a nativity story
his, hers, mine, and yours
Paying subscribers: You will receive an audio post of me reading this aloud later today (after I’ve had my coffee). Just a heads up if you want to save your eyes. XOXO
The child who opened my womb turned eleven this week. All my children’s birthdays give me pause, call me towards reflection and memory, but none so much as his, and every time.
It’s been eleven years since I have been someone who’d never felt her own fragility. Eleven years since mortality was just a concept. Eleven years since I’d never worshipped my own body.
We gave him Emmanuel for a name because he would arrive during Advent. God with us. I was thirty years old then, I was no child, but still the innocence of my belief feels foreign to me now. How precious to think God would always be with us; how coddled to not yet have touched forsakenness.
God with us, I planned to name my baby, before I knew what it was to be devoured by arrant pain, to be so weakened by it’s relentlessness that to stand is impossible and to lay is unbearable and the only thing left to do is writhe and writhe and writhe; before I knew I would throw up in my own bath water; before I knew his father would be praying a rosary gray-faced and breathless; before I knew I would push for three and a half hours to enter him into this world, pieces of vomit still threaded in my hair.
God with us. I thought I knew. Thought I knew what any of it meant.
A small historic house called Inanna was the vestibule of the earth that I brought Emmanuel into, a namesake of the Sumerian goddess of fertility who descended to the underworld and was gradually stripped of every divine asset and protection until all she had in the end was herself. Three days and three nights she spent as a corpse suspended from a hook in Hades. When she emerged, it was as Holy.
There is a reason that Inanna guards fertility.
It is the same reason that the Advent child of Mary—the one who would likewise be stripped of every divine privilege for a three day descent into the underworld to re-emerge as Holy—would one day be symbolized by a vagina. Because not until you have nothing, not until you look your own shadow square in the face, not until you are hanging from a hook or a cross or the skin of your teeth can you know that God with us doesn’t mean beside us or around us or near us, but in us and through us and is us.
Most theologians agree that the Nativity story is not strictly factual. But a story doesn’t need to be factual to be true. For there is nothing more true than the God-with-us-ness of a birthing mother’s breaking open. There is nothing more true than the God-with-us-ness of a newborn baby. There is nothing more true than the ancient human story of descent and ascent, of suffering and rising, of losing and finding, of terror and love. There is nothing more true than that we are made Holy only after holding mortality’s gaze and nodding our trembling yes, not knowing whether ecstasy awaits on the other side, but knowing we can’t bear the godlessness of never finding out.
Wishing each of you a magical, mystery-ous marvel-ous, merry Christmas.
With love,
Shannon
💜 Have you read The Book of Mary by Nicola Slee…it’s a bit hard to find, but the poetry around all parts of Mary is divine. Highly recommend!
Loved going from this to my lectio on today’s gospel reading. The leaping in Elizabeth’s womb… the holy ground of the first recognition of God In Us.