A 14-year-old Jewish Palestinian girl finds out she is pregnant.
A 14-year-old Jewish Palestinian girl finds out she is pregnant. Her fiance could be angry. He could turn her over to the judgment of her community. He is not the father.
Zoom out. An imperial government holds her in the same regard as livestock. Soon she will have to make a journey with her betrothed on foot. 80 miles away from home. This is so the imperial government can keep an eye on them. Tax what very little they have.
Zoom out. Not long in the future she will give birth. There is a vassal king. A vassal king is the head of a territory that is bound in allegiance to the imperial king. Fearing displacement, fearing revolution, fearing the subjugated peoples will rise up and reclaim their autonomy, the vassal king commits a genocide against children. The girl and her family will flee and remain displaced for as many as three years.
A 14-year-old Jewish Palestinian girl finds out she is pregnant. And she sings:
“My soul magnifies the Lord,
and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
for he has looked with favor on the lowly state of his servant.
(...)
He has shown strength with his arm;
he has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.
He has brought down the powerful from their thrones
and lifted up the lowly;
he has filled the hungry with good things
and sent the rich away empty.”
Notice the tense of God’s actions in the English translation of Luke 1:46-48; 51-53. It’s the past perfect. If we look at the girl’s circumstances, at her fortune, we might say that God certainly has not done any of these things. How is she shown favor? How have the powerful been demoted? How are the hungry filled?
In the original text, the ancient Greek, the tense used is called the aorist. The aorist tense is used to describe complete, undivided tasks or events. And something called the gnomic aorist tense refers to universal truths. Actions that are so complete, so beyond time, they need no qualification of duration or pinpointing within a linear dimension.
Today, the moon will enter Pisces and conjoin Saturn at 2 degrees. Saturn has been in Pisces since March, and will remain there until early 2026. In ancient astrology, the moon is known as Fortune, the signifier of circumstances and luck, and the ephemerality of the body and of its such conditions. Saturn is associated with linear time, chronology (Saturn is the Roman iteration of the Greek god Kronos), poverty, and death. Together, the moon and Saturn might represent the ones whose bodies are regarded as the most marginal, inconsequential, and unworthy by the powers that be.
Today they stand together in Pisces. Much like Mary, I imagine, standing in First Century Palestine, pregnant, with every evidence of injustice surrounding her, yet singing of the Good News of God that pervades every fiber of time and circumstance.
The moon will perfect in Pisces to its first quarter phase over the next few days. This means that the right half of the moon will be visible after noon and for a few hours after sunset. First quarter moons are squares between the sun and the moon. Today, that square begins by sign between Pisces and Sagittarius. Jupiter, planet of faith, abundance, and pregnancy, and freedom, rules these two signs, and in the Christian liturgical calendar, these two signs correspond with Advent and Lent. Seasons of devotion. If Pisces is the season where we recognize the truth of God’s love and power undergirding the many rotten circumstances we face, even create, in this life, Sagittarius might be the season where we imagine what it might be like if God’s love and our fortune would make a circle from a Venn Diagram. “On Earth as it is in Heaven.”
May the vigil we keep for Palestine, for DRC, for Sudan, for every saturnine person in the whole world, for every participant and victim of injustice in this world, not be lacking in imagination. We are ones who know that God’s love is real. We are ones who are called to square this love with this reality. We are ones to reconcile the two.