We decided to commit a parents’ perspective to print: Don’t take the baby out of Christmas! Babies help us celebrate and understand our humanity, where God is revealed to us. Our Church listens too quickly to talk of finding holiness more readily outside the mundane, sometimes grueling demands of everyday life. For us there has been no greater opportunity to live our faith and experience conversion—the kind the Advent readings call for—than becoming parents.

To take the baby out of Christmas would be to deny what, for many of us, is the most tangible way to understand the meaning of Jesus’ Incarnation. When we understand the commitment and sacrifice it takes to love another human being, one who is flesh of our flesh, we begin to understand what it means for God to have made us in God’s image. When we feel how much we love our own children, we begin to understand how much God loves us. We begin to understand the love that God expressed in the person of Jesus.

We’re taking that advice seriously, as parents who will spend this Advent and Christmas awaiting our third child. Life is about to change for us in a big way, and we want to prepare ourselves. Yet how do we wait for our child whose heartbeat began announcing his or her arrival back in August? How do Christians wait for Baby Jesus?

The first reaction of many parents-to-be is to pull out the wallet. “We’re going to need a bigger car,” he says. “We’ll have to redecorate the nursery,” they agree. Will they use disposables or the diaper service this time, they wonder. “This one will need the best stroller, the most perfectly color-coordinated crib set and the latest, ultraconvenient diaper bag.” The list can be as long as any baby-product catalogue.

By the time baby arrives modern parents may feel they have more in common with the pack mule which carried the Holy Family to Bethlehem than with Mary and Joseph! “How are we going to pay for all of this?” looms just around the bend. Sure, some of the accessories are essential, but the accumulation of unnecessary goods and debts can be truly distressing for parents who want what’s best for their baby.

The same type of thinking can add a measure of distress to anyone preparing for Christmas. Whether we spend a wad of money or not, many of us spend a great deal of energy trying to do Christmas “right.” By the time we crawl out the door to midnight Mass, we may wonder our annual doubt: Was it all worth it?

There are good reasons and not-so-good reasons, whether we are preparing for birth or Christmas.

By engaging our bodies in shopping trips, decorating and the like, we prepare our minds and hearts for what is coming. That’s good. We also, by the very act of preparation, celebrate and affirm what is to be. Maybe that’s why we don’t protest too loudly as the Christmas items hit the store racks a little earlier every year.

Yet the picture usually is not so simple. Deep down we may want that perfect Christmas. Or perhaps we go on a consuming binge to cope with past hurts that feel amplified during the holidays.

Parents-to-be risk some of the same perils. Some of us preparing for a new child also spend ourselves into debt out of fear. We may feel insecure about our relationships, about our very self-worth. So we try to set things up so they cannot possibly go wrong, as if we could control people, or relationships which unfold in God’s time. Faithfulness to Jesus may require giving up that sense of control. That can be obvious to a couple awaiting an infant.

In her loss of control, though, comes a power she has never known—she participates in an intense creation, the use of her very physical, human, earthy, God-given body to make life. As her time arrives she may watch in distress as her body grows beyond any reasonable dimension. During labor she will get bloody, she will moan—she’s certainly not running the show—but she shares in God’s love in a unique way: She births a new life. She must lose in order to gain.

The father loses his sense of control, too. Suddenly a new person, a baby, is in the midst of his relationships, whether with his wife, or perhaps his extended family. This infant on the one hand is utterly dependent, yet intrudes in an unnervingly independent way.

Can the father let go of his old self enough to take on a new and unpredictable role in the human family? Can he open up his hidden places to love this child? Can he relinquish the security of knowing what will happen next? Or will he, like some men, “sign out” by making himself either emotionally or physically unavailable to the new family? He, too, must let go in order to hang on.

Maybe that’s how the baby fits back into Christmas. In Advent, all of us can allow ourselves a little less control of our busy, programmed lives. We can make fewer attempts to mold God into our image of who we want God to be.

The Messiah, after all, was not the king people had thought he would be. God is uncontrollable. Our conversion, our awakening, where we make the crooked paths straight, could be here: We can’t control or predict the moments or people who will bring God into our lives. Let us, instead, embrace them and hold them close to our hearts!

Immediately after Mary of Nazareth learns she is to give birth to Jesus, says Luke, she goes to the hill country to be with her cousin Elizabeth, who is six months pregnant with the child who will grow up to be John the Baptist. Elizabeth, upon seeing Mary, is filled with the Holy Spirit and proclaims, “Of all women you are the most blessed.... Blessed are you who believed that what was spoken to you by the Lord would be fulfilled” (Luke 1:42, 45).

These two women exhibit the attitude that Christians need to develop as they await a baby. Imagine Elizabeth, the childless old woman, suddenly pregnant with a child described as “full of the Holy Spirit, even from his mother’s womb.” She is beside herself with joy and openness.

Mary, though “deeply disturbed” by the angel Gabriel’s news, assents to follow wherever God’s future will lead her: “I am a handmaid of the Lord. May it be done to me according to your word” (Luke 1:38).

Elizabeth’s husband, Zechariah, perhaps in a typical reaction for a father-to-be, has the nerve to ask the angel Gabriel, “How can I be sure of this?” and is struck dumb for the duration. His untrusting attitude is to be transformed during a period of watching and waiting in silence. When he speaks again, at his newborn son’s circumcision, he expresses the faith that his wife and her cousin Mary expressed from the outset. Zechariah, the old priest who helped his people worship God through strictly defined rituals, proclaims his willingness to raise one who will be anything but tame. John will give up Zechariah’s household for a life in the desert eating locusts and wild honey and preaching hellfire, and eventual martyrdom. What changes Zechariah must have gone through!

Francis’ down-to-earth Christianity inspired the reenactment of the Christmas story at the hillside outside Greccio. “I would like to see a figure made of the Babe of Bethlehem,” he told his rich friend, “so that we can actually see with our own eyes where the babe lay and in what discomfort for a newborn infant.”

He knew things of the senses affect our entire being. Bringing this tangible, concrete reminder of the infant Jesus into our homes caught on, and to this day we credit Francis with the tradition of the nativity crèche.

Francis taught his friars to celebrate the feasts of the Church with physical trappings, but in a spirit of joy, hospitality and fulfillment, not greed. Today we could imagine Francis leading a crusade against commercialized Christmas, with the infant Jesus as the central symbol of getting back to the basics.

We changed attitudes more quickly with babies. Here we had spent so much time preparing, yet parenthood was different from anything we could have imagined, and there was no time to negotiate. We were knocked off our rockers!

Before children, we barely understood the giving side of God’s love. Now (that is, now that our young ones let us sleep through the night) it burns within us. How could we have known that we would actually want to sacrifice for our children? It went against all common sense in our “b.c.” (before children) way of thinking.

We recently shared with each other our attitudes before the arrival of our first child. We had figured that we both would still work in our professional jobs. We naively thought we would just somehow fit the child into our already busy life-style. We were in control; we had things figured out. We moved across country during our seventh month to be closer to our families, then found an apartment and settled down to wait.

Probably sleep deprivation made it plain to see we would need to let go of our previous ambitions after our first child was born. Tending to an infant night after sleepless night is the parents’ equivalent to spending a few months in the desert eating locusts and wild honey.

We’ve each let go of different things during the past five years of parenthood. We’ve chosen new jobs outside the home, and we’ve learned how better to be supportive of each other around the house. Our expectations are different. We’ve lived through a few scary medical episodes with our oldest son, and have learned to accept (sometimes even gracefully!) last-minute changes in almost any plans.

For the most part we’ve quit looking back to our freer, more controllable “b.c.” days. Our priorities are different now. We’ve come to accept that serving these children day after day will be the center of our lives for a long time to come. We have little idea how they will act or how we will act, but we have a lot of trust. We’ve converted from our old lives, and we know we will be transformed again and again as we raise our children.

For most of us openness to the unexpected, the unpredictable and the uncontrollable does not come naturally. It comes with work, prayer and practice. Although these writers rarely find time to go off and be alone, we are blessed with children who constantly ask for explanations of anything new in the house. So now that the Advent wreath is out, we know every day we will either be explaining its presence or be inspired to tell a story of how the world awaits Baby Jesus. The kids will take turns blowing out the candles, and will show us how to anticipate as only children can anticipate. They count the days throughout Advent until the next candle will be lighted.

The decorations, cookies and presents are still important to us, but we strive to keep them in their rightful place as expressions of the religious seasons of Advent and Christmas. Our kids may even demand some childlike behavior from us, which is altogether appropriate for any Christian!

All of this gets back to our original complaint about the call to de-emphasize Baby Jesus in our Christmas celebrations. We laity have been a bit too ready to take our cues on holiness from the devoted religious men and women who are striving to be faithful, but in a different life-style from ours: the radical, inspiring witness of celibacy and professional Church service. Somewhere along the way in our Church that life-style became normative and married life became seen as somehow less holy than celibacy. But it’s not an either/or proposition: We all are called to holiness, and there is more than one holy life-style.

Let’s cling to the enduring image of Christian holiness that speaks most strongly to at least those of us who have raised, are or will be raising children: Baby Jesus and his faith-filled family. The baby belongs in Christmas, because there is no baby without a parent. And every Christmas the Church is called to become parent to a new child, to the child Jesus who is always new, exciting and demanding. Every one of us is called to bring Christ into the world, to birth Christ within ourselves and bring Christ to others.

Mary, the Mother of God after whom the Church is modeled, is the perfect example. “Let what you have said be done to me,” she said to the angel Gabriel, and offered herself for a life of service. Tradition tells us Joseph stood beside her and did the same. That is what all parents do each time they agree to forgo sleep for their children, forgo some life ambition which would take a toll on their family, and willingly enter into and embrace the sometimes endless demands of being faithful to their calling. They choose a life-style of holiness.

How do Christians wait for a baby? Maybe it’s not so complicated as we would make it. We don’t need too many accessories, we don’t need to run a race to get everything done just right and on time, we don’t need to enter a convent or monastery (although some of us surely are called to). We need to open our hearts to what is happening around and within us. We need to trust, and let go of some of our selfish ways. Christmas is closer to our everyday lives than we might have imagined.