I remember the way I felt when my son was born. More precisely, I remember the way I did not feel. To describe it as disappointing would be misleading, but there was something curiously anticlimactic about holding my newborn baby in my arms for the first time. It was as though I had expected to know something I hadn’t before, to feel some numinous awe that every father before me surely partook of, but it wasn’t there. It was, in a profound way, more of the same. Knowing the depth of my own numb exhaustion in that moment, I can only speak to the weariness of my wife on the point that she hardly remembers it, so thoroughly was she spent.

Upon reflection, I see that therein lies the secret. The birth of my son followed naturally, contiguously, without any intrusion or interruption, from the months of gestation preceding, even from the years of his parents’ lives that cumulatively generated the moment. The so-called “miracle of life” is not birth, that’s just where the miracle begins. It’s the miracle that began when God formed man from the dust and breathed life into Him insisting and persisting into the present day. It’s the same miracle God initiated when He said, “Let there be light,” which He continues to uphold by the Word of His power. Truly, what happens at birth is not somehow distinct from “ordinary” life, it is identical with life. It’s the same miracle we’ve been living all along loudly announcing itself.

“‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.” “And the life was the light of men.” The stars have been holding my gaze more frequently of late. The last few days, I’ve seen some of the most magnificent shooting stars to ever cross my path — possible heralds of the approaching Halley’s Comet, I’m informed. Surprisingly, stargazing has also been full of reminiscences of my son’s birth. “What is man that you are mindful of him?” And yet His mindfulness of men was epitomized in His dwelling in their midst and according to their means. He who spoke existence into itself, in assuming unto Himself the principle of human being, spoke and speaks a new depth of existence into the same. And He did not surrender His humanity forever, but raised it even from the maw of mortality into the unassailable heights of the highest Heaven. 

The same Word of creation is the Word in flesh of our salvation. Just as birth is a mere instant at the outset of the long road of living, participating in all the breath of humanity before it and after, so re-birth of Baptism is by the Holy Spirit just the start of the sanctity continually reconstituted and reestablished in the Eucharist. And, so is the primordial week of the beginning mere entry into the perpetual relationship between the cosmos and the One in whom it holds together. Ernst Sartorius muses that God reiterates His luminous first command at the beginning of every day. 

In recreating and reconciling the world, God clothed Himself in humanity, humbled even to the form of an infant boy, of the exact same kind, nature, species, substance as my own son, as myself. The Light of life was pleased to become one of us, to participate in that infinitely granular chain of events called time and history that He set in motion, to become a moment like us, and so reconcile all moments to Himself. The very purpose of birth is toward life, and in no instance of that truth was it more replete with truth than when Life Himself was born. Every birth before or since, every life into which those births unfold is a reflection of the Nativity.

“The heavens declare the glory of God.” Men of antiquity often considered the stars as identifiable with angels. Not only are the stars wrapped in glory, but the purpose of their glory is to govern time beneath them and deliver to he who has ears to hear the message of their Creator’s love. A star and an angel announced the Lord’s birth. They drew men of every station to kneel before an infant, in whom the mysteries of God from before all time were made manifest. And yet, it is a strange sort of appearance, which far from dispelling the obscurity of the Divine simply invites us into it. The incarnation is not to be dissected by reason, only adored by faith. Knowledge in this case is so clearly only incidental to the working of Love.

Holding my own son in my arms, I cannot explain this mystery, it only stares back at me with little windows to a radiant soul. It is not an expulsion of ignorance or the attainment of some enlightened sense, but the eradication of sense in the invitation to love. Like Paul, I am disillusioned, blinded so that I may see indeed. All wisdom is confounded in this living, breathing messenger of God, sent to destroy my understanding and extol faith in His sender. In that fact is an awe far deeper than the one I thought I desired. Indeed, because of Christ, this infant declares the love of God. If even from His robe emanated power to renew the sick from their decay, how much more has the infancy He humbly donned been irrevocably marked with holiness? “To such as these belongs the Kingdom.”

How easy it is, how tempting to demand a sign with our wicked and perverse generation. Having eyes, we become blind, and having ears we become deaf in failing to see that all that the eyes were made for and all that was made for the eyes is itself the sign. And He who descended also ascended, that He might fill all things. What vanity to demand that the thundering chorus of all the cosmos be made louder! Only the humble heart of faith can hear the still, small voice.

O God, like the dying thief on the cross, may we be granted the eyes of faith.