Never has there been a more pure and holy place, one marked by God’s love and will. It is a wilderness of utter security, warmth, and peace, an environment of darkness, stillness of time, space, and consciousness. There, in the womb, it is formed—all that is and will be, all that becomes, all that is living, breathing, knowing. In this prelude to consciousness is the conception of being. The womb holds timeless secrets revealed in time. A singular, eternal moment becomes flesh. The womb nurses the soul, the spirit, the essence, the mind, the feeling of oneness. In the unspoiled womb the supernatural becomes natural, and humanity is wrought from the divine. The tyranny of time and space is scarcely known in this nursery of grace.
For thou didst form my inward parts,
Thou didst knit me together in my
mother’s womb.
The Psalmist knew that the grandest moment in history is repeated over and over, worldwide, throughout time. Everywhere conception and pregnancy result in new life, in the thoughts and ideas of the parents made flesh, the spirit of endeavor, love, and survival breathing, crying, reaching out in love, receiving love. The incarnation occurs, the child is born, its origins unknown, the miracle of its conception unexplained, the path it shall take undetermined, the will through which it shall act unformed. An image of the divine, sweet purity unperturbed, unstained by evil, profile of truth, fresh and new, content in grace, by angelic care secured, a gift by which the will of God is served.
Repeatedly the mother is asked to accept the burden of the creation and nurturing of life. Repeatedly she is asked to risk her peace and contentment, to give herself to another, to sacrifice self for another, to become two when she has been one, to break from selfishness and her supposed singularity to sponsor new life, to nurture the divine. Her natural impulse is to resist. Who can accept the call to pain, sacrifice, and suffering? How can she accept the endless torment of fear, the anxiety of self made manifold in another? Why must she accept what is not her will? Why must she accept her destiny? She consciously wishes to resist, but something within tells her to accept.
The child is blessed from the moment of conception. The blessed being is given the vast riches of life. He is blessed as well with the intuitive feelings of love. He is a seeker and receiver of love, which is as much as anyone can ask for in life. Life’s setting, events, duration, pleasure and pain, matter little: for he is blessed with life. He has a mind with which to think, to reason and calculate who he is. The surroundings in which he lives provide him ample opportunities with which to search for the truth, and abide by it accordingly. This truth is not outside of him anyway, yet always in him, even before birth. There, in the womb, he is.
The blessed being is as pure as his circumstances allow. Sin as a product of willfulness is a present unknown possible only in the future. Life brings movement, pain, frustration, growth, illness, and the ever present chance of death. Such is original sin. The infant will respond to his physical needs and cry in hunger. Yet his spiritual innocence is unsurpassed. He is created in God’s image; hence he is goodness itself; he is love; he is and was and will be.
Life is a search to recapture the oneness and grace of the womb. After birth, all forward movement is looking backward. The very nature of sin is the feeling of being incomplete, the insecurity, the dissatisfaction with self all alone with self. One person, twisted by hate and bitterness, lashes out against others in violence; another seeks to acquire more material goods; yet another yearns for unending euphoria and pleasure–all are panaceas to loneliness, despair, self-hatred, rejection. The power of dominance, the illusory hubris of riches, the excitement of the narcissistic moment brought about by intoxication, are feeble attempts to regain the contentment, warmth, and utter love of the womb. The future is utterly beholden to the past in the fruitless search to recapture the bliss of conception.
Mother will swaddle the child in love, clothe him in hope, and pray that he will live forever just as he is, running, laughing, playing, singing–a flowing and vibrant lump of clay fashioned into the most beautiful sculpture of God’s utter and complete benevolence. For mother, the blessed child will be a constant reminder of unborn life, the hidden seed, the pinpoint of light thriving with the promise of life, marked by God, known to God, yet unseen by humans, unknown to anyone save the mother. The father will see in it over and over the miracle of birth, emerging from the dark silence of the womb into the consciousness of noise and light, the mother’s screams and the babe’s cries combining to form a mystical symphony to be played repeatedly throughout the ages. Few experiences are more ubiquitous than mother and child living a lullaby of daily life. The mother treasures these experiences in her heart.
In the womb the blessed child consciously begins to form his environment. The material world succumbs to its power. An idea has been born, a human the likes of which has never been seen, the power to live unsurpassed by all creatures, its ability to mirror the transcendent inherent, its urge to love unquenchable, its thirst to know unstoppable, its instinctual drive for peace, contentment, silence, humility, and acceptance pervasive.
Yet the blessed being emerges into a world of ignorance and darkness, where all that is becomes dominated by fears of what will be and anxieties about what has been. Time curses this being and shrouds the meaning of life in a mist of momentary, corporeal, fleeting, transient, concerns. All that seems to matter does not. All that appears significant is not. Life itself, and the divine spark within it, is the buried core to all else that flutters and blows about making noise and causing terror.
The child was conceived in a society in which mysticism and credulity mixed with attempts at rational thought and skepticism, when fundamental assumptions, basic rules and accepted traditions, were sufficiently rigid to become antithetical to all supposition and belief. Hypocrisy overwhelmed the wise as well as the ignorant, the leaders as well as the led. Mirroring changing time, it was a culture of diversity and movement, cosmopolitan yet traditional, overtly stagnant but within were swirling currents of conflict and uncertainty. Society and culture were deeply in need of something. The primitive and sophisticated stood side by side. Barbarism countered civilized behavior. At the same time as there were large cities, trade, and technological advances in communication, architecture, food production, and medicine, the society was marred by a love of violence, ongoing rivalries and conflicts, dependence on the natural environment, famine and disease, ignorance and uncertainty. Humans aggressively pursued wealth, power, honor, immortality, and knowledge only to come up short on all accounts. Human weakness, ignorance, frivolity, suffering, aggression, and sinfulness were never more apparent than at the time during which he was conceived.
The moment when the transition occurred from Ante Christos to Anno Domini was like all moments: people were completely dependent upon the past yet in utter expectation of the future. Contemplation of the past brought disillusion to those who could see the bleak and dark colors of suffering, pain, ignorance, hunger, poverty, disease, violence, and war. The faint possibility that the future might bring a change, some fulfillment to the past, to end the consequences of sin, gave people hope. But it was hope compressed within the narrow confines of the present, of time, therefore of the institutions, society, assumptions, and expectations of the passing moment. Disaster and disappointment had hitherto comprised the story of human existence, the pattern of civilization throughout the ages. Falsehood, deception, sin, and evil confronted those who sought in the past, present, and future truth and goodness. Sermons and writings of priests and prophets complimenting the divine on the vast wonder of Creation, on the goodness and mercy of providence, seemed but hollow words to people who experienced the dismal consequences of sin, the apparent wrath of Heaven. Benefactors of humankind came to horrible ends and everlasting torment at the hands of the very gods that humans prayed to for help and redemption.
Yet the world continued to hunger for the divine embrace, for love that would be eternal. The world had had enough of hate to inspire this urge for the peace and bliss of the divine. Priests and prophets, holy men and women, offered a route to, communication with, the transcendent ideas and forces of life, love, and nature. There were mysteries that only a few wise people knew; they formed ceremonies and sacraments for the uninitiated to become initiated into the secrets of the divine. So many were the possibilities! Each place had a favorite, some heavenly being to answer needs and reward behavior. The deities went by different names, donned different apparel, enjoyed special powers, and were particularly jealous of rivals. The Egyptian fertility goddess Isis, the Thracian god of ecstasy Dionysus, the Earth Mother Cybele, the Sun god Mithras, the divine singer holding the keys to the underworld Orpheus, the divine healer Asclepius, had rites of initiation that led to a mystical cleansing of sin, which resulted in communion with the divine to transcend the body, time, and evil—the result would be eternal joy.
The mysteries remained mysterious, and only the dead knew the truth. How often do the living know the truth? Did Mary know the truth? Did the ethereal messenger from God implant awareness of the truth? Did the Holy Spirit implant not only the seed of God, the Son, but commensurate knowledge as well? The writer of the Gospel of Luke thought as much.
Mary pondered in her heart the gift of the child. Pondering, feeling, sensing: God chose Mary for her empathy, her talent at pondering life, feeling another’s feelings, sensing human character. Life is countless people each with an infinite number of potential experiences all interacting and being experienced simultaneously. God in a single moment, as Aurelius Augustine argued, is able to peruse the whole of experience, the infinite plethora of human experience. God’s perusal is empathetic; God feels all of these human experiences. Empathy in the singular moment connects with transcendence of human experience. When Mary pondered in her heart she experienced this empathetic transcendence, feeling and sensing the manifold experiences that her child would enjoy and endure over his life. This empathetic transcendence occurs in a single moment of awareness, an entrance to the transcendent truth that is God. Isolated human experiences combine into a whole, into a united human experience that transcends the individual moment. Her response to the miraculous, to the improbable circumstances of her life and the child’s conception, was understanding, simple humility, and acceptance of God’s will.
The American Plutarch 