Newspaper Columns by Bishop Paul V. Marshall
Who's in the water with us?
By Bishop Paul V. Marshall
December, 2005It was my first experience of sickening terror. I remember the gray sky, the chilly breeze and my helplessness.
One in our group, Elizabeth, was in danger of drowning. We kids at the church youth event were terrified. The nearest grown-up was out of earshot. It was the late 1950s, and today's strict standards for supervision were not in place.
I knew I should just get in the water, but was paralyzed by stories I'd heard at home of people who drowned while trying to save others.
None of us was a strong swimmer. In our impotence to help, we shouted: ''Kick… You can make it.. Swim!''
An older kid who was coming to get his boat saw what was happening. He didn't shout advice. He didn't say anything. He just got into the water and towed Elizabeth back to the little dock from which we had been diving.
She had been only 20 feet away from us. We could have given her good advice right up to the moment she drowned. The person who made the difference was the one who silently got into the water with her.
There are times in life that call for wisdom. There are those moments, however, when we need somebody in the water with us if the situation is to change.
That fall, I left for boarding school. I never saw Elizabeth again, except at the other side of church at holidays. I hadn't the nerve or the words to ask her how it felt to be alone in the water or what it felt like when the young man rescued her.
I do know, however, what it feels like to stand alone at terrible places in life, places where advice is pointless and companionship is everything.
Muslims, Jews and Christians revere the words of Isaiah, who spoke to humanity's need for something beyond words in naming a child Immanuel — ''God is with us''— to a frightened king. Christians see that theme played to its fullest crescendo in the birth of Jesus the Messiah, ''God with us'' for all humanity.
The idea of a divine figure experiencing human birth without a human father is not unknown in world religions — but something is different here. In telling the story of Bethlehem, the virgin, the star and the Magi, Christians try to make two points.
The first is that, although God had given advice in many and various ways through prophets, when the point was to be made for all time, God got into the water with us in the birth of a fragile and vulnerable human baby, who lived our life and died our death and has gone to the fullness of new life ahead of us.
There is no part of human experience, from its joys to its horrors, from which God wishes to remain aloof.
The second point is that, when they insist that the Christ was a real human being, Christians see the affirmation of human worth.
That the creator would take up the reality of the creature expresses a dignity of human life that is absolute.
When they take their own rhetoric seriously, Christians see each life as sacred. Whenever the Christian religion has been used to justify harm or neglect, it has been defiled. When it is employed to help people experience their worth in God's sight, the music is being played well.
In the months between Christmas, Good Friday and Easter, there is time to observe what that child grew up to do and say.
In December, it is enough to remember my drowning friend and recall that, in a world full of advice-givers, God still wants to be in the water with each of us.
Merry Christmas!
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