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Our Word of the Week is that mysterious name, Emmanuel, which means With-us [is] GOD, so I’ve chosen for our Poem of the Week a sonnet that looks upon the mystery that it names. As I’ve said, the ‘Immanu- part of the name can suggest something quite personal and powerful: just as you might think of someone standing at your side, facing the enemy, strengthening your resolve, protecting you when you falter, inspiring you with confidence and courage. So far, if we are talking about God, we are speaking in profoundly spiritual terms, but who could ever have suspected that God would come among us in the flesh? Advent is the season of anticipation, when we look forward to seeing our Redeemer, as the wonderful verses in Job have it: “For I know that my redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth,” and “in my flesh I shall see God: whom I shall see for myself, and mine eyes shall behold, and not another.” We read this as a foreshadowing of life eternal — but between the night of this world and that heavenly vision, the first Advent comes, though no one on earth knows it but Mary and Joseph. That Advent, that time of anticipation, lasted nine months, when Christ was with us, and in the flesh, but still unseen; whose life Mary could feel within her.
Can you “hold infinity in the palm of your hand,” as the poet Blake said? Whether or not the human mind can do so, God can and has done so, present in his infinity and totality in the mustard seed, in the grain of wheat, in the germ of yeast. But when Jesus sheltered in the womb of Mary, it was as a human and divine Person, from the first moment of his conception. Then did the womb of Mary become, as today’s poet John Donne shows us, a “cloister,” a garden enclosed, a paradise of Eden, in space but a “little room” — which, by the way, is what the Italian word “stanza” signifies — and yet containing “immensity.” We’ve got to understand precisely what that word means: literally, what is beyond measure. All created things, even this universe without a physical boundary, are circumscribed in being: they have their measure; they are finite. They obey the command God gave to the sea, “Thus far and no farther.” But the all-creating God has made himself present in a new paradise, the pure and fruitful womb of Mary.
God knew, from before the foundations of the world, before even time itself came to be — for time, as Saint Augustine says, is itself a created thing, and came into existence with the union of matter and form, when in the beginning God made heaven and earth — God knew that there would be Mary, and that the Son of God would come to dwell with us. Donne plays on this paradox, that Mary in a sense would be the maker of her Maker, the mother of her Begetter, God, and he does so with wonder and joy. I’ll now let the poem speak for itself.
Salvation to all that will is nigh;
That All, which always is all everywhere,
Which cannot sin and yet all sins must bear,
Which cannot die, yet cannot choose but die,
Lo, faithful Virgin, yields Himself to lie
In prison in thy womb; and though He there
Can take no sin, nor thou give, yet He'll wear,
Taken from thence, flesh, which death's force may try.
Ere by the spheres time was created, thou
Wast in His mind, who is thy son and brother,
Whom thou conceiv'st, conceived; yea, thou art now
Thy Maker's maker and thy Father's mother,
Thou hast light in dark, and shut'st in little room
Immensity cloistered in thy dear womb.
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