holy birth

Thanks to Ruth at http://thereisnosuchthingasagodforsakentown.blogspot.com/ (a Haiti blog which I recommend to you), I have just read a moving post about the Incarnation.  Here is an excerpt.

The divinity of God is on display at Christmas in beautiful creche scenes. We sing songs of babies who don’t cry. We mistake quiet for peace. A properly antiseptic and church-y view of birth, arranged as high art to convey the seriousness and sacredness of the incarnation. It is as though the truth of birth is too secular for Emmanuel, it doesn’t look too holy in its real state. So the first days of the God-with-us requires the dignity afforded by our editing.

But this? This creating out of passion and love, the carrying, the seemingly-never-ending-waiting, the knitting-together-of-wonder-in-secret-places, the pain, the labour, the blurred line between joy and “someone please make it stop,” the “I can’t do it” even while you’re in the doing of it, the delivery of new life in blood and hope and humanity?

This is the stuff of God.

There is something Godly in the waiting, in the mystery, in the fact that we are a part of it, a partner with it but we are not the author of it. How you know that there is life coming and the anticipation is sometimes exciting and other times exhausting, never-ending. How there is a price that you pay for the love love love.

I was fortunate to give birth to three of my tinies without complications. I find myself thinking of those experiences often during Advent; they are still very fresh for me...

There wasn’t anything very dignified about giving birth.

And yet it was the moment when I felt the line between the sacred and the secular of my life shatter once and for all. The sacred and holy moments of life are somehow the most raw, the most human moments, aren’t they?

I am reflecting this afternoon on Mary and her experience as we wait with awe and wonder for that birth which we celebrate tonight - and which we celebrate, too, as Jesus is born in our own hearts in no less a messy, holy way.

Thanks be to God, who reaches us in the most human of ways and brings that presence into each moment, in love, making the ordinary holy.

If you would like to read the whole post, here it is:
http://deeperstory.com/incarnation/