about time which can be applied to timelessness…the absolute beauty of the run that doesn’t measure. The true Advent journey cannot be sequentially ordered, and perhaps this reality seeks attention in Week Three more than at any other time, when the “word of the day” from all the pulpits is supposed to be Joy. The cross and the manger have surprised me this week by becoming for me in my devotional time the same place. The same way when I held my firstborn son for the very first time, his entire life passed before my eyes and I could see what I really could not see. When I realized there were not enough drops of moments in the eye-dropper of my own skills and gifts as a woman to adequately fill up and prepare this little child. Not without supernatural forces. Not without prayer. Not without acceptance of the gift of the process, which was, in a miraculous way, also preparing me.


There is joy this week in Advent, in the face of all that I cannot do.

-submitted by Kerri Snell