Mary

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I stand at the edge of the cave, a silent presence as I watch a girl wrapping a tiny wailing baby in strips of cloth torn from her own dress with shaky hands. She’s young –so young, I think as I watch her.

Just a teenager, long dark hair and sweet dark eyes. Her hair is sweaty from labor, a mess around her face, her eyes wild from the shock to her body and her mind of what she just went through. Pain still wracks her muscles with every movement she makes, though the worst is over.

I wince in sympathy. You can be told something all your years of growing, you can be prepared with all the facts about what can and will happen, but it doesn’t make going through something like birth easier just from the knowledge. Especially not the first time, as a teenager. She may not be a teen in the same way as modern day defines. But she is unexperienced. Her emotions are big and new, her body still changing. Her culture teaches her to hide herself – most men in her time devalue her as a mere vessel to be used … and she’s still learning what it means to be a woman instead of a child.

And she’s here… not somewhere in comfort, surrounded by family, but instead in a dark cave used as an animal shelter.

The hay might be sweet smelling, but it’s dusty and scratchy and it’s all she has for a cushion. She’s alone. Her mom isn’t here beside her, reassuring her through the pain that it’s normal. I watch her eyes close against the homesick feeling. I know she’s wishing her mom was here, lifting up the baby and clucking over Jesus, fussing over Mary, letting her rest while she does what any mother would do, cleaning up and taking on all that we want our mom for when big things happen to us.

Neither is Mary’s husband here. Jewish men, even good ones, don’t enter into things like birth – a mess that makes you “unclean.”

If she’s anything like me, she wouldn’t really have wanted Joseph here anyway, a man who doesn’t know her body yet. Being young and hyper aware of her newly changed shape, embarrassed by the mess and the smells and the blood and the most intimate parts of her being ravaged. She’s never had sex. She doesn’t even know Joseph all that well yet, though he’s been kind to her, taken care of her and shielded her as much as he can from those who don’t understand what is happening to her.

Maybe Joseph had time to find her a midwife in this strange town, but just as likely, with a strange city, all the commotion of the census, and the crazy amount of travellers, she went through this whole thing on her own, with only her trust in God to keep her and the baby alive.

So for the moment, she’s here in front of me, cleaning herself up as best she can, getting rid of the mess, stopping periodically, staring down in wonder, tears on her cheeks at both the shock and the surreal idea that she has a living, breathing, infant in her arms. She holds Jesus to her breast, hoping she’s doing it right. She’s missing her mom, she’s embarrassed about when Joseph will come back into the cave and see her, she’s exhausted and she’s flooded with the fiercest, protective awe she’s ever known at the tiny baby nuzzling her.

As a mom I know that love is intense and instant. Without question she will do anything for this baby. Sacrifice is not something that needs to be taught a mother. It’s in her bones, knit into her soul to value this innocence as if it were herself. To protect and cherish it as if loving this child is all that exists.

The physical feel of his little mouth as it pulls at her, of his tiny head that she cradles in her arms. It’s all startlingly vivid. And yet disjointed too. Little pearls of moments caught in eternity and strung together with the other normal (sometimes awful) things like the dull pain between her legs, the cramps that still echo in her stomach, the smells of the animals and the hay. The damp sweat of her clothes and the need to change as blood continues to seep out of her. The worry over the future and what Joseph will be like with this piece of her that now exists outside the safety of her body but doesn’t come from him. The instant fascination with Jesus’ breathing, the soft panic when he chokes and coughs up fluid from being in her womb. Time doesn’t exist inside the physical sensations – the flashes of soft, dark, fuzz for hair against her fingertips, the red, wrinkly, newborn skin, dry and needing oil; his cute, scrunched up eyes as he roots about and swallows for the first time.

I watch her, tears in my eyes. I’ve been jealous of her – this highly favoured one. Spoken of with so much delight by Yahweh. She’s Jesus’s mom. I’ve always seen him first as a man rather than a child. But he’s a man with such gentle hands and so much compassion, so much inclusion, that he won my heart even despite the harsh religion he gets tied to. And this sweet young girl in front of me taught him how to love and respect women. Raised him with a deep and awe-filled trust in her God that he watched. Showed him how to ponder the deep things in his heart – take time to be alone with his Dad.

I never spent much time imagining Mary. She was everything I couldn’t be and didn’t want. Birth was never something I cared about. I saw it as a curse rather than a gift. A have to that caged rather than freed.

Until now. Until now, when I can see the reality of her in this moment. It’s quiet in the cave. No fanfare. No crowd. But in that quiet I can feel the invisible, careful God I love, hovering over the two of them. Deeply hopeful and full of so much fierce love. Tying his beautiful, intangible spirit into something so physical, so finite – melding the two seemingly impossible states into one.

As I watch her study the tiny features nestled in the crook of her elbow, I watch Yahweh study her, and I wonder if she realizes what it means – for Yahweh to let her in on this secret, one of his biggest secrets ever. She gets to be the first one to unwrap it with him. And He knows the hurt she had to wade through to hold it with him for nine months – the way she’s been isolated and humiliated and shunned by most family and friends after saying yes to him.

So God hovers, watching over her through the exhaustion and the pain. He’s so thankful for her wide open heart. He’s so delighted with her trust in him. He’s brimming with the excitement of giving himself, of starting this cascade of love that will reach forward through history but also back all the way to the beginning. Mary doesn’t even realize yet the extent of the respect Yahweh is showing her. With her innocence, her willing partnership with him, he’s plucking Eve out of the darkness of the accusation that’s haunted her through time. Mary’s a balm to Eve. He’s showering the first beloved one he created with restoration – and through the both of them giving back the respect he created all women with. Erasing the curse with the gift of his son born into the care of a woman’s innocence and trust.

I can tell by the quiet of Mary’s body and face that she’s reaching out in the weariness, in the heartache, in the loneliness and the uncertainty of her relationship with Joseph, to the Yahweh she has loved all her life. Can she talk to her God in her state of being unclean, in the blood and the mess and the now weird feeling of an empty stomach? Does she have to wait seven days to be able to approach him with her thanks and her fears and her overwhelmed questions? Can he be with her now rather than separated by her culture’s idea of holy, rigid, perfection? Her head might war with her, but her heart reaches for him anyway.

She feels Jesus rub his cheek and chin against her skin, his dark, little eyes open and staring up at her. Here he is – Son of God come to her unbidden, completely vulnerable, and needing her care to keep him alive.

What trust Yahweh is giving her. Yet more tears flood down her cheeks and she clutches Jesus’ small body close. She doesn’t know what is in store for either of them. All she knows in this moment is the Love that bounces back and forth between them in an unending loop. That Yahweh is trusting her with this gift that is so tiny and so fragile and yet has the power to capture her whole heart without doing anything but be. That this is who her God is, is sinking into her heart. That he could move in such strikingly subtle and gentle ways, that he would come be here with her in this cave, give himself into her care in this physical way rather than reign from a castle on a hill.