Captain Edward Latimer Beach, U.S. Navy (Ret.), was: President Eisenhower’s Naval Aide; Commanding Officer of the first submarine to circumnavigate the globe, while submerged traveling over thirty thousand miles in 61 days: a World War II hero who earned the Navy Cross; and the best-selling author of Run Silent, Run Deep. During World War II, submarines in which Captain Beach was serving damaged or sank 45 enemy ships. The war’s conclusion found him in command of the USS PIPER, underway in the East China Sea. There, just as they were entering Japanese waters, he received this message from his wife: Daughter was born August 10th X Both well X Congratulations. In his words, “The war had come to an end, and life, for some of us, was beginning.”
I am always bemused when people invariably comment about a newborn child, Isn’t he beautiful? or Isn’t she cute? One does not have to see very many newborns to realize that those comments do not connote physical attractiveness. Instead, I have come to think that people intend their comments to convey a sense of the wonder they feel in the presence of a new life. That something so fragile and helpless as a newborn has the potential to grow into an adult, perhaps to become a great artist, powerful leader, wealthy tycoon, or spiritual guru, is truly wondrous.
When privileged to hold a newborn, I have often pondered whether this small bundle of life, usually the sum of many dreams and hopes, will survive everything that life will throw at it. Will this baby live to maturity? If so, what will be his or her fate? Those questions have felt especially poignant with respect to the infants that I have baptized in neonatal critical care units. Yet mystery always shrouds birth; nobody, not even purported soothsayers, astrologers, or other alleged practitioners of the psychic arts knows what the future holds for a child.
To survive, a baby requires much love, love that provides food, warmth, protection, and, most importantly, emotional nurture. A newborn, unable at first even to differentiate self from environment depends totally upon others. This dependency is so complete that the love people claim to receive from a two or three day old baby is in fact the projection of both the person’s own love onto the child and an imagined reciprocal response from the child.
Working with baby chimpanzees, psychologists have conducted experiments in which they removed newborns from the mother. Food, warmth, and protection were insufficient to allow the baby chimp to thrive. To thrive, the baby required at least the semblance of a mother, e.g., receiving milk from a heated, cloth covered frame. Even that substitute helped the baby chimp develop only to a minimal level. Further development required real interaction.
Thankfully, I am unaware of anybody who has suggested conducting similar experiments with human children. Instead, we tenderly cradle a newborn in our arms, wrap the baby with blankets for warmth, and often make cooing sounds, almost instinctively trying to give love.
The feelings of wonder, mystery, and love that newborn babies evoke in us resonate deeply, I suspect, because they touch our basic, primal nature. Our feeling of wonder at the beginning of a new life, a function of human consciousness, of the self-awareness that is an integral dimension of the human spirit, reminds us that we are spiritual beings. Our sense of the mystery that shrouds a newborn future reminds us of a power greater than ourselves, a power that transcends life itself, God. Our experience of a love so strong that it envisions its own completion fills us with hope, for we know, perhaps without ever saying the words, that this is how truly and unconditionally God loves us.
Recall, for a moment, the story of Captain Ed Beach, with whom I began this sermon. He, who had never seen his daughter but knew too well the horrors of war, insightfully wrote, “The war had come to an end, and life, for some of us, was beginning.” In those few words, Captain Beach unwittingly alluded to this day’s real meaning:
• The wonder we feel at God's continuing activity in the world, manifest in the Christ child’s birth;
• The mystery of how we, linked in Holy Baptism and Holy Eucharist to the Christ child, will be part of what God does next;
• And the love, complete and unconditional, that is transforming us into the image of the Christ child.
May the wonder, mystery, and love of Christmas be yours today and every day.
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