It's funny, what sticks with you after the event...

My strongest memory of that early morning in late August is of standing in the front hall of our little rented house while a friend, who had come to look after our first child, knelt before me, slipping my sandals onto my feet. Normally I manage my own footwear all by myself, but I was otherwise occupied, and Carol (herself a mother) knew what I could and could not manage. I was managing all I could; Carol managed my sandals.

It got very busy after that, quite quickly--a mercifully quick labour, during which I cracked jokes when I could breathe or think, not at all like the birth of my first, which had been very difficult. "Mercifully quick" does not, however, mean "neat and tidy." That it wasn't. Nor was it a silent and self-controlled business. The first time I gave birth, I insisted on being ntensely stoical. The second time, I wasn't so stupid.

The great biological events of our existence--conception, birth, death--are marked by uncontrolled noises, spasmodic motions, ungainly postures, intense sensations, untoward fluids. These are animal events, involving all sorts of things that should embarrass us intensely but don't, if we're doing what we should be doing in the spirit in which it should be done. we're out of any rational control, any neatness, any propriety. Our bodies have taken over. Bodies have their own agendas when they're making love, giving birth, or dying--or, for that matter, sneezing.

Incarnation isn't a perfect smooth-skinned simpering madonna, slim-waisted and small-breasted with waving gold hair, dressed in formal blue brocade and kneeling demurely before the manger, her long white hands pressed palm-together in seemly prayer. Incarnation is God being squeezed down the birth canal, while his young mother hung on and gasped and moaned and cried aloud when it got bad. Incarnation is amniotic fluid gushing and the child's head crowning; incarnation requires a placenta, which, God knows, is a messy, marvellous object.

That's not what we want. We're ashamed of that side of ourselves --ashamed to be so needy and messy and human. The good thing about making love, giving birth, or dying (or sneezing) is that the biological imperatives are so overwhelming that we don't have time for shame--or if we do, it's because we're not paying sufficient attention to the object of what we're doing.

Incarnation says, it's all right. This is the way it's supposed to be. God joins us precisely where we are most human. Starting with being born... God was born red, wrinkled, and covered with whitish stuff, his eyes squeezed tight against an unknown light, his fists clenched and his legs bowed, still tied to her body until someone cut the umbilicus. God was born shivering at the touch of the cool dry air, gasping and crying as it filled his new wet lungs.. God was born bleary-eyed, toothless, wailing --that sharp "waa! waa!" of the newborn. God lay on a young girl's soft, flattened stomach, instinctively rooting for her unaccustomed nipple.

God did this, because we all do this, and he wanted to be among us, one of us in every particular way. God went through birth and death and everything inbetween, keeping us company. It was God's choice to be one of us, one with us in our embodied life. It's when we try to fight free of our embarrassing humanity--when we try to be perfectly neat, unmessy and inhuman--that we distance ourselves from God, in our pride and shame. Better, I think, just to accept that it's not going to be a tidy business...

And yet; and yet... There's something else at work...

A couple of days ago, I was putting up the Christmas tree lights, always an exacting and time-consuming business; and for one moment the two worlds collided: the world of the incarnation, messy and so extraordinarily human, and that other something, the soft wing of Mystery running so lightly and gently across this poor battered violent bloody world. For a moment, I felt time running backward and peace backwashing into the past.

And I had that fleeting notion that maybe Time has its surprises, when we confront eternity--that the apparent contradictions that we wrestle with will suddenly merge; the paradoxical will become far more whole and truly One than any simple "truth" we clutch at, and our treasured black-and-white will sink under the weight of colours we cannot now begin to imagine. It's by letting go of certainty that we step out into Mystery and find ourselves caught and held.

There is the violence and humanity of birth-giving, with its blood and crying; and still, when we look back to that particular birth, there floods through us that peace that is so far beyond what we can begin to imagine. That peace washes backward through the violence of our humanity with a clear and kindly courtesy. They were wise, those old musicians, who set the Incarnation to music of such gentle, graceful sweet clarity. Life isn't like that. But God's sweet mercy is like that; and that infinitely tender light shines backward into every corner of our humanness, redeeming it all, transforming it all--even the pain, bad as it was.

It is like the tide washing softly in, almost imperceptible in its ordinary action, but full of such power. Grace washes in to tidy up all the mess we leave behind us, leaving us fresh and new again, the gentle shining so clear. And that's the Something we long for, without ever being able to speak the need.

But God does know the longing we have, and the need. That's why this night.

This stable is a Prince's court;
This crib his chair of state;
The beasts are parcel of his pomp,
The wooden dish his plate.

The persons in that poor attire
His royal liveries wear:
The Prince himself is come from heaven:
This pomp is prized there.

--Robert Southwell