Divine Incarnation
We found out we were pregnant during advent. I was at the very beginning of my pregnancy while Mary was, once again, coming to the very end of hers, but I could not help but think of her.
I could not yet feel the baby move. That it was there was more academic than experiential, and yet, I knew there was a life being knit together within me...just an ordinary life, a miraculously ordinary life. It is part me, part Dutch. A small, tadpolish conglomeration of cells, and yet, already I was wondering would it have his eyes or mine or some of its very own? Would the baby have my chin or his, his hair or mine, my temperament or his or be nothing like either of us?
Each new week of the baby's gestation we have marked by reading, in What to Expect When You're Expecting or on the Pregnancy App I have on my phone, what is happening in the baby's body, and in mine. These little mile markers helped me through the first queasy months. Limbs are developing, I can feel rotten for arms and legs...The heart is differentiating in to chambers, I can endure another week of constant sea-sickness for a good heart...
And with each thought, I've thought of Mary. I've never been one to emphasize Mary and her holy role in Jesus' life, mainly because I think she's played up a bit much, oftentimes. Or maybe the feminist in me has been annoyed that she is considered remarkable only because of her ability to procreate. But my mind keeps returning to her and what she must have been thinking and feeling - without books or apps to guide her along the way, without, even, the benefit of friends and family toward the end. She, too, must have wondered what her baby would look like, what kind of eyes it would have, what kind of chin. She, too, must have dreamt of holding it and watching it grow. Mary, too, must have marveled at and been confounded by the wee foreign body within her own ('The Alien' or 'The Tapeworm' as I often call it) growing, demanding food and rest, moving, and being still.
My mind boggles at the thought that the food I put in my body plus the biological engine within these dividing cells has knit together a baby in my womb that continues to grow, already makes me laugh, and melts my heart before I've even seen its face. Mary must have been all the more bewildered by the Incarnation happening within her. How much stranger must she have felt? How much more foreign the being within? How much more humbling to know that it was God's?
And yet...every time I stop to think of the being who has woken me at 4:30 this morning because it has tapped my reserves and my stomach is so empty it's growling, or when it seems to delight at the sound of music in worship, or reacts to Dutch's voice when he speaks nearby, or forces me to my knees in the afternoon in need of a power nap, or anyone of many ordinary and surprising things, I cannot help but marvel at the divinity of its incarnation, at how miraculous it is that the process even exists and works, but even more so that God has allowed it to happen in my body, allowed me to be a part of it and experience it.
The divinity I recognize within the growing baby of my womb, opens my eyes to the divinity of each of us. The power we each hold to do good in the world, or bad if we choose. I do not think our baby will be the savior of the world. With two pastor parents I hope that s/he will find something of her/his very own that makes her/him happy and the world a slightly better place, but I hope, too, that I do not loose this sense that the baby is divine, that it is a gift to have her/him in my life, that s/he is only entrusted to me for a time to teach and love before sending out to play her/his part, however small or large, in the history of the world and the unfolding story of God's salvation. In that way, I think Mary and I are not so different, and I hope I can have Mary's poise to differentiate between myself and my child, my hopes and dreams and its. I hope when it's late for curfew or has just broken a beloved wedding present or scared the dickens out of me by wandering off, that I can love its independence, its curiosity, its ingenuity, and recognize it all as divine.
I suppose, like Mary, I don't have to go it alone. I've got Dutch to help to keep the crazy at bay and God to guide the way...if I remember to listen to either of them!