And so he was born...

And so he was born, this gloriously impossible baby, in a stable in Bethlehem...God come to be one of us. from The Glorious Impossible by Madeleine L'Engle.

In a cave or a stable, the Son of Man was born to a poor young girl and her beloved husband with whom she had never had marital relations. All of us who have given birth know what this means...what it looks like and how it feels. The risk of sanitizing this birth is great, because it was hardly a decent place or way for a baby to be born. It is gloriously impossible that the baby survived.

Then when you stop and think that Mary had ridden on a donkey for about 67 miles in the days before her delivery, it could be very possible that the baby was premature...bouncing along on the back of a mule for that long surely hastened labor. And when you think of the animals and their excrement and the smells and the sounds, there certainly was nothing sanitary or silent.

And yet into that gloriously impossible setting, the Word became flesh and his life was the Light of all people, and the Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overtake it then or now. God came to be one of us, the epitomic act of Love. We celebrate this glorious action today, a Gift like no other, a Love like no other.

May the Feast of the Nativity of our Lord Jesus Christ bring you great Joy and along with it peace that passes all understanding, peace as gloriously impossible as the birth of the Child.

A child in Palestine with meningitis, laid on the floor because there was no table space in the hospital.