The magic of the Advent season — the church’s time of waiting before Christmas — was always dramatized for me by the lighting of the candle in the darkened church and the yearning chant of the music: “Emanuel, Emanuel, who are we that you should love us so well?” The stories of angels with messages for Mary and Joseph and the shepherds spoke to me of listening and paying attention to the messengers in my own life who herald the next clue in my spiritual journey.

Those images carry me today and spill over into other areas of my believing. I am moved still by the telling of how God creating me in God’s own image; that, when I misplaced this message, God came again, in the person of Jesus, to remind me that my body carries God within; that we are all — as Meister Eckart said — “mothers of God.”  I strain to hear the voice within who longs for me to love myself as She loves me, and, in particular, for me to love my body.

Our bodies are pregnant with messengers, angels who herald new truths of who we are and what is best for us. Being with the mystery of our body is routinely ignored in our culture in favor of  external success and recognition. My clients often complain that their bodies “betray” them by weeping when they least expect or want, by breaking down when they push themselves too arduously, that their bodies are “too hungry,” “too needy” when it comes to emotional wants.

What is the body doing in these instances, if not trying to shepherd my clients to more safe grounds of wellness? Why would the body weep, or need, or want, if it didn’t know a truth about us we have overlooked or trivialized or ignored for other, more acceptable responses? Our bodies are, indeed, our contemporary angels, sending messages of mighty importance we can no longer relegate to dark basements of ignorance.

So many today speak of these things: the movement toward holistic medicine, the works of  Marion Woodman, James Hillman, the whole spiritual thrust of learned people who encourage daily dialogue with our bodies. Our feelings are messengers who speak to us of how we’re doing, what we’re needing, our possible next step. Are these not angels? We constantly receive messages from within that seem to emerge out of nowhere yet carry intimate and life-altering awareness.

Our instincts send us dreams, those mighty visitors who mirror back for us some needed clue for our journey. Are these not angels? Our imagination and rational capacities are surely emissaries of the divine in us. Our emerging diagnosis of depression as a wake up call from the body, alerting us that something else needs to be happening than what is — Is this not an angel sent from within to assist us in changing course when we’ve lost our way?

James Hillman goes so far as to say the very words we speak are angels, “independent carriers of soul between people, personal presences which have whole mythologies, with their own guarding, blaspheming, creating, and annihilating effects.” Is this not the Christmas message, that God so loves us, there can be no stopping until God becomes flesh of our flesh? A light in our darkness. No, part of our darkness! If God is to be part, depression and our daily struggles and hardships of any kind are only God being with us from another perspective.

As candlelight brought into the darkened church once stirred my soul, I sense now the light of conscious awareness brought into my body by these carnal angels as a wonderful Christmas story. The light of awareness, the light of spirit entering my body — Is this not the story we tell of God’s spirit entering the Virgin’s body? Angels, light, messages of God’s coming, stories of  wonder and new beginnings, God and man eternally embodied  — Christmas, yes.

We come together during the Advent season to tell the stories, to tell our stories of a God who intervenes and embodies and walks our walk. Let us not forget, then, in the hustle and bustle of collecting Christmas, that God chose to be so close that our very bodies, with everything that means for us, herald to each we meet, “Look, God is here.”  Even in our darkest behaviors, in our blackest doubts, in all our “guarding, blaspheming, creating and annihilating” moments, our God is here, breathing, longing, laughing, waiting in us. 

“Emanuel, Emanuel, who are we that you should love us so well?”