“Emmanuel: Glimpses of God Incarnate” December 6

Monday, December 6

Genesis 21:15-19

Hagar’s Prayer

When the water in the skin is gone ... gone too my hopes, my faith, my dreams, my future, and not mine alone, but his, squalling ’neath the wood, life just begun … I turn away. Best not to watch the end. Quiet, little one. Death draws near.

Hyenas haunt these wastes like ghosts, near almost to touch. Their laughter, never gone, mocks fate, curdles in my ears. The end is in their snarling grins, not in my dreams. A prayer for mercy, then, ere end’s begun, whispered not for my life, but for his.

Dreams! Dangerous to hope that his life matters, that prayer could beckon near some angel whose dark ministry, begun on bleak nights in covenants long gone, may yet haunt the corners of the old man’s dreams. Angels begin what only death can end.

And yet I harbor hope that at the end some angel will appear and with him, his salvation, this infant of my dreams, who nurtured at my breast yet draws me near and bids my terrors, phantasms be gone and limns a path to dawns not yet begun

but inkled in the darkness. Here begun would hints and premonitions of the end be loosed in time—though time is not yet gone— and worlds reshaped, aligned with love, and his the face to whom those worlds draw near. I dare to hope, to pray, to sleep. To dream.

A mother has so little left but dreams when birthing’s over and hard life’s begun. But here’s the truth: though dark of death be near dreams yet endure and love withstands the end, and gath’ring ’neath the wood they trust in his embrace, spread wide, ’til dark of death is gone.

O Angel! Bide ’til dreams and ghosts are gone! Bid lives begun in death at length be his. For nearest dawn is darkness at the end.

– Rev. Dr. Paul Hooker, Associate Dean for Ministerial Formation and Advanced Studies