Born

I have been trying not to be so grinchy about commercial Christmas. True, crabby thoughts spring spontaneously into my head when I hear "The Most Wonderful Time of the Year," but I try to squelch them. (Okay, actually, in that case I don't try very hard because whoa, that is a TERRIBLE song and I still have unhappy memories of the college choir director who made us sing it with [shudder] added choreography.) When I hear others of the same ilk -- "Silver Bells," "Winter Wonderland," "Sleigh Ride" -- I'm trying to suppress my automatic inner grimace.

But I am having an Inigo Montoya moment today. (Not the "you killed my father; prepare to die" kind, the "I do not think that word means what you think it means" kind.) Christmas in these songs is all about cozy leisure activities. Chestnuts roasting by an open fire-- we're warm, we're toasty, we're getting ready for a nice snack. Jack Frost nipping at your nose-- he can't really sink his teeth in, though, because it's lovely weather for a sleigh ride together with you.

Christmas is not about cozy.

We are getting ready to celebrate a birth. That means work, not idleness. Before the baby comes, you prepare. You think hard about what the baby will need from you and you find it. Even if it's costly, you figure out a way to obtain it -- it's for the baby, after all, and nothing is more important than the baby right now. You get everything ready. You clean the house. You wait -- not idly, wondering if the chestnuts are toasted yet -- but expectantly, eagerly. Your whole world is about to change.

Birth is not about comfort. There is a pious tradition that the Blessed Mother did not experience pain during the birth of our Lord, but I am quite certain that she worked hard to bring him forth. Birth is like that. 

We tend to romanticize the Nativity, but I think often of how hard it must have been. Can you imagine? A first baby, a young mother, a cave in the middle of the night (or so tradition suggests). I think of the smell, the noises of livestock, the steam, perhaps, rising from a wet little body in a chill night. Hands moving swiftly to swaddle the baby, before he could get too cold. Did they think, "Why now? Why here?" I know I would have, had I been there.

I think he chose that time and place to say, Where there is privation, I am Lord. Where it stinks and you have to watch out for the piles of dung, I am still Lord. When it is not what you expected, not what you would have chosen, I am Lord even then. In the humblest circumstances, my glory is undimmed. The angels saw it and sang out: gloria in excelsis. Often we imagine the same tableau, strange and humbling, and we sing out too: our cheeks are nice and rosy and comfy cozy are we.

My oldest son was posterior and in labor every position except sitting was painful. So I sat. When things weren't progressing, the midwife told me I needed to to turn him by moving out of my comfortable chair. She said, "This baby needs you to be uncomfortable." I am thinking of her words this Advent: what does the Divine Infant require of me? Where am I sitting placidly, reluctant to do the work he is asking of me because it is uncomfortable?

I always think, when I think seriously about birth, about the prospect of my own death -- in late pregnancy I always get to confession, always try to have my house in order. You never know what's coming. To prepare for the birth of Christ is to prepare for death to self, one more time.

This post sounds very gloomy, like Eeyore's Advent Musings. All through the writing of it, though, I have been remembering the joy of baby Stella's arrival, bright and warm and palpable in the middle of that icy night. The thing is, that kind of joy doesn't come cheap. You can't manufacture it with a cup of cocoa and a Bing Crosby album. Christmas is bigger than cozy, bigger than comfortable. I find that its joy runs deeper when I am willing to lean into the work -- the work of preparation, the work of yielding -- that comes beforehand.

I doubt they'll be changing the soundtrack at Starbucks, but you never know.