Called Out of Darkness Page 0,73

coming and to His time amongst us.

After all, what does the image of this Sacred Child really mean? It means He didn't come down Mt. Sinai as a full-grown male to live out His years of ministry for us and to die for us in Jerusalem. It means that He entered this world through the body of the Virgin Mother, that He came into the world as all of us come, born of woman, tiny, seemingly helpless, and surely obliged to experience life as an infant experiences it, as a child experiences it, taking weeks and months and years before the power of adulthood was within His grasp.

This astonishes me when I think of it, when I really seek to penetrate what it means.

God became a Baby. God became a Child!

His tender little hands and feet, as depicted in the marble statue, don't have the imprint of the redemptive wounds in them. They're seemingly soft and vulnerable and purely innocent. Yet this is God. This is God amongst us. This is God as He was in that mournful Child of the icon, clinging to Our Mother of Perpetual Help.

Why did He do it this way! Think about it. He made the Universe. So He could have done it any way that He liked.

He knew what His intentions were. He knew what we were. He knew what He meant to do. Why begin in such complete obscurity and helplessness? Why begin in the arms of a woman who surely had to provide for His every physical need?

I find myself confounded by this, as confounded as I am by the horror of the Crucifixion - that the Lord surrendered to the process of birth and maturation, that He entrusted Himself to the weakness and the inevitable frustrations of a developing little boy.

This is not merely the measure of love, but the measure of an overwhelming affirmation of the human condition. You have been a child, so I became a child. That seems to be what the Infant in Mary's arms is saying to me. No wonder He can later say with such conviction in Matthew 18: "Unless you turn and become like children, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven." He had become a child, quite literally and completely, to enter the Kingdom of Humankind.

I found myself dazzled by this as I thought of it this morning. I was dazzled by His long journey from babyhood to manhood, dazzled by the tenderness of those little hands and little feet.

No wonder a great frisson paralyzes me when I look into the Christmas crib, when I hear the phrases of certain old Celtic Christmas hymns. Sweet little Jesus Boy! - The Child born in the Manger is more than sentiment and pretty devotion. It's a stark and chilling mystery, this helpless God cradled among animals and fearful humans, a deposit of infinite power in the midst of the age-old stable where man and beast, in the dark dead of winter, have so long found common rest. The Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness grasps it not.

How tragic the misunderstanding of modern students of history who snidely declare that Christians coupled the birth of the Christ with an older pagan feast of midwinter in which men and women, full of hope for the return of the warmth of summer, burnt the traditional fires in celebration of the eternal return of life-giving warmth. Christ's birth is the embodiment of this age-old ritual!

It is its fulfillment, and how wise were the church fathers who understood it, and saw the shining Babe as the eternal flame round which generations of pagans had sought a desperate warmth.

I wonder sometimes if there are not Christmas Christians and Passion Christians, and if I have not always been a Christmas Christian, coming closer to the fathomless love of God in His becoming one of us in the Christmas crib. It is not that Our Lord's Passion lacks meaning for me. How could that possibly be? How could I not follow Him to the cross and to the nails and to the spear that pierces His side? This is The Redemption! This is The Atonement!

I've already confessed my deep longing for the gift of the Stigmata.

It's only that understanding begins for me in the tableaux of Christmas. A thrilling certainty begins there, in the moment when that Infant is placed in the humble bed of straw. He died for our sins, yes. But He was also born for them, nurtured