A child is born

Amidst all the tinsel and cake, mistletoe and wrapping paper, I try to take a moment to impress upon my mind and heart the real reason why we celebrate this most lovely of feasts. To recall that great gift of God, of His very Self, to us.

For me, it is the joy of giving that best encapsulates the spirit of Christmas (not that I have any objection to receiving!). For nothing else comes quite so close to mimicking that quiet miracle of miracles; the arrival of the Saviour of the World. The Saviour not just of Christians, Jews and Muslims, but of atheists, agnostics and all faiths big or small. The Saviour of every human soul that ever came into being through the intimate union of mother and father, past, present and future. Saviour of the believer and the non-believer alike and of those balancing on the proverbial fence. In an era of intolerance, strife and discrimination, Christ personifies peace.

Innocence, vulnerability, and total dependence, God became one of us. Imagine a tiny baby, eyes closed, face wrinkled with childbirth, hair matted and tiny hands curled. He nestles at his mother’s breast and his little mouth opens as he roots for her milk. Wrapped in swaddling clothes and held close in his mother’s arms, his bleary eyes cannot see the poverty around him. So close to his adoring mother, he is the richest child in the world. Humble shepherds come to gaze on his tiny form. Lambs join the gaggle of animals and the baby’s first lullaby is a symphony of bleating and cooing. The grey-haired St Joseph smiles fondly at the infant as he works to prepare a bed for his wife and child. Without pomp or ceremony, without guile or prejudice, the Christ-child is born.

Happy birthday sweet Jesus. May we all remember you today, your day.

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Angelitos

I have two little angels – angelitos – waiting for me up in Heaven.

I would ten thousand times rather that they were sitting here, right now, in my arms but they were never destined to see the light of day, nor I the light of their eyes.

Today is the anniversary of a birthday that never came. Every year, I struggle with myself as December comes and goes. Should I mourn a life that barely flickered into a flame? Am I being uncharitable to my surviving children?

But, with time and the arrival of little T, I have made peace with the reality that I will always mourn the loss of my babies, however tiny. Intricately caught up in my unfailing belief that life begins at conception, I will not deny the reality of their existence, nor God’s decision to call them to His side just a few weeks after they winked into being.

It is so hard to see the rhyme or reason behind God’s decisions sometimes. I say sometimes. I could say oftentimes. Life can seem so very, very fragile. A puff of wind and a memory is all that lingers. Peace; better to have lived a moment, and been loved, than never to have lived at all.

 

How fleeting a life can be

A tiny bud of potentiality

A brief spurt of individuality

Stolen away, washed away

Drained away.

 

A mother’s love

Quarterised in its infancy

Blunted before its time

So ungracious, so very ugly

And so very very cold.

 

Brief weeks of intimacy

Immortality in the waiting

Until then, precious,

Here’s a tear at nightfall,

Here’s a smile at moonrise.

I whisper your name at dawn.

 

Though never shall I know you,

Always shall I love you.

Picture me, remember me.

Wait for me.

 

2nd May 2009

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