Our humanity is made divine in our basic care for each other, Jessica Martin writes in The Guardian reflecting on her Christmas Eucharist
My Christmas eucharist reflected on the fact that human beings become holy when they look upon a baby and see God.
Christmas Eucharist, Ickleton, Cambridgeshire, Christmas Day
“…the shepherds said to one another, ‘Let us go now to Bethlehem and see this thing that has taken place, which the Lord has made known to us.’ So they went with haste and found Mary and Joseph, and the child lying in the manger…”
“… And the shepherds said to one another, ‘We will go down to Breadhouse, below the hills. The Lord has told us that God will meet us there and that we will recognise him’. And they went into the town of Breadhouse, full of hurry; they went past the public buildings, past the houses, past the pub, to an outhouse at the back of it where a light shone. And they went in. And the light was a little brazier, set next to a feeding trough, and in the feeding trough was a tiny baby, crumpled and awake, with unfocused eyes; his newborn dancing aimless hands were bound to his sides with strips of cloth. Beside him, a girl, tired and a little bloody, with her man. And when they looked at the baby they saw God.”
This is a story about God coming to live with us, heaven enclosed in little space. It tells us that God most deeply imbues the basics of being human. In the House of Bread, Beth Lechem, a baby sleeps in a feeding place. Like every human baby, he is helpless, dependent upon his mother for milk, upon adult care for every need. Without it he will not live. He has nothing to give the people about him. That is true of every baby too. He cannot feed or clothe anyone, he has no language with which he can beguile or amuse or move, he does not even know enough about people to attempt the complexities of human love. These are all things he must learn in receiving them from others. If this baby is God, he is weak and useless, as weak and useless as the countless babies for whom food and shelter and love have not come, and who have died for lack of them. There is no power in that, is there?
That is a truth about babies, and so about this baby. But it is so incomplete as to be a kind of lie. To care for a child is the pinnacle of being human. What could be a joy more complete than to hold a baby, to satisfy such basic needs as warmth and shelter and hunger and affection? What responsibility could be more noble than to imbue a new existence with the profound demands of human love? To share the pleasures and pains of human communication? It is the beginning of the task of a lifetime, a task at which all human beings are doomed partially to fail, but which all must attempt. Everything follows from it – all art and music, all science and technology, all human striving. It is the duty of relationship. Our humanity is made divine in our basic care for each other.
So this is also a story in which human beings become holy when they look upon a baby and see God. Not by power, nor by might, but by the spirit of God, the comforter who shows us fulfilment in vulnerable human life. By a hungry baby we are fed in the House of Bread, by a speechless child we are taught the word which opens all words to glory; by night in a dark room shines for us the light of the world.