The Monstrosity of the Christ-Child

“The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

[from “The Second Coming” by W.B. Yeats]

         As we round the last corner of the semester and plunge full throttle toward the Yuletide, we are cheered by many types of Advent themes. Nearly every one deserves to be reveled in; however, we oftentimes too easily fixate on either the Christ’s divinity or his material humanity. Both of these need to be stressed, because different contexts need to be reminded of Christ’s wholeness in different ways. But I think we need to backpedal from an easy hope, a cheap hope. We must remind ourselves that much of the time, we act as though couldn’t care less about redemption, about reconciliation, about hope. At least, that is my story. My forgetfulness of the possibility of restoration is matched only by my indifference about the matter. Today, I want to awaken the primal feeling of awe at the fact that God become flesh that we might become like God.
I am not advocating a gospel of fear, but trying instead to recall the trembling I have had before the face of righteousness. I can only do justice to this God-awe-fullness by comparing it to absolute horror and revulsion. When the gospel does manage to break through the surface of my consciousness, it often disintegrates into boredom. This malaise is my soul’s defense against the bombshell which is Christ’s life-death-resurrection. I cannot stomach the love and amazing grace embodied in the natal form of Christ – a wretch like me can only retch at the smell of the manger. The stable destabilizes me. If hope would only leave me alone, I can make my tepid peace with the fragments of this city, and I can avoid the strangling sensation of longing for redemption.
           If hope never arrives – never advents – then I will never have to change and leave the shadows. My body lives in tension throughout the Advent/ure: while my head may know that the arrival of the Christ bears glad tidings of great joy for all people, my guts scream out that he will undo all the nothingness that I have assimilated to. What will be born on Christmas is not something which I can honestly praise – I have embedded myself so firmly in the mould of the world. I shudder with the powers and principalities at the name of the Christ child, because he threatens to strip my own identity from the tentacles Sheol which I drape myself in securely. I betray my longing for gospel-redemption with every thought, desire and action which secretly hopes that the hope-creature will be stillborn, dead on arrival. Abort this hope-creature, lest I cry out with Isaiah, “I am undone!” (6:5).
           Hope is not a promise – it is a warning. The prophecy of Isaiah 7:14 (“the virgin shall conceive and bear a son and they shall call his name Immanuel”) is not something for an unjust world to long for – it can’t, because the redemption which the God-child bears will make all things change. He will alienate us from our alienation. In terms of its visceral impact on our hearts and our guts, Mary’s baby should feel to us more like Rosemary’s baby.

“To them [the vampires], he was some terrible scourge they had never seen, 

a scourge even worse than the disease they had come to live with…

He knew he did not belong to them; he knew that, like the vampires, 

he was anathema and black terror to be destroyed

…A new terror born in death.”

[I Am Legend by Richard Matheson]

            I have long since assimilated to the ecology of death and despair. My heart’s twin pulses attack one another: my longing for hope is violently countered by my longing for the corrosive quotidian. I don’t want that hope. Shove it back into its uterine cocoon. Suture the creature to the walls of the womb. For if this god-creature is unleashed upon our planet, there is no power in heaven nor on earth which can pry its love-clutch from the crevices of creation. In an upside-down world, the one who stands right-side-up is the gestating Christ-fetus, bobbing like a gyroscope inside its host-mother.
            When the gridwork of constellations sagged downward, bending toward the Bethlehemic birthing-trough, astrologers from the East read this event in the stars. Once their message reached the king, he responded as we all do to the news of the coming coronation: the king launched a infanticidal spree against the boys of the region (Matthew 2:16). He knew the consequences of what was prophesied – he tried to exterminate the monster, lest the monster change everything.

All this was a long time ago, I remember,

And I would do it again, but set down

This set down

This: were we led all that way for

Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,

We had evidence and no doubt. I have seen birth and death,

But had thought they were different; this Birth was

Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.

We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,

But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,

With an alien people clutching their gods.

I should be glad of another death.”

[From “Journey of the Magi” by T.S. Eliot]

            Eliot’s Magi know that the death-birth of the Thing called Christ is a singularity point, which collects the crushing weight of the distortion-driven universe into infinite density. The god-creature sucks into his very being every last drop of sin and every last drop of righteousness in the cosmos. Advent is the process of being sucked into the black hole of rebirth – and who knows what we may come out as on the other side? I am horrifically ambivalent about the horror of this vortex – I wouldn’t choose it, though part of me still desperately longs for it. There is nothing in my imagination which would choose to encounter such rebirth pangs. By the time Advent rolls around, I am depressed and weary from habituating myself to sarx, the resurrection-denying body-decay – and yet, I am confronted by a historical infant with a paradox which threatens me with absolute transformation.
              Thrown into being in the uterine deapths of a virgin teenager, the god-creature feeds off of utter humanness. It adopts the motions of a human child. It patterns its brainwaves after the mental frequencies of humanity. It guzzles umbilical nourishment, and makes itself into humanity. It is not made to sin. It is made to become the very likeness of sin, so that in it, we might become the very likeness of this god-creature (2 Corinthians 5:21, ESV). As Athanasius said, it has turned itself into us in order to turn us into it. What B-movie monster could menace humanity more horrifically than that?