“All this is presented to us in the person, work, and history of the Son of God, through the successive stages of His humiliation and exaltation, forming an image so august, so richly adorned, so expressive, with colors so strangely contrasted, with lineaments so inspiring and yet so over-awing, with such a combination of majesty and grace, of power and mildness, that if we regarded the Christian faith simply as a poetic fiction, nothing could be imagined more beautiful, more fascinating, and more sublime. But it is no fiction.” 

— Ernst Sartorius

In time of ancient strife, on a night of suffocating cold, a moon as frosty as the beleaguered hope over which it presided rose upon a party of three, all glistening precariously as a dewdrop in the sublime and passionless glow. A little, nascent family, that most fragile of budding flowers rendered impossibly more so by vagrancy, tottered with infantile gracelessness over the hills of that epicenter of antiquity. In such sorry state did they venture along the dusty road to the old city that to credit to them any certainty of their arrival there would rightly appear ridiculously vain. 

The maiden shivered, her delicate frame plunged to new depths of frailty by the singular animation by the bitter wind-chill of the roiling pangs of labor, each one an insensible reminder of that ancient Curse, a wearisome participation in the endless cycle which was nevertheless, in her case, ending. In such throes of the hostile dark, submerged in the stupefying sickness of her portentous woe, her soul touched bottom, reaching that sea-bed where the pearl of faith is hid among the muck of misery, her feet reliant on a humble beast of burden, her heart clinging helplessly to her betrothed leading them both through the nebulous night, her spirit thrown limply upon the munificence of her Lord, and all the while the world hanging with desperate anticipation upon the Fruit of her womb.

What soul with such fatal mission entrusted, upon whom its nemesis should therefore desire naught else but to lump upon her every conceivable impediment of flesh and mind, would not have trembled with the wretched infirmity of doubt? Ah, but even Job, that worm who languished among the ash, received by Providence a fence about his life, and by the security of his faith, or rather the surety of its object, retrieved his own life from the ash and drew healing from the potsherds. Surely, even that tiny girl, by the inimitable might of divine hope, could receive no injury which her watchful Master had not by holy intention designed for the success of the very enterprise of which the same sweet creature, though according to all measures of the eyes in low and unenviable condition nonetheless invisibly precious and pristine, was an instrument with which He was pleased not to dispense. If her thoughts, embattled prayerfully as they were against the elements and the weakness of her own body to withstand them, at any point turned to fear, for which vice the bearer of such burden as hers could by any heart in possession of a scrap of feeling be forgiven, nonetheless they could not overcome the sacred Will which was weaving her faith into the grand and cosmic tapestry by which life itself would be recovered from ash.

Yes, for the burden of her sex, the fair duty from which she wrests salvation by resolute gaze, was in its manifestation on that ostensibly impoverished night the new Beginning, the Everything becoming more — not as though He lacked anything, but that everything yet lacked Him — becoming everything to everyone, becoming not as one approaching the limit yet unreached but as the One who cannot be delimited, who not only was and is but is always yet to come, Being becoming eternally and recapitulating the essence of all that was perishing and slipping out of the atmosphere of existence. The Spirit which hovered over the waters in the first and called forth goodness by name was speaking His own Name over her womb. His Word, that He is that He is, embodied, the Yet-to-Come arriving to us.

As the presence of adversity only enriches the eventual triumph, so His ancient adversary was being made by the woman’s Offspring so much like a prop whose only role is to be knocked down, destined alone to confer glory by his own abject defeat. So also the mundanity and empty indifference of that night by their depth only exaggerated the height of what destiny was being wrought in their midst, the excellence of the masterpiece rendered still more evident by the simplicity of its material. Though clothed in the humble rags of peasantry, so little bulwark against the elements, the wandering family’s true garb was a light that shines not to the eyes. That True Light was coming into the world behind the footsteps of its erstwhile unremarkable heralds. The greatest King who could ever be born chose an entourage of the lowly, a court of the unassuming, an inauspicious and unostentatious entry to yet rattle the cosmos by infinite contrast.

The light did shine to the eyes of yet more unlikely celebrants for the celestial triumph: keepers of sheep, blissfully ignorant to the symbolic proclamation that their simple lifelong occupation would disperse across eons, who in the stupefying incongruity of their worldly estate with the blazing vision of an angelic visitor could find nothing in themselves but to plant their faces against the earth in fear, clinging as it were to the familiar and unchallenging realm of their livelihoods. But the angel came not to terrify, for terror was but an accident of his splendor and a mere ephemeron of his grand message. How even a glance of that reality which was scarcely unfolded before them, like the gilded traces of the dawn which only foretell the encompassing light to come, demanded awe to make the body quake and the senses retreat! The holy messenger from beyond the veil, being joined by the flashing visages of a thousand of his ilk, encouraged them with the news of the Blessed Child, and by example bid them render the obeisance and reverence which could only be considered proper at the proclamation of this King of Kings. He afforded them no time to dawdle nor squander their incalculable opportunity with questionings and disbelief, but only delivered the truth unashamed of its demand.

As spirits are wont to do, the bristling host of supernal worshipers reassumed the obscuring cloaks of immateriality, concealing their terrible presence as quickly as they had a moment before cast off their hiddenness. A sublime and awful silence remained like the crater of a fallen star, the profound impression of their absence being the only trace of the disturbance which had churned the wintry air with a thousand sunbeams. The silence sank into the shepherd’s souls. They gazed dumbly at one another, sharing the unspeakable sense that they had in an instant been crushed by the awareness of an immense weight and at once therefrom been relieved with an impetus that deprived them of breath, though not without replacing it with something lighter, softer, lovelier. Had they not held that fair aether in common, any one of them could have mistaken it for madness. It brought their hearts into concordant sympathy of a degree that matched the harmony of the angel song whose echo had already expired without but not within. Like clay vessels smashed and fused together, they with newly-one will rose to follow that beckoning truth. 

The weary maiden, her meek form suffused with fatigue yet burning with the alien warmth of heaven-sent compassion, was brought by her faithful steward to a stable, the only dwelling he in his vigilant service could find — yet indeed was it the only dwelling ordained in that city of regal heritage soon to be augmented, prestige to be fulfilled. The tender love of a husband in blessed ignorance saw with doleful pity the musty abode of animals, but to the sovereign and piercing love of God the same scene was arrayed as the locus of destiny. And just as the angels had passed into sight, so at the moment of the holy Baby’s birth a joy immeasurable bubbled up from beneath the grievous exhaustion which was thus shown to be but a veneer across the virgin’s countenance, for no semblance of ugliness could in the presence of her soulful beauty be called more than illusory. And perhaps her betrothed even saw for a moment her crystalline face, lovely beneath and beyond its youth, glistening like a jewel by the light of her Son.

And so, though the banal darkness of time was gathered together in full strength and encroaching on all sides, a single radiant point of beauty in the firmament defiantly staved off all the power of the air, and by its might the shepherds likewise braved that night, overcame by divine aid the invincible inertia of the dark age, which could not rob by profanation the chosen time of its perfection, and found Him reposed in as piteous a bed as had been described to them, adored by the mother whose pains had borne the weight of glory and yet could not compare to the anguish with which that very Infant should one day labor for the salvation of all those gathered about Him. Indeed, no eye could behold in full, naked truth the inexplicable wonder of the mystery encircled by that curious throng, itself enveloped further still by an otherworldly chorus. Had the mere mortals thus assembled foregone that blessed chance, surely the rocks would have cried out and all heaven and earth bent the knee in that strange ceremony. 

This is the story of all creation, of re-creation, the root of the elusive, all-encompassing meaning for which every generation has vainly combed the depths of the sea and stared longingly at the heights of heaven. Seeing as there is no greater treasure than He who was delivered to mankind that night, there could truly be no greater unhappiness than to forget it. Life itself was born that night, Light Himself was manifested. In Him, we find our new Beginning.

Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among men with whom he is pleased!