Tend and Befriend

Like many of you, I have been seeing the photos and videos of the devastation coming from the tornadoes that ripped through places like Kentucky.  It is gut wrenching to witness the damage.  In one video, I watched as a woman stood expressionless in front of a pile of rubble and wood that was her house. Her neighbor, who also lost her house, came up beside her and gently put her arm around her.  It was only then that the first woman started to sob, and they held each other tightly – trying to make sense of what this all means for them.

An old Irish proverb says: It is in the shelter of each other that the people live. And I am finding this to be more true than ever – and we hear echoes of that in today’s gospel reading.

Just before the reading we hear today, Mary says yes to what the angel has proposed. The famous pastor and writer Nadia Bolz-Weber says, “I know people get hung up on believing the virgin birth thing, but for me the harder thing to believe was that the Angel Gabriel actually found someone to say yes [to this job]!”

Have you ever said a BIG “Yes” to something – a job, a relationship proposal, an opportunity – and then after started to realize what this was actually going to mean in your life?  I remember when I wrote a letter to the editor back in 1998 about the situation at Corpus Christi…as soon as I hit send, I knew that my fate was sealed.

I am guessing this was happening to Mary at the start of today’s reading.  She started to more deeply realize the implications of her, “Yes.”  And the implications were serious.

Mary’s visit to Elizabeth was not a social visit. This was not OMG – we’re going to have babies – posting baby-bump selfies…Elizabeth lived about 90 miles away from Mary.  No uber. The journey was a hard and potentially dangerous one and we’re told in the reading that she “set out in haste”.  Why the rush, Mary?  Mary is an unwed pregnant woman and I have no doubt that word spread fast in her home town.  She was likely not safe there – emotionally and physically – and needed to find a place where she could go for a little while.

I remember a few years ago, I was talking with a young woman who had come to counseling.  Christie said that a few months earlier, she had been fleeing a difficult situation in CT and was broke, alone, and scared.  Desperate, she jumped on a bus to Rochester and showed up unannounced on her grandmother’s doorstep. Her grandmother opened the front door and Christie just collapsed into her arms crying.  The grandmother – who had known that Christie had been into all kinds of things over the past few years – didn’t ask any questions, but just said, “Come in, sweetie…”  Christie slept for about two days and all her grandmother said to her was, “When you’re ready, tell me what happened…” Christie said that her grandmother’s welcome was the beginning of her healing process…

I’m guessing the same happened for Mary.  Elizabeth took one look at her and said, “Come in, sweetie…and when you’re ready, tell me what happened…”

Instead of shaming or rejecting Mary, Elizabeth just takes her in – even blesses her – and that this was very healing for Mary under the circumstances.

The great theologian Joan Chittister notes about this passage – and it is something I had never thought of before –  that in the face of the overwhelming nature of her situation, “Mary does not go to her fiancé, Joseph, for understanding. She does not go to her father for protection. She does not go to the priests of the Temple for vindication. No, Mary…travels to the hill country to be with her old cousin Elizabeth, who is also pregnant, also dealing with overwhelming change and the isolating implications of it in her life.”

What is interesting here is what Mary and Elizabeth do during a period of intense stress.

Modern science has told us that, in general, under stressful situations, people respond in one of three main ways – fight, flight or freeze.  Have you heard that?  We’ve been told that these are the 3 primary things that people do in the face of something that is overwhelming or very stressful.

But about 20 years ago, a research psychologist named Shelly Taylor at UCLA was studying stress responses and realized that most of the 50 years of research about stress had studied people who identified as men.  Dr. Taylor found that when she studied the stress responses of people who identified as women, she found another response was present and she called it “tend and befriend.”

Dr. Taylor recognized that, under stress, people can also take care of one another rather that engaging in aggressive or escape behaviors.  They protect, connect and work to deepen the ties that bind us. And while we see this more often in women’s responses to stress, it is something that is available to ALL of us.

Tend and befriend.  Connection calms our nervous systems.

What we have also discovered is that some of the folks who know how to tend and befriend the best are the people who have been left out of the systems of power and privilege.  And that’s why I think Mary went to visit Elizabeth.  She knew she’d be understood.

One of my recent favorite authors is Mia Birdsong and she has written a lot about community and how we show up for one another.  What she has noticed in her work is that the people who have achieved the success of the so-called “American dream” are often the ones who lack meaningful community in their lives because “success” in our culture seems to require many forms of disconnection.

I think Mary and Elizabeth – as women living in a patriarchal society, as poor people living in the shadow of the great wealth of a few and as Jewish women living in a Roman occupied country – understood something that we can learn and need to from today.

The world of empire that we currently live in and that Mary and Elizabeth lived in – is not based on tend and befriend.  It is based on winners and losers.  On competition. On profit. On scarcity, fear and insecurity.

And I don’t think it’s coincidental that after Mary and Elizabeth come together – Mary is able to sing her Magnificat – where she says explicitly that God will turn the world upside down to make it right again

Scattering the proud. Bringing down the powerful. Lifting the lowly. Filling the hungry. Sending the rich away empty.

This alternative vision of the world reflected in Mary’s song is not a new song.  People have been singing this song for ages.  As the great Sam Cooke said, “it’s been a long time coming, but a change is gonna come!”

Change is only going to come, however, if we have the courage – literally the heart – to dare to do something different.  Mary said yes to this new vision.  Elizabeth said yes to this new vision, and they held each other up as they moved into an uncertain future together. And then their sons said yes to this new vision.

Author and pastor Barbara Brown Taylor says that “Like Mary, our choices often boil down to yes or no; yes, I will live this life that is being held out to me or no, I will not. Yes, I will explore this unexpected turn of events or no, I will not…You can decide to take a risk. You can decide to take part in a plan you did not choose, doing things you do not know how to do for reasons you do not entirely understand.”

Now maybe you are going through something these days that makes it hard to hold on to hope.  Maybe you have had an unexpected turn of events and feel a sense of disorientation, loss or grief.  Maybe you are being invited into a plan that you did not choose, being asked to do things that you do not know how to do for reasons that you do not entirely understand.  If that’s true for you, then you are in good company today.

Between COVID resurgences, natural disasters, political tensions, economic insecurity, mental health challenges, supply chain disruptions, employee shortages and holiday pressures, I can’t say I know too many people who aren’t stressed and overwhelmed these days.

We need to tend and befriend like never before, and I think it is this sacrament of friendship and connection that helps us all to carry what we are asked to bear in this life.

At the end of a job interview, the Human Resources Officer asks a young engineer fresh out of RIT, “So what kind of starting salary are you looking for?” The engineer replies, “I don’t know, maybe around $125,000 a year, depending on the benefits package.” The interviewer says, “Well, what would you say to a package of five weeks vacation, 14 paid holidays, full medical and dental, a company matching retirement fund, and a company car…” The engineer sits up straight and says, “Wow! Are you kidding?” The interviewer replies, “Of course I am, but you started it.”

The vision of the world that we’re being offered today and during Advent is not some pipe dream or joke.  Like everything about the kin-dom of God it is already in our midst and it is in our memory.

Mia Birdsong whom I mentioned earlier says, “I believe that somewhere inside us, we all have ancestral memory of what it’s like to live connected, interdependent lives. We may be cut off or too far away from those traditions to claim them or access them, but I think we can find our way back to them by listening deeply to our longings for belonging and wholeness. We can learn a way of being in the world that honors and makes tangible our connections to one another, to nature and to spirit.” This Advent and during this whole Christmas season may we all find our way back to the shelter of each other.