There are many faces to a baby. When you think about it, a baby is an amazing symbol of both power and powerlessness. Or, perhaps, more accurately, a baby is a symbol of power within powerlessness.
“The first moment I looked at my baby” a young father told me, “my stammer left me.”
When loving couples have a baby they become as vulnerable and precarious as the baby of their love. The beauty they have created shatters their former security. Their lives are irrevocably transformed. But that is what love is like. It surrenders. It has no more masks, no more expectations, no more certainties.
The Bethlehem baby’s defenseless presence, his shocking and precarious weakness, his overturning all our ideas about the nature of God, stuns us into silence.
It is in this sacred silence, during the few precious days of Christmas, that the hard thoughts within us will melt, that the unforgiving walls of judgment and blame will crumble, and that the shadow of all our pride will be transformed by by the light of an infant’s smile.
Such is the power of a baby.
By
Christopher Myers SSM