Nativitatis et mortis

At Christ­mas­time, I think we neglect to remem­ber the myrrh-bear­ing magi with his fune­re­al spices. We tend toward cel­e­brat­ing the nov­el­ty of birth as an end in itself, but I think that the most beau­ti­ful part of the nativ­i­ty of Jesus is not the inno­cent child in swad­dling clothes suck­ling at his mother’s breast, a vignette of oxy­tocin-dri­ven dreams; but the very enflesh­ment of god which nec­es­sar­i­ly presages death.

The wis­dom of chris­tian­i­ty has, I think, always been the min­gling of joy and sor­row, gain and loss; the sus­tain­ing of oppo­sites in per­pet­u­al para­dox. I remem­ber my sons, new­ly born, and that my ecsta­sy was in some intractable way alloyed with fears, anx­i­eties, and sad­ness: for their safe­ty, my prob­a­ble fail­ure as a father, the guilt of hav­ing brought an unbro­ken being to be bro­ken in a shat­tered world, the like­li­hood that they would nev­er love me as much as I loved them. Ah, but the para­dox is unas­sail­able. To be blessed is to be wound­ed. To be saved is to be lost. To live, to be born, is to die.

God, in the incar­na­tion (at least in my esti­ma­tion), redeemed mat­ter by con­de­scend­ing into it not by ele­vat­ing it. God began the process of the redemp­tion of human­i­ty, not by lift­ing it out of its nature but by enter­ing into its nature. To become enfee­bled and finite. To be born with the shad­ow of death already present in the cra­dle, the scent of the pall and tomb waft­ing from a jar. To enter into rela­tion­ship with crea­tures who by the slow move­ments of the ages — the gen­er­a­tion of many gen­er­a­tions — came to under­stand the moral inter­play of amoral mat­ter by wit­ness­ing self as object among objects, selves. To rec­og­nize the oth­er and in turn be the other.

God came down and dwelt among us. He sensed with our capri­cious organs. He entered into our very being to expe­ri­ence the world as us and call us not out of our­selves but into an imi­ta­tion of him who embod­ies us as we could ide­al­ly be. The beau­ty of god’s flesh-made birth is that he embraced the inevitabil­i­ty of death, divest­ment of pow­er, res­ig­na­tion into weak­ness. Only after being pow­er­less and weak and only after dying, does god defeat death, all pow­ers and prin­ci­pal­i­ties, all bold­ness and might.