I’m surprised every Advent at how much giving birth has changed my spiritual life. When we have actually done something, we know it in a way we can never know it second-hand. The body remembers.
And so when I meditate on the incarnation, I now have physical memories that go with. The sensation of a baby being birthed — I speak here not of pain, but of the pressure and movement and release as a the tiny person passes out of the pelvis. Then the warm, naked baby snuggling against skin, looking around quietly with those froggy newborn eyes. The way a baby fills the arms as it nurses, the rhythm of the industrious little mouth, the seriousness with which a newborn goes about the business of feeding.
If you have not done things, felt these things, then when you contemplate the birth of Jesus, you cannot understand it the same way.
But I would not tell you that you should, therefore, move on to some other mystery.
No, no.
To begin with, there is plenty to be gleaned from the Nativity without having the foggiest notion of childbirth or breastfeeding. Christmas is, after all, much more than a report for labor & delivery. Your own life, however un-motherly, and perhaps because un-motherly, has insights of its own to offer. And then, those of us who do know something of these activities can surely at least explain a little?
I mention this now, when Christmas is more or less over, because I’ve been getting a lot of “you can’t understand” messages lately. (Not to me personally, but to the world in general. And written by people I respect, which concerns me.) Bits along the lines of “you can’t understand what it is like to experience what I have experienced, so don’t even try.” “You’ll just come away with the wrong idea”. “You are not like me”. “You are a ______, _______, or _______, and therefore you are incapable of correctly associating with a person like me.”
Now if I were getting these messages from someone who wanted to wall-up in an isolated compound and never have to do with my sort of riff raff, it would make more sense. But I’m hearing it from some people whose usual message is just the opposite: that all people deserve respect and fair treatment, that superficial differences should not divide us.
And so my answer is: If I don’t understand it, explain it to me. No, of course I cannot know what your very life is like, any more than you can know mine exactly. But if you mean to make your cause more widely understood and accepted, then you must not give up on trying. Whenever social solutions are built on “those people are fundamentally different”, the results are disastrous.
So in the interest of averting disaster, please consider sharing your experiences. Which you cannot share the way you share a shirt or a lawnmower, but which you can share the way you share a conversation, or a friendship.