I am currently sitting on the verandah at our dear friends' house, gazing into green and feeling unusually zen. We've celebrated Christmas and today is my birthday eve. Tomorrow I turn 35 - an age I find hard to comprehend. Ah time - you certainly are a mystery. Next year, you'll be with us and our lives will have changed in ways we can't imagine.
Christmas has held special meaning for me this year as I have thought about Mary and how she must have felt before and while her body birthed Jesus in an animal shed. Was she frightened? Or strangely at peace? Was her body sore and uncomfortable? Did she wonder if she'd imagined everything about her child's conception? Did anyone come to help her that night she laboured? Was she filled with awe and delight the moment she set her eyes on her baby son or did she feel like she held a tiny stranger in her arms?
The Incarnation feels especially important this year in the midst of such global chaos and widespread grief. And not just God becoming flesh, experiencing humanity in all its rawness in Christ's lived out life - but being born of flesh - to a fully human woman - that seems critical too. Those nine months of pregnancy - the stretch marks and nausea and rollercoaster emotions - that was important. The groans and mess and exhaustion of labour - that was important too. It was important because Mary wasn't God. But from her pain and her confusion and her limited and mortal understanding of what was happening, came the long-awaited salvation of the world. Not in a dramatic, spectacular fashion (although the shepherds perhaps would beg to differ), but in a slow-moving, ordinary, messy story that spanned three decades of a mother learning her son.
And somehow, the difficult waiting and the dark unknown-ness of the future that lies before me seems slightly more bearable. The word 'adventure,' derives from the Latin 'about to happen' and shares the same root, the 'advenire' - 'to arrive', with the word 'advent'. Pregnancy is an adventure - the perilous journey before the arrival of a life-change.
May the advent of the Christ child, born so human-ly, be our strength and encouragement in our adventure.
Merry Christmas (season, not day).
Mother.
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