As the Church anticipates the Nativity of our Lord, it is helpful to reflect on our natality—that is, the reality that we are all, without exception, born of a woman. It’s good, then, to wonder what our being born teaches us about being human, about Christ our God who was born for us, and even how our natality is marked in our very bodies.
I.
Consider your navel, your humble bellybutton. Your navel is the sign you bear in your body of your natality. It tells you that you were born of a woman. It is the umbilicus, the vestige of the umbilical cord by which you once received nourishment through the placenta in the womb. And the placenta is a wondrous thing—an entire vital organ formed in pregnancy and then discarded at birth. Just think of that!
Ephraim Radner, in A Time to Keep (2016), speaks of “the miracle of our birth, the foundation of our existence upon grace.” Your navel is a sign of this, too. It points to what the psalmist prays:
For you yourself created my inmost parts;
you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
I will thank you because I am marvelously made;
your works are wonderful, and I know it well.
My body was not hidden from you,
while I was being made in secret
and woven in the depths of the earth.
Your eyes beheld my limbs, yet unfinished in the womb;
all of them were written in your book;
they were fashioned day by day,
when as yet there was none of them. (Ps. 139:13–15)
Every human being has a bellybutton. I do. You do. Our Lord does. Every human has had a navel—with the possible exception of Adam and Eve. “Possible” because, in the second creation account in Genesis 2, the Lord God forms the man out of the dust of the earth and makes the woman from his rib—in both cases suggesting a process, forming something out of existing material over an unspecified period of time, which may be compatible with an evolutionary account of human origins. But that’s a topic for another day. My point is that the navel is a universal sign of our creation by God, “the foundation of our existence upon grace.”
You contributed nothing to your birth. Your father and your mother each contributed something to your birth—but you gave nothing. And what they had to give, they also had received—for they too have been born. Through them, God has given you your body, formed of their bodies, and your soul, as his direct creation. So, you receive yourself as a pure gift. Your coming to be is a pure act of grace. In your bellybutton you can read the story of creation:
And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth. (Gen. 1:26–28)
And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul. (Gen. 2:7)
“What do you have that you did not receive?” (1 Cor. 4:7). I remember how after my children were born, they retained (as every child does) the stump of their umbilical cord for somewhere between one and three weeks. That unsightly stump was a vivid reminder of where they had just come from. When my firstborn’s umbilical stump fell off, it felt as if something momentous had happened. But his navel—and mine, and yours—still bears the same reminder. The reminder of the truth that, as Agnes R. Howard says in her book Showing: What Pregnancy Tells Us About Being Human (2020), “we become ourselves through another.”
“We become ourselves through another.” And, we might add, a whole series of others, reaching back through the generations. Your navel is a physical connection to your family tree. It embodies your genealogy. And, in this way, it also a sign of the story of salvation.
For, as Ephraim Radner rightly says, “Genealogy, within Scripture, is a sacred icon of divine creation and its purpose in time. Hence genealogy initiates the entire gospel of Jesus Christ.” Both Matthew and Luke include a genealogy of Jesus. Indeed, Matthew begins his Gospel with these words: “The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham” (Matt. 1:1, RSV). And he traces the genealogy of Jesus from Abraham to “Joseph the husband of Mary, of whom Jesus was born, who is called Christ” (1:16). Matthew sketches the whole sweep of the Old Testament in his genealogy of Jesus; Israel’s story narrated in his ancestry.
My point is this: God uses the mystery of human birth from generation to generation to accomplish his purposes in the world. Your belly button bears witness to Radner’s claim; God has a purpose in creation and in time, and you are part of that divine purpose.
Thus, we can see that navel-gazing does not have to end in solipsism. Rather, contemplating your naval can lead you to the contemplation of the God who has created you and who is making all things new.
II.
To speak of natality is to speak of our genesis, our origins—from our ancestors, from our mother’s womb, and ultimately from God—and thus far to speak of the past, to remember. And yet our natality also betokens hope, as every birth brings something new into the world.
This aspect of natality is what the 20th-century philosopher Hannah Arendt stressed. Arendt’s thought is marked by her concept of natality, “the fact that human beings appear in the world by virtue of birth.” She stresses the newness of natality, the new beginning marked by the birth of a human being. As she puts it, “We come into the world by virtue of birth, as newcomers and beginnings.” For Arendt, natality is what keeps human societies from becoming static; it is the root of human freedom. The birth of any human being affects the whole “web of human relationship” (her phrase), creating new opportunities for action. As she says in another place, “through [natality] the human world is constantly invaded by strangers, newcomers whose actions and reactions cannot be foreseen by those who are already there.”
A friend recently introduced me to a lovely poem by Philip Larkin called “First Sight,” in which the poet speaks of “Earth’s immeasurable surprise.” Larkin is referring to the surprise the Earth holds in store for lambs born in the snows of winter, namely, the coming of spring. But we can speak, too, of the birth of every human as also bringing an “immeasurable surprise.”
If it is true that “we come into the world by virtue of birth, as newcomers and beginnings,” then it is especially—and uniquely—true of Jesus. His birth is sui generis, for he is, as the Church confesses, “born of the Virgin Mary.” He is born as the newcomer par excellence—not only in the manner of his birth, but in its effects. He was born to make all things new. The newness of his birth corresponds to the “newness of life” (Rom. 6:4) wrought by his death and resurrection. He is “the beginning, the firstborn from the dead” (Col. 1:8). And, as St. John declares, “to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God; who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God” (John 1:12–13). We speak true when we sing of Christ our God, that he was
Born that Men no more may die;
Born to raise the sons of Earth,
Born to give them second Birth.
Natality, then, concerns not only our origins, but also our destiny. Our births bear witness to the living God, “who didst wonderfully create, and yet more wonderfully restore, the dignity of human nature,” that we might “share the divine life of him who humbled himself to share our humanity,” even Jesus Christ our Lord.
The Rev. Christopher Yoder is rector of All Souls’ Episcopal Church, Oklahoma City. Raised in western Pennsylvania, he studied at Wheaton College and Duke Divinity School.
