Advent II: "Let all mortal flesh..."

The intensity of being a person who exists in this container we call a body, still sometimes catches me off guard. Nowhere have I found this tension to be more difficult than in the liminal space of pregnancy, where my body is housing another’s.

This week found me curled up on my couch, crying and close to a panic attack because I couldn’t get out of my body. The baby’s movements were especially triggering for some reason - harsh elbows or knees hitting tender places, a growing claustrophobia that I couldn’t escape. I couldn’t see the miracle, I couldn’t feel anything but that I was being held hostage in a body made more foreign by the day, needed for the survival of another human, and provoking anxiety at every turn.

I wondered later, did Jesus ever feel claustrophobic in his human body? What must it have felt like for God to become incarnate, to become limited by the edges of a baby…