Mary in Transition - A Christmas Eve Tale
It's 11:00pm on Christmas Eve, and I'm having a moment. I'm empathizing with Mary.
Tomorrow is baby Jesus' birthday, and that means Mary has been in labor all day, unassisted, just her and Joseph.
By now, Mary is in transition. She's about to "bring forth her first born son."
She's in the grip of something huge and inevitable coming through her body. She's got Joseph by the beard screaming don't leave me! in one breath, and Get out! in the next.
He's staying right there. He's not quite sure what to do, but he knows he's all she's got and this baby's coming.
She's starting to feel the urge to push.
She feels something deep inside of her opening, like the whole sky is coming through her. A whole new person is coming, and it has taken control of her body, her mind. She's going to blow apart. She has become, incandescant, supernova, divine.
Echoing in her mind are the words of the vision: Your son will be called the Son of God, ... and in the chaos of this extraordinary rending of the veil between heaven and earth, through her body, she screams, You never said it would be like this!
She doesn't know it yet, but her body knows how to do this. Soon, her body will find a new rhythm. She will know to rest and breathe in the stillness between contractions, and she will know to push like hell when the urge comes upon her.
She will marvel at the intensity of sensation, of the overwhelming inevitableness. She will consciously disappear into the moment and become a portal.
And in another hour or so, she will be a mother.
The intensity and strangeness and pain of this moment will be forgotten as her newborn son fixes his gaze upon her eyes, and she holds him to her bare skin, and he begins to search out her breast.
The Universe shrinks to the sacred contact between these two people, mother and child.
But not yet. Mary is in transition.
She wonders fiercely what the hell was she was thinking when she said to the vision: "Let it be to me according to your word."
Galaxy Birth by Carla Sanders
Galaxy Baby by Carla Sanders