Christ is Born! Glorify Him!
- from Newsletter Nativity 2004 -
In winter new life is born—a wonder, a miracle, a child. Jane Merchant, a poet born physically handicapped with osteogenesis imperfecta, wrote in her 1971 “December Haiku”:
Bare trees, bare earth, bare
Room, where a new mother holds
Five rosebud fingers.
Jane died in January 1972, a year before the Supreme Court in Roe vs. Wade made the killing of unborn babies legal in the United States. Since then, the silent genocide of 45 million unborn miracle babies bearing the image of God has added to the number of “holy innocents,”martyred saints. Each year in this country another 1.3 million are added and 46 million more around the world. Their memory is eternal. May God have mercy on us and heal the wounds of our souls, for we sin against Him and the least of His “little ones.”
Two thousand years ago, God the Word became flesh in the womb of His young Virgin Mother, the Holy Theotokos. Abortion was common, except among the Jews.Mary said “yes” to the Gift of life conceived in her womb. Joseph, her betrothed, took upon himself to protect and provide for the young mother and babe. Did they face shame and scorn? Mary was pregnant and unwed. Joseph, a God-fearing, respected carpenter and widower, trusted an angel in his dream who said the babe in Mary’s womb was the long-awaited Messiah. Did they think of what people would say? Or whisper? In the synagogue? At the well where Mary came to draw water?
They faced danger and hardship; the long journey to Bethlehem, the birth in a stable—no room in the inn. There was the strange story told by shepherds who had seen and heard a shining choir of angels in the night sky over the fields. And three wise men bearing gifts from the East, who had been guided by a star and came to worship the newborn babe whom they called King. And then Joseph was warned in another dream by an angel who told him to flee with Mary and her child into Egypt. King Herod’s soldiers had orders to “put to death all the male children who were in Bethlehem and in all its districts, from two years old and under” to get rid of the infant Jesus, feared to be a rival to Herod’s throne.
“Then was fulfilled what was spoken by Jeremiah the prophet:
‘A voice was heard in Ramah,
Lamentation, weeping, and great mourning,
Rachel weeping for her children,
Refusing to be comforted,
Because they are no more’”(Matthew 2:17–18).
On the fifth day of the Nativity, December 29, the Orthodox Church remembers the fourteen thousand Holy Innocents of Bethlehem— the forerunners of the more than a billion aborted children around the world during the last 35 years. An incomprehensible number, but God knows each of them intimately:
“For You formed my inward parts;
You covered me in my mother’s womb.
I will praise You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
Marvelous are Your works;
And that my soul knows very well” (Psalm 139:13–14).
