When I stand up and walk to the kitchen, Blaze appears and sits on her haunches in the doorway, quietly observing me as putter about.
“What is it girl?”
I go through my mental list: she’s had her breakfast, so I don’t think she is hungry. We went for a long walk this morning so she’s had some good exercise. She has finally figured out the dog door, so if she needs to take care of business she knows what to do.
So what does she want?
She looks at me with her steady, slightly quizzical gaze.
I don’t think she needs anything in particular. Maybe she just heard me get up, and she wants to see what I’m up to.
Blaze is an Australian Cattle Dog mix that my brother James and his wife Sheryl, adopted her a few years back. So, how comes it that she is here, presiding over my kitchen chores on a wet Saturday morning?
Well, it recently came to pass that Sheryl retired after 37 years as a High School Math teacher, and she and James hopped a flight to Europe, where, among other things, they intend to walk the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage that follows the Atlantic coast of Spain.
Well woop-de-doo for them!
I’m not jealous or anything…
They may be retired, and they may be jet setting around the globe, but from where I’m sitting, I’m beginning to think that Cary and I have got the better end of this deal…
We’ve got Blaze!
**
Life is full of unexpected events.
Just when you think you’ve figured out what it means to be a person in the world, something comes along that helps you to realize that, as Hamlet famously said: ‘
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’
I am not talking about dogs right now.
I have changed the subject to Elizabeth, the soon-to-be mother of John the Baptist, whose encounter with Mary is narrated in this morning’s gospel reading.
As is often the case in gospel stories, the encounter is described without embellishment, as a simple cause and effect thing that happened:
When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the child leaped in her womb.
Now, I myself, being a male member of the species, have never been pregnant, but I have been around my fair share of pregnant women, and from this relevant experience I can say with some assurance, that the fact that the child in Elizabeth’s womb made a sudden movement is not, in itself, all that uncommon.
Babies do that.
In the last trimester of pregnancy, especially, a healthy fetus will stretch and kick and push and shove and engage in all manner of calisthenics that make Moms go: Oooooh!
Am I right Moms?
Silas, my youngest, was a famous acrobat while still in the womb. Cary would be sitting there, and all of a sudden you could make out the outline of a foot pushing outward against the skin of her already magnificent belly.
Oh my!
One can hardly imagine a more physical experience than this! I am speculating, of course, because it has never happened to me – but I can only imagine how incredible and strange it must be, to feel the effects of someone else’s movement affecting you from the inside…
We know how to interact with other people who are outside in the world… folks we encounter in the produce aisle, among the pews, or on the highway. We nod hello, chat, stay in our lane.
But this?!
This is different. This interaction is happening with someone else – another being – who is inside the body!
A pregnant woman contains within her body an intention that is not her own.
I know that it’s easy for me to be a wide-eyed romantic about this, not being the one who must get up to pee twenty times every night because a little one is leaning on my bladder. I get it that, at forty weeks, pregnant women don’t waste time waxing philosophical about the very physical reality that they are struggling to get through.
But, even so, I will go on the record and say that feeling a baby move around in the womb is about the most unbelievably amazing thing that can happen to a human being.
We think we have figured out what it is to be a person living in the world. We think we have a working practical knowledge of who we are, and the world we live in. But knowledge comes in many forms, and sometimes things happen that – if we have eyes to see and ears to hear – widen our ways of understanding. And if a person is present enough to truly experience what is really happening to them, it can be transformative.
Take Elizabeth for example.
The significance of the event described in this story comes less from the physical movement of the child in Elizabeth’s womb than it does from Elizabeth’s understanding of what happened when Mary showed up.
The text says:
When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the child leaped in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit
Elizabeth does not experience the baby’s movement as a physical event.
She experiences it as a spiritual event.
**
I don’t know if I should admit it to you, as you might decide that I am certifiably insane, but Cary and I already have a dog and five cats.
We are already swimming in quadrupeds.
So, to tell you the truth, I was a smidge anxious about throwing another critter into the already overflowing bestiary that is our household.
Just a smidge…
The practical smidge of my brain was saying: really?
Before they left left, James and Sheryl and Blaze came and lived with us for about a week. With Sheryl’s retirement, they were on a deadline to move out of faculty housing, so it made practical sense to have them stay with us. The other reason, of course, was to try and ease Blaze into the transition to a new, unfamiliar home.
So how did it go?
Well.
The first thing you should know about Australian Cattle Dogs, is that they are intensely bonded with their humans.
I mean intense! Obsessive!
So when James and Sheryl were around, all was sweetness and light, but the moment they left the house, even for a few minutes, poor Blaze would descend into a funk of depression. She would position herself by the door out which they had disappeared, and wait, her tail between her legs and eyes with an imploring hangdog expression.
I think the word “hangdog” was created to describe her.
I tried to come to the rescue, but my overtures were greeted with suspicion. At such times our conversation went something like this:
“Don’t worry, they’ll be back…”
“Did you say something?”
“”I was only telling you that they just went out to the store… they’ll be right back…
“I’m sorry… who are you?
“Me? I live here!”
**
Where were we?
I was just observing that when the child inside her womb leapt, Elizabeth understood this very physical experience in spiritual terms.
Filled with the Holy Spirit, Elizabeth…
…exclaimed with a loud cry, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. And why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me? For as soon as I heard the sound of your greeting, the child in my womb leaped for joy.
Elizabeth knows – she is absolutely certain that the child in her womb didn’t just happen to move at that moment. The baby moved because he heard Mary’s voice.
Elizabeth also explains why her child responded in this way to Mary’s voice. It is because the child has recognized Mary as the one who is bearing the long awaited Jewish Messiah. The child somehow knows all this and is filled with joy.
Elizabeth too. She somehow knows all about the magnificent blessing that Mary is carrying in her womb.
Isn’t it amazing that all this spiritual knowledge can be gathered from one physical motion – one leap?
Elizabeth’s certainty is not a practical certainty. It is not based on any rational way of knowing.
I find this particularly fascinating because it sheds light on something that I have been thinking a lot about – something that I have been trying to work out in many of my sermons.
In recent years – perhaps since the death of my parents – I have become increasingly interested in how we know – how we understand things in our lives.
We know and understand things with our minds – this is our practical, rational knowledge.
We know and understand things with our hearts – this is our emotional understanding.
We and understand know things with our bodies – this is our physical, embodied way of knowing
And, finally, we know and understand things spiritually – with that part of us that is sensitive to the presence and resonance of God.
As a minister, I am, naturally, interested in this last, mysterious way of knowing. You, as people of faith, are also interested in this elusive mode of understanding.
And this story offers us a glimpse into this mystery. It offers us an example of how a spiritual knowledge may arise from a very physical experience.
**
When her people left left, Blaze was confused, and sad.
But about two days after James and Sheryl’s departure, her attitude began to shift.
While Cary and I were sitting on the couch watching a British TV show I felt Blaze lay her muzzle on my feet.
“Do you mind?” she asked sheepishly
Not at all.
Can I…?
Sure, come on up…
Pretty soon we were cuddling on the couch.
As the story is told, Mary was greeting Elizabeth – it was the first moment they were together – when the baby leapt in Elizabeth’s womb. So Mary could not have informed Elizabeth about how she , Mary, was visited by the angel Gabriel and about all of the other Divine circumstances that surrounded Mary’s conception.
Elizabeth just knew. Her body told her.
What did her body tell her? That Mary was blessed.
Elizabeth’s physical knowledge informed her spiritual understanding.
Her body seemed to understand something that it could not know.
But isn’t that what our bodies do?
For millennia, western thought – in particular Christian doctrine – has dismissed our physical knowledge as being low, earthy and unrefined. Many theologians and philosophers have suggested that the knowledge that we gather from our bodies is the opposite of the knowledge we get from our spirits – and even that, worst of all – our bodies are working against the knowledge of our spirits.
This story suggests the opposite.
That our physical, embodied knowledge nourishes our spiritual ways of knowing.
That God speaks to us in strange and wonderful ways – including from our insides.
I have started taking Blaze for long walks.
During these walks there are times when her ears stand up straight, and she looks about her with a beautiful, steady alertness.
Perhaps she is smelling a squirrel.
But I don’t think so.
I think she is looking for my brother and my sister-in-law.
I don’t know how I know this. I feel it.
And it reminds me of something.
It reminds me of the power of love.
It reminds me of how we look around, attentive to the presence of someone who, our practical knowledge tells us is not present, but who our bodies – our spirits understand is very much present.
This is the presence that was in that leap.
The presence of love.
The presence of Jesus
The presence of God.
Amen.