I thought I would find you in perfection, but instead I found you in the unborn parts of me. Where I don’t love like a man, where I don’t decide like a man, where I’m not free like a man. You wait for me, you take me by the hand, you dive with me into the deep. Advent means that you wait for me to be reborn, day after day.
Power is dangerous, “tetrarch” evokes the closing of a trap. The Baptist however is free. Because he is on the margins, because he has no palace walls to contain the wind of freedom. The desert frees. A journey is freeing. It is as beautiful as an exodus, as beautiful as the trajectory of hopeful migration.
I thought I would find you at the center of life, in an ark, in a church, instead you were waiting for me at the margins. You were waiting for me where no one expects anything from me. To be marginal is to walk outside the logic of power, to be one who proposes a baptism of conversion. Now I understand that baptism is a warm womb of re-formation.
What we call sin is nothing but a form of non-humanity, what we call sin is everything in us yet unborn. One does not condemn what is not yet born; perhaps one helps it to be born. You need a pregnant womb, a baptism; we need to immerse ourselves and re-emerge with new breath.
