Many years ago, on a Friday afternoon, when my now young adult children were in grade school, I was waiting for them in my car for when school let out. I was parallel parked along the street immediately outside the cyclone fenced property of the school. Because it was a high curb, the kind fashioned for the occasional Southern California downpour that sent water rushing down hilly communities like a flash flood, and because I was sitting in the driver’s seat on the road side of the street I was unable to see the upper torso of pedestrians if and when they walked by. I discovered this when I was roused from my daydreaming by two women who greeted one another right outside my open, front passenger-side window, “Shabbat Shalom,” “Shabbat Shalom” as they passed one another. It was one of those flash moments, when you are in the right place at just the right time, lasting no more than two seconds. It was so simple. Two words spoken in two voices moving in opposite directions on the sidewalk right when they were outside my open window. What are the odds? The words that were there then not there, spoken from unseen mouths of two half-bodies that were there then not there, sounded so affable but reverent, spontaneous though with a sense of being well-worn. So simple, yet it struck me almost immediately, and without any thought before or after, as a beautiful, holy exchange.

The first time I heard the Indian greeting Namaste was in 1977 or 78.  It was during a homily, by a Jesuit (of course) named David Rothrock. I wrote a poem I liked by that title soon afterwards for a love of mine. Back then it was still fresh, unknown, and literally unheard of in the United States except for those who had spent time in India. These days in America, where particular words and phrases are as likely to become quickly fashionable as a particular type of jean, it is not uncommon for an instructor to use it at the end of a yoga class or for another school mom waiting to pick up her daughter to bid you goodbye with it. Much like the Irish greeting “Dia dhuit” (JEE-ah-GWITCH), which is used to say “hello” but whose literal meaning is “God be with you,” Namaste is a Sanskrit word used as an everyday greeting whose literal meaning also suggests something deeper and means “to bow to.” Indian children were expected to say it to their elders, aunts, uncles, and adult neighbors as a sign of respect. The handful of people I know who grew up in India are surprised and somewhat amused by how Americans have infused the word with an overt spiritual connotation: “I greet the God in you” or “The Spirit in me recognizes and bows to the Spirit in you” and so on.

Probably before yoga teachers, Mother Teresa, as much as anyone, was responsible for its early and eventual pervasiveness and embellished connotation. She was often photographed in a pose of bowing her head and pressing folded hands together at her chest in a reverent bow that typically was accompanied by the greeting when meeting another person, perhaps an emaciated dying man lying on a cot. Like many words or sayings, perhaps especially those coopted or retranslated, it is prone to triteness and cliché. The best definition I’ve ever heard for cliché is “a truth well-worn,” which among other things means its ubiquitousness indicates that it has captured something in the collective imagination, something — let us not forget — that rings true. Which I think is what those who are prone to cynicism and appoint themselves the triteness police should keep in mind.

When I first heard David Rothrock use the word in his 1978 homily, what made it evocative for me was its theology, which was how and why he was using it. Whether originally hidden within the gesture of bowing and greeting or extrapolated by people like Mother Teresa, the conviction that “what” is deepest and most sacred within us — what many people walking a spiritual path would identify as Spirit, the Divine, God, Christ’s presence, the Holy or Ineffable One — recognizes and honors that which is deepest and most sacred within the other, I believe is good, edifying, enacted theology. If it is spoken sincerely, how could it be anything but sacred.

This leads me to one of my favorite biblical stories, one that is an integral part of the Advent/Christmas narrative. It is referred to simply as “The Visitation.” It is a rare scene seldom depicted, if ever, in the gospels where men are absent and the main characters are two women. It is the gospel passage that is quoted in the first half of the Hail Mary, and depicts the encounter of female cousins, Elizabeth and Mary. Conduits of divine mystery, both women are impossibly pregnant. Elizabeth, who is too old to bear children and now finds herself six-months pregnant and just shy of beginning to waddle, greets her young cousin Miryam of Nazareth. Miryam has recently discovered she is pregnant though aware that she has never had sex with a man, including Joseph to whom she is betrothed. Elizabeth carries a child destined to be a prophet whose primary raison d’etre is to precede and announce the way God will be with the people to illumine, liberate, and heal them. Miryam is bearing that child who will incarnate the intimacy, solidarity, and wild love of God here on earth.

In one of the most beautiful and joyful encounters depicted in the gospels, Luke describes the human and holy moment when the cousins see each other for the first time since being pregnant. Mary, the younger, goes to visit Elizabeth at Zechariah’s and Elizabeth’s home in the town of Judah surrounded by hill country. As Luke tells it, it seems quite possible that Mary’s visit is a surprise. Regardless, Luke describes perhaps the most sacred of meet and greets in human history in these words:

In Psalm 42, written in a time of exile, in a time when God’s people are suffering trial and persecution, longing for and dreaming of home, feeling as if they are drowning in their own tears, pushed down by their tormentors as if under massive breaking waves and the terrifying roar of a threatening torrent, the psalmist describes his prayer in these well-known words: “deep calling unto deep” (v. 7). In the deep danger of their despair brought on by the depth of oppression at the hands and ridicule of their tormentors, they long for the deep “mercy within mercy within mercy” of God. “Why are you cast down, O my soul,” they cry, reminding one another of the trustworthiness of God. Like a deer, they long for safe waters, for fresh running streams, thirsting for the real, forever quenching taste of the Water of Life.

It’s as if that which is deepest in Elizabeth calls out to that which is deepest in Mary. It’s as though the sudden leap within Elizabeth is not only the gestating prophet’s recognition of the Christ growing within the watery womb of Mary, but also is the negation of the threatening waters of death by the life-giving amniotic fluids within the buoyancy of the God-bearer’s loving care that holds the coming of Emmanuel.

It is this recognition from that deep sanctuary of Spirit within us, that we recognize and honor Christ among and with us, see and revere the divine in the other, the Christ presence in each and every person, the Spirit in each and every winged, legged, finned, flowering, bursting, diving, pulsating creature and life form that comes forth from the wild and generous imagination of the Creator. It is the Love and Life of life, incarnated in Jesus who is the deep bow of God to that which is deepest, truest, and most noble in us and in all creation.

Friends, I bow to each and all of you in this season of light and delight, hope, joy, and liberation. Shalom. Namaste. Emmanuel.

For Advent Prayers click here.

Check out essays and reflections on Advent by going to the right hand column where it says TOPIC CATEGORIES. I have written much on Advent/Christmas. –>

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