Sometimes I wonder what it would be like if we could remember as far back as the moment of our birth—that slimy, turbulent transition from the comfort of a warm, dark womb into the unkind cold, harsh bright light of life outside. What emotions, thoughts, hopes, and fears would accompany such a memory? As it is, I can only remember about 27 of my 30 years... my memories begin around age three. When Jesus turned 30, could he recall the moment of his own birth? That epic, heavenly-hosts-rejoicing mystery in which God incarnate dwelled within a teenage girl's womb one minute, and cried and breathed in Bethlehem air the next? Was his memory God-like and infinite, or was it as limited as mine, recalling only shadows and bursts of nascent consciousness from his earliest years?
I like to think it was the latter.
Here on the eve of the first Sunday of Advent, and two days before my 30th birthday, I've been thinking a bit about aging. Turning 30 feels to me to be the first birthday where I've really contemplated the reality of mortality--that my body is gradually breaking and my breath will one day fail me.
Time and aging are weird, earthy, fleshly things. But it's what we know. All we know. How does it, then, feel so peculiar and unnatural? Why is it that, when I pause to venture into my own distant past--waiting for the school bus, building campfires with my dad, playing in the creek and the riverbank with my friends--my heart feels so weighty with longing? How can instants gone by, archived pictures in my mind, stir up such discontent?
I think Lewis captures it well in Reflections on the Psalms when he writes:
We are so little reconciled to time that we are even astonished at it. “How he’s grown!” we exclaim, “How time flies!” as though the universal form of our experience were again and again a novelty. It is as strange as if a fish were repeatedly surprised at the wetness of water. And that would be strange indeed; unless of course the fish were destined to become, one day, a land animal.
The eternal enveloped in time, embodied in humanity, Christ must have felt this bafflement with temporality even more than I do. If it feels to me that I'm a fish out of water, I can't imagine what it must have felt like to Christ.
Or perhaps it felt just the same.
I stand in awe of the Incarnation for precisely this reason: that in Jesus Christ, the Divine became a man just like me, a breakable body with tender emotions, longings, vulnerabilities, maladies. In "the fullness of time" (I love the mystery of this phrase), the hopes and fears of all the years were met in a man called Emmanuel. God was with us. Walking the same mountains. Breathing the same air. A part of the same decaying system of life, death and earthiness.
As I consider my own life--the 30 years already lived and whatever I may live from here--I take solace in the fact that Jesus Christ was here too. He turned 30 once. Maybe he also reflected on his first three decades of life with a mix of gratefulness and curiously somber nostalgia. I wonder if he knew where he was going at that point... where his 30s would lead him. Or maybe he felt as open-ended and uncertain as I do now, confident only that he would seek his Father's will.
All I know is that the Incarnation gives me hope. Christ is familiar with the struggles I face and the wonders I behold. He knows that feeling of joy mixed with sorrow when one looks back on the past: that purple sunrise in the desert, that night of endless storytelling around a campfire, those special breakfasts Grandma used to make. He understands the disconcerting realization that one's capacity for dreaming and accumulating "to-dos" is far bigger than the breadth of accomplishments one's fleeting life can accommodate.
Ours is a life of chronic dissatisfaction and unrelenting pace. We are all speeding forward in time and age, leaving in our wake the things we did and didn't do, plunging ahead with only a vague sense of purpose and perspective. It would be enough to drive anyone crazy.
And yet the Incarnation.
God redeemed creation. Christ took on temporality to make possible for us a timeless future. In the fullness of time. A new world of peace. A weary world that will soon see rest.
Rejoice.