“We receive fuller knowledge from the child.”
This is how Martin Buber, the great Jewish thinker, put it, how he talked about that mystery we all know—what he famously and mysteriously called the “I and Thou”—the human experience of the world, a person’s experience of reality, your experience of the world beyond yourself, mine too. He said our experience as individuals, as human persons, of I and Thou, begins as children, indeed, even in the womb. He said it was ancient Jewish wisdom, mystical wisdom, that in the womb of the mother the unborn child “knows the universe,” experiences for the first time—in the body of the mother—a spiritual connection which becomes a natural connection with all the rest of the world.[1] That is, in the womb, he said, we experience ourselves for the first time, experience the world for the first time too—in the womb, under the heart of the mother, in that space mostly silent, no sound greater than a heartbeat, two heartbeats, the music of the hearts of mother and child.
This is the human experience which is the beginning of everything: the experience of the unborn child become the child become the person. This is why so many philosophers, although sadly maybe not today, have agreed with Aristotle, that “the first thing to arise is the family,” no matter how much Aristotle may have misunderstood the true beauty of what he was saying.[2] This is why the Stoics in ancient times were such staunch defenders of the family, why, as one of them wrote, “whoever destroys human marriage destroys the home, the city, and the whole human race.”[3] Because they knew what was inside the family, what was inside the womb—life and the undying origin of all life, that which even God did not destroy after our first sin, after our innumerable sins.[4] It is the foundation of all human community, the foundation of our human need to belong and feel belonging. As Jean Vanier put it: “The very first community to which people belong is the family; a child belongs first to the mother.”[5] This is the human truth at stake today, why we sometimes say that the work of the Church in our age is simply to keep us human.[6] Because it is the experience of the child in the womb and in the family which is what makes us human; because it’s an experience which, as humans, we cannot afford to lose.
But, of course, we fight for life, promote life, march for life for more than merely these natural, philosophical reasons. We Christians know, don’t we? We know the story. It makes sense to us, we see the beauty of it, the fittingness of it, that God would begin the redemption of all things in the womb of a mother, where life since the beginning has begun, where new life begins in conceiving faith in God announced in an archangel’s greeting. The philosophers knew the womb’s significance for the life of the world; we Christians know its significance in redemption. We know that although young and small and out of the way, a nobody in a nowhere place, still, when Gabriel appeared and when she said yes, “according to your word,” that small moment, that invisible moment in that nowhere place, was, as Paul said, “the fullness of time.”[7] O magnum mysterium—O great mystery—that in such a small thing the Maker of all things is conceived. Our medieval ancestors sang of her as a rose, our Blessed Mother, this small woman: “in this rose contained,” the ancient hymn goes, “was heaven and earth in little space. Res miranda.”[8] This thing to be wondered at: this is how we Christians have venerated and praised this mystery of Christmas whose advent is no mere history but still very much an advent—as we who are still faithful and still wise wait for his coming again, for Christ the King, once born so small.
It is the prophecy of Isaiah that “the virgin shall be with child, and bear a son” which sounds through the cosmos and echoes eternity but which begins in miniature in the womb of a young woman.[9] Again, it is a mystery, although wondrous, which should not surprise us, we believers in Jesus. Yet, it does us well to remember it as we praise our God at Christmas and pray for his birth in us in Advent, remembering the smallness of the beginning of redemption, that it begins in the womb, in an unborn child resting under a mother’s heart. This is what we must remember, what must inspire us: the smallness of this wondrous, infinite mystery, begun in a world at first utterly ignorant of it all, of an angel in a girl’s room, of grace in a womb.
Because, of course, what we do often is small, thought insignificant and of no account in the world. If little mind was paid her, then little will be paid us. A single rosary prayed on a sidewalk, a single prayer, a single kind word and smile, a single gesture of hope, a single young woman, a single unborn child: these small things filled with God, these small moments, the fullness of time. This is what God reveals in taking flesh in a small womb—heaven and earth in little space—that small things matter, that what you and I do, however small, matter. The endless small chores of the family, the smallness of your ministry, the smallness of your art and work: these things matter because they share in the fullness of what God is doing in Christ, in that redemption born of grace and of her, that first small believer. This is the sweetness which we saints can have, the delight in the fruits of the Spirit we can possess, when in faith we see how God works in the small things we do and fills all the small spaces we give him. This is the joy of heaven which we can begin today, a joy in all the small things, because we know what God is doing. A joy, hope too, if we’ll only remember the child who is Christ, the God who loves us so much that he became smaller than us. And if we stay faithful, even if we’re small or what we do is small. Because Christ was small too. Amen.
©2019 Rev. Joshua J. Whitfield
[1] Martin Buber, I and Thou, 24-25
[2] Aristotle, The Politics 1252b
[3] Musonius Rufus, Lecture 14.11
[4] Genesis 3:20
[5] Jean Vanier, Community and Growth, 13
[6] St. John Paul II, Evangelium Vitae 97; Gaudium et Spes 40
[7] Luke 1:38; Galatian 4:4
[8] There is no rose of sych vertu (15th century)
[9] Isaiah 7:14
