Christmas Babies

What child is this who laid to rest on Mary’s lap is sleeping?

This time of year, I tell E, we think of Jesus as someone like you. Someone with chubby folds of thigh fat, who pooped everywhere, who drooled and sucked on his fists.

It’s strange to think of Christ as a baby this year. In some way I’ve anticipated E’s coming most of my life, sat a year ago knowing she was in my body. And now she’s here, and so much more her own being than I could have thought. She has the full force of her own personhood, yet is utterly helpless. She can’t blow her nose when it’s stuffy, can’t itch a rash, can’t verbalize her thoughts.

What must it have been like, to be like Simeon, and hold with tears in your eyes the baby you had anticipated your whole life, knowing this child would change your life and that of all humanity? To know that God in his full being could be in something so powerless?

That is what strikes me about it all this year. That Jesus did not appear a man, descend a hero. That he came through a woman’s body like the rest of us, screaming, cold, and helpless.