Christmas and Birthdays
18 Dec 2011 Leave a Comment
in Catholicity
It takes approximately 3/4 of 1 year for a human being to be born, a radial temporal framework replete with possibilities for the poetic imagination. A child conceived in the barren darkness of winter will emerge in late summer when nature itself is most fertile. Both Isabel and baby #2 were conceived in the fall and are children of the summer solstice, the longest and brightest days of the year. Both, seemingly, are also the enfleshment of two of the happiest periods during my relationship with my husband. In October 2009 we were very much in that somewhat innocent and admittedly groundless infatuation-period preceding our marriage in which we spun out all of our light-filled hopes for a future together over long talks and glasses of wine. In October 2011 we were back together again after a brief and difficult separation during which we worked through a lot of pain and found love for each other again. It’s as if God decided to incarnate these periods of happiness, to make a flesh and blood photograph of them. He made of them two midsummer babies, children at whose birth the sun will stretch out the day to its maximum in order to bid them welcome.
I also consider Christmas and Advent in the light of this 9 month idea. I’m not going to go into the “was Christmas a Christianized version of a pagan seasonal festival or wasn’t it?” debate**. Christmas is its own event. Like the birth of my own children, it is suffused with signs, but not a symbol. A symbol is a half mask, partly covering and partly revealing the truth behind it. A symbol is not the thing but points to the thing away from itself. The Incarnation, the birth of Christ isn’t a symbol pointing toward a big abstraction like “light in a time of darkness” or “fertility in a barren season”. Rather, precisely the reverse, the quickening of the seasons and the lengthening of the days are the symbols which point to Christ’s birth, than amazing radical event in which the Author of Life became flesh to live among us and die as the worst of us to save us and bless once again all He had made.
But Christ’s birth is also a season, not merely a day. Mary’s Annunciation is celebrated on March 25th, at the Spring Equinox, when the Earth is warming and working. He is born on December 24th, when nature has experienced death. He comes to promise life in the midst of death, but not, as nature, a mere switch of the cycle back to life and death and life. His is not a cycle, but an end to time itself. With Him all is now and all is life, pure life without transience or blemish.
You could almost read, inscribed in the seasons between Mary’s conception and Jesus’ birth the story of Creation, the Fall and the Redemption. In Spring the world is created and life is brought forward. In Summer the Garden flourishes and Adam and Eve spend long-days revelling in its delights. In Fall there is radical shift and death enters the world. In winter all is death and loss…and at its nadir, its blackest point, when the sun can barely spare us northerners a half-day of weak light….
A child is born….
**By the way, it wasn’t
