Advent 2025 December 13 - My personal miracles

In these daily posts, I (somewhat) respond to readings, songs, or experiences that are happening as we journey toward Christmas the way Mary and Joseph journeyed toward Bethlehem. 

The William Butler Yeats poem gets quoted a lot nowadays, which gives punditry an apocalyptic feel:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre   

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst   

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.   

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out   

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert   

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,   

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,   

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it   

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.   

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? 

______

Those last lines, well, the whole poem, haunt us. "What rough beast . . . slouches toward Bethlehem to be born."  The Christ child was not a rough beast, but the next apocalyptic event will involve a rough beast (there are some of those in the Bible?) I don't quite understand it on my own, but it hovers over us. What is going to happen? What judgment that we called down on ourselves, or that comes from God?

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I have written about miracles, sin, and songs I like so far. I will continue with miracles for two reasons. I am writing this on the 11th, and I am going to my granddaughter's first "school play" at her day care. She is going to wear her cow costume from Halloween to be an animal in the manger. She is two years old next month. I don't expect much out of her performance, but grandma (she can't say that clearly yet*) has to go. 

She is a miracle. Yes, all children are, but she is a miracle because her parents found each other (from very different backgrounds, in their mid-30s) and loved each other and God gave them a child (and I believe another will come soon, although it's none of my business). She is even more a miracle because her father, my son, who was born about this time in the 1980s, was truly a miracle. I have a serious medical condition that requires a lot of rigamarole to get pregnant. I did, one time, and he resulted. He is a miracle and would not exist in other ages and places. He is a miracle because he is so normal despite his upbringing (long story). He is a miracle because he needed surgery at two months old and had epilepsy later (not now). 

I will write more about Christ's miracles and those of Christmas. But I am mostly thinking about my personal ones today. 

*My granddaughter will be bilingual. She understand Spanish and English now, or at least she is processing it, but those who know say her language development will be a bit delayed because of it. Later she will have advanced English and Spanish development, but now she's trying to figure it out. She prefers Spanish for some things--mas rather then more, agua rather than water. Abuelo is easy for her but grandma is sort of a gama or maga or gaga mix. I often don't recognize it and don't realize she is talking to me!