Eight years ago, in the quiet early morning hours of Epiphany, a mystery was unfolding, and only a scant few were privy to it. As I lay in bed in the dark, breathing through early contractions, I was one of only three beings bearing witness to the new life that was on its way: God, myself and my baby.
Once I had safely delivered my son, it was impossible not to draw the connection to the baby in the manger, and to the Magi coming to visit him, knowing nothing of who he was, not fully understanding who he would yet be. On the first Epiphany, there were stars, there was darkness, there was a momentary glimpse through the kaleidoscope of mystery, just a fleeting intimation of what God made flesh might mean.
As I looked into my baby’s eyes and listened to his gentle coos, I marveled, as any mother would, as surely Mary did, at this brand-new human, wondering at all the things I would come to know about him, but which remained on that January morning obscured by the clouds of the future.
Years ago, when I was studying Russian literature, I came across a quote in Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Bend Sinister that I scrawled across a magazine page in black marker and taped to my wall. In this dark satire, eminent philosophy professor Adam Krug resists a totalitarian regime while also trying to shield his beloved child from its poisoned tentacles. Gazing upon his son while negotiating bedtime, Krug’s mind begins to wander, and he finds himself thinking philosophically once more:
And what agony, thought Krug the thinker, to love so madly a little creature, formed in some mysterious fashion (even more mysterious to us than it had been to the very first thinkers in their pale olive gloves) by the fusion of two mysteries, or rather two sets of a trillion of mysteries each; formed by a fusion which is, at the same time, a matter of choice and a matter of chance and a matter of pure enchantment; thus formed and then permitted to accumulate trillions of its own mysteries; the whole suffused with consciousness, which is the only real thing in the world and the greatest mystery of all.
This was precisely the mystery I wanted to spend my life pondering, a mystery wrapped in a miracle—the uncharted and indeed unchartable galaxy of every human consciousness.
I have occasion to revisit this mystery every Epiphany when I return to my favorite poem by Joseph Brodsky:“January 1, 1965,” from his collection Nativity Poems. Brodsky is an unlikely candidate for a Christmas poet. Of Jewish descent and raised in the atheist Soviet Union, he was imprisoned in a mental institution, tried in court as a social parasite and spent much of his life in exile from his home country. He was not a religious person; when asked in an interview if he was a believer, he replied: “I don’t know. Sometimes yes, sometimes no.”
Yet, for decades, he returned in his writing each year, like the shepherds and the Magi, to the manger. When asked why, he answered:
Above all, this is a temporal holiday, linked to a particular reality, to the movement of time. In the final analysis, what is the Nativity? The birthday of God-made-man. And it’s no less natural for humans to celebrate it than for them to celebrate their own. Ever since I took to writing poems seriously—more or less seriously—I’ve tried to write a poem for every Christmas—as a sort of birthday greeting.
Brodsky explains that this practice began for him with an image called “The Adoration of the Magi” that he cut out of a magazine and affixed to his stove. He couldn’t recall the artist, but he did remember gazing at this image in the evenings, and it became the catalyst for his first Christmas poem.
When further pressed about his understanding of Christmas, Brodsky responded: “What is remarkable about Christmas? The fact that what we’re dealing with here is the calculation of life—or, at the very least, existence—in the consciousness of an individual, of a specific individual.”
What does it mean for God not only to take on flesh but to take on a very specific and highly individualized human consciousness? This is a mystery I never expect to elucidate. I love to dwell in its richness. If I concentrate hard enough, sometimes I can almost feel myself being cradled by it, as if wrapped in folds of the richest cloth. Maybe this is what Brodsky felt, too, and what he endeavored to put into words every Christmas.
“January 1, 1965” sets a grim scene. The Magi won’t be coming, the speaker announces—they’ve forgotten your address. There’s no star in the sky, the wind is bitingly cold and your stocking is empty: “It’s too late for some breakthrough/ for miracles, for Santa’s crew.” Brodsky translated this poem from Russian into English himself, and he didn’t spare any of the bleakness of the original.
But a miracle occurs in the last two lines, the fruit of a pondering gaze at the ceiling. In English, it’s a bit jarring: “And suddenly you’ll realize that you/ yourself are a gift outright.” The Russian adjective that describes this gift, chistoserdechnyi, literally means clean-hearted, but it can also be translated as sincere, frank, open-hearted. Brodsky has traveled to the manger, only to find that the mystery of the Incarnation, the mystery of God taking on human consciousness, radiates far beyond the swaddling clothes of the newborn God. It illuminates him, too—he also holds that mystery within himself. We all do.
Years ago, a friend of mine had a baby and announced the birth with the following message: “A new light has turned on in the world.” You don’t have to have a baby on Epiphany to grasp this mystery. You don’t even have to have a baby at all. You just have to accept this very specific and unrepeatable gift: your own unique consciousness, a holy echo of the one God took on 2,000 years ago. It is the birthday of God-made-man. But it is your birthday, too.
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