The old canvas tents of my childhood smelled like earth wrapped in twine. A moving shelter, I learned how to pitch them and to sleep upon the body of creation. Inside, I dreamed of being in a Bedouin caravan traveling across deserts or with the magi moving by starlight, searching for signs. A sanctuary held still with ropes and stakes, my home away from home. Holy spaces that move tell the nimble story of a swiftly moving, shape shifting Spirit. Temples of stone cannot hold a traveling god. A tabernacle would hold the ancestors and all of their sacred stories as they journeyed toward lives of abundance. Wrapped within the covenant of love, they carried a promise and the prayer that they were walking the good road. They carried the Word.
I can see the faded picture of my mother, pregnant with me, looking happily exhausted on Christmas morning. I can see the outline of me resting quietly within the safe carriage of her body. She was my tabernacle, my traveling star, my host. Where she went, I went. I pitched tent within her, like a Russian doll. I see Mother Mary holding herself, just like my mom. I imagine her labored breathing, echoed by my mother’s, holy and brave as she pushed. All mothers’ sacred work is the same: to bring healing into this world through words made flesh. All of us, midwives ushering in the promise of a new Kin-dom, where living words feed the hunger pangs of love.
In our beginning, the Word breathed us softly, closer than a child on a mother’s breast. John, in his gospel of love, tells this story.* The Great Spirit comes to us in our own flesh and blood, a fellow traveler in this great caravan of love. Pitching tent, it comes to dwell in all souls, showing us how to carry what is planted within. Each body a sacred tent carrying sacred things: children, blessings, medicine, kindness. I wish to carry a promise my mother would be proud of, an imprint of a dream that could come true.
