Every mother who has ever loved …

 And while they were there, the time came for her to be delivered. And [Mary] gave birth to her first-born son and wrapped him in swaddling cloths, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn. (Luke 2:6-7)

If there is anything more beautiful, I know nothing of it. Swaddling Jesus, Mary is an icon of every mother who has ever loved a child.

Holding him, mother and child as one, her gaze fixed on the life in her arms, she cradles him warm in the gentleness of an exquisite tenderness, shielding him from the cold and the perils of living in a world that is seldom so tender.

And all these centuries later, I sit in the chair where I pray … and weep … at the unspeakable beauty of this mother and child, as she wraps him in bands of love and worry, joy and fear.

I watch … and see so many others who live large in my memory, each shimmering with a beauty far beyond my speaking. They’re all Mary, every last one of them, and their children are all Jesus.

There are so many, like the refugee mother sitting on her suitcase in the rough gravel of a Macedonian hillside, cradling her infant in a thin blanket against a relentless late winter wind, wondering if they will ever be able to go home again.

There were Somali mothers sitting outside makeshift tepees, fashioned from corrugated tin and plastic from war-torn buildings, denying themselves food to feed their children with what little they had, and then, especially, there’s that other one in South Sudan, who in my heart stands for so many thousands.

Wrapping her little one in filthy rags, the only thing she had, she hummed as she kept watch, knowing those rags would soon be a burial shroud, so like the mothers of Gaza, today.

I see them all … others, too, as I watch Mary cradle Jesus.

For, there’s another image this night that also shimmers with Mary’s beauty, my beloved Dixie, 20 years old, looking more like 17, dark brown hair falling on her shoulders, just home from the hospital, holding our first born, her smile alive with a joy I don’t think any man can ever understand. We can only watch and give thanks that the Holy One allows us the vision of infinite beauty.

Yes, she is there, too, as I watch Mary, her eyes gazing at me from across the centuries, inviting me to open my arms and hold Jesus, to cradle him near—even as some of those mothers in those troubled places invited me to do what I most wanted to do—hold the precious lives of their children in my arms as if I could protect them from the brutalities to which darkened hearts had subjected them.

And here lies the mystery that reduces (or elevates) me to tears every year.

Jesus, the Christ child, who bears the heart of God, the soul of Infinite Mercy appears in human flesh that we, as Mary, may see and touch and fall in love with everything he is … awakened to the Love he is … in the unsearchable depths of our own souls.

O Come, let us adore him.

The Beauty we bear

 And when Elizabeth heard the greeting of Mary, the babe leaped in her womb; and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit and she exclaimed with a loud cry, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb! … And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfilment of what was spoken to her from the Lord.”  (Luke 1:41-42, 45)

I remember her hands. It’s been so long that the images run together.  I cannot recall whether they were Meta’s hands or maybe Grandma Lena’s hands. Maybe it was both of them … and then some.

I see two weathered, wrinkled hands, blue veins showing through shiny, thin flesh, nearly transparent on back. But that never mattered. As I remember, the hands always came together, cupping the cheeks of our children as we brought them through the door, flesh on flesh, loving delight, a sacrament of welcome celebrating the unblemished beauty of children’s smiles.

I see those hands as I watch Elizabeth welcome Mary, the Mother of our Lord. I’m in the room as she hears Mary’s voice calling her name. I see Elizabeth’s startled face as the child in her womb kicks and turns.

And I see her as she bursts through the door and takes Mary’s face in her hands and calls her blessed. I see … and hold the moment in my heart, for it is resplendent with love’s beauty, the beauty for which I long as Christmas draws near.

Far from the desire to possess something, it is a desire to be possessed, swept up and enveloped in a loving beauty, like that of Mary and Elizabeth as they enfold each other in joyful arms.

Mary’s beautiful heart, open and receptive to birth the beauty of God’s great mercy from the darkness of her womb, Elizabeth blessed to see the Beauty she bears, they twirl together, arms around each other, caught up in the dance of the Love who chose them.

Watching them is a bit like being at Meta’s doorstep again … or Grandma Lena’s, where Love’s dance reached out and enchanted our hearts.

It’s beautiful, all of it, the stories surrounding Jesus’ birth, the stories of love’s beauty in our own little lives. They’re all the same story, of course—the story of the Great Love, who will stop at nothing in an unceasing effort to sweep us up into Love’s own beauty.

Mary and Elizabeth, Meta and Lena and my kids … and all the rest of us … we’re all part of it. And when we remember, when we tell ourselves the tales of Love’s breathless beauty, the Beauty Mary birthed into our troubled world … is born in us.

For Christ lies in our own hearts, ever waiting to be born anew. All of us are ‘meant to be mothers of God,’ Meister Eckhart wrote centuries ago, ‘for God is always needing to be born.”

And the world has no greater need.