A LOT OF BEGGING happens at Christmas. There are pleas in the toy aisle and hints left open on laptops. But no one begs to be in labor. Not even a woman who is pregnant. Unless, of course, she is at the bitter end of her pregnancy.

In the language of King James, Luke tells us that Mary is not just pregnant, but she is “great with child” (Luke 2:5). She is on the cusp of birthing, of being the first one to slide her hands up under the armpits of the warm, slippery flesh of God. No one before or after will have God in quite this way.

In Mary, the Word became flesh and was born in the most mundane, most primal human act. This flesh must count for something. The extremely pregnant body of Mary — great with child — reveals the nature of our waiting for Christ and what it might mean to cry out for Jesus’ coming.

As a midwife, I have delivered more than 1,300 babies, and I have given birth three times myself. But you don’t need a midwife or someone who has had a baby to tell you about the discomforts of pregnancy. Nausea, headaches, food aversions, and swelling are common enough knowledge. As unpleasant as these symptoms are, they aren’t enough to make anyone beg for labor. For most of a pregnancy, the woman is largely herself and retains her sense of self.

So, if I told someone who’s 32 weeks pregnant that she had to go into labor tomorrow she would be utterly unwilling. That her baby would easily survive the labor does not change this fact. You don’t need a midwife to tell you why she might not want to labor. No one wants the searing pain of contractions, pushing, or tearing. To be in labor is to be completely beyond yourself, given over wholly to another, and the pain of its outworking.

We know, or suspect that we know, the gravity of the transformation a pregnant woman is about to endure. And we want to help her, we do. We want to come alongside her and acknowledge and aid her work. But our culture fails us. “Birthing classes,” though helpful, are as inadequate as “dying classes” would be — there is no way to simulate or teach the courage required of a soul in extremis. The closest thing we have to a rite of passage for initiating a woman into motherhood is the baby shower. Onesies and party games do not prepare someone for the maelstrom of birthing and raising a child.

A time between times

WHERE CUSTOMS AND rituals fail, our bodies prepare us for the work of being split in two. You may know about the miseries of pregnancy and labor, but you might need a midwife to point out that these kinds of pain are nothing compared with the unique suffering that occurs during the last days of pregnancy. The hormone relaxin loosens the pelvic ligaments and strains all the joints in the body while pro-inflammatory cytokines increasingly amplify in the bloodstream until the uterus reaches a tipping point. The changes are not just physical; the whole person becomes restless, preoccupied with the desire to be delivered.

Pregnancy is as awkward as it is mysterious. At its end, two people inhabit one body in a taut reality that cannot be sustained for long and finally comes to a breaking point. God has built this grace into the world: That we might come to the point of wanting, calling out for what might devastate us. As the book of Romans puts it, “All creation groans as in the pains of childbirth.”

In Godly Play, a Montessori-based curriculum used to teach Christian spirituality and scripture, children hear about Mary’s last days of pregnancy like this: “Mary was about to have a baby. It is very hard to walk when you are about to have a baby. Sometimes she could not take another step. Then she rode on the donkey. It is also very hard to ride on a donkey when you are about to have a baby. When she couldn’t ride another step, she got down and walked.”

Midwife Jana Studelskaadopts the word Zwischen, from the German for “between,” to describe this state. It is a time between times. One foot in her old world and one foot in a new world as a mother, she is balanced on the knife edge of pregnancy. A woman who has entered the time of Zwischen says, “I am just ready,” with a restless, bodily frustration, an ensouled pain that gets into her words.

I tell a woman who is 41 weeks pregnant that we have no rooms, and no nurse, and that she must go home until tonight with her induction of labor delayed; she bursts into sobs that wrack her body. Nine hours more than the nine months of waiting is too much for her to bear.

Perinatologist Nils Bergman observes that painful waiting calls forth in the mother exactly the “emotional fitness, the boredom tolerance, the stress tolerance, the ferocity in defense of young that she, and thus her child, cannot live without.” Our culture may have failed to prepare them, but God has put grace into the body, a physical push into the vulnerability and openness essential to the birth of a mother.

Great with child, Mary’s pelvis and her person prepare for the birth of a baby by beginning the birth of a mother. Walking down the road to Bethlehem and lying on the stone floor of a cave with the animals, her body strains with the weight of becoming someone who can beg for this mysterious gift. The mother of God came to the end of her pregnancy, to the point where we beg for labor: “I just want to have the baby,” we say, and our voices break.

A gift that stretches us

FROM LUKE’S PHRASE “great with child,” a midwife knows that, in the end, Mary was ready for the birth of the Christ child. But can we be? Can we get ready for what it will it cost us? I was well into adulthood when I realized that when people ask, “Are you ready for Christmas?” they do not want to hear about my family’s Advent wreath or Jesse tree. They mean, “Is all your shopping done?” What an unfortunate turn of phrase. How could one possibly be ready for Christmas? How could any amount of shopping ever begin to make us ready?

Great with child, Mary’s body begged for the birth of the Christ child, but can we? Can we want what she begs for? A newborn comes into our lives, and the demand and force of love threaten to undo us. I flirted with postpartum depression after each of my three babies. I was fiercely in love and overwhelmed with what this love would cost me.

At Christmas, it is not just any baby that we pregnantly await, but the One whose coming heralds the end and the turning of time. “In those days,” devastating light will blind their eyes that are heavy with sleep and a voice from heaven will echo, “This is my son, my Chosen One” (Luke 9:32, 35). “In those days,” the bridegroom will come and will be taken from them (Luke 5:35). “In those days,” this baby will overthrow Augustus and Quirinius and everyone with the power to demand that all the world should be taxed (Luke 2:1). “In those days,” the songs of Mary, Elizabeth, and Zechariah will be sung, and they will be true. This baby is a gift. A surreal, unbeckoned gift that offers to break and remake our world.

Gifts can go wrong. We worry a great deal about this at Christmas. We imagine nothing sadder than a child who is crestfallen, disappointed with what has or has not been given her. And we guard against this with anxious excess. Even if we get what we wanted, we may be disappointed.

I wonder if hidden beneath our piles of presents is a deep suspicion that the child given to us at Christmas is himself a disappointment. Mary sings that God “scatters the proud in the imagination of their hearts” and “casts down the mighty from their thrones” (Luke 1:51-52). Really? Has this happened? Could it ever? It doesn’t seem so. Against the twinkling lights and hopeful carols, we remain disconsolate.

Sometimes we see by a harsh light too clearly. Christ came into the world, sure. But look at that world for long — its senseless cruelty, injustice, and lands laid waste — and whatever savior it has had doesn’t seem like very much. When I am in this state, I cannot beg for Christ’s coming because I suspect he has already come, and I am sorely unimpressed.

What would it even mean to rightly receive this gift of God’s? Theologian John Milbank observes that for a gift to “work,” it is intended to surprise in just the right way. Even “Oh, it’s what I always wanted” is not enough, suggesting that we were about to buy it for ourselves anyway.

Sometimes the Christ we get is deeply recognizable, demonstrating the way of selflessness, justice, and forgiveness, and I am pleased. But if Christ goes before merely to show and do what I would have done anyway, he is simply a larger version of myself — “It’s what I’ve always wanted.” In this state, it doesn’t make sense to beg for Christ’s coming because there’s nothing there to beg for, nothing I’m incapable of getting for myself.

A gift must surprise neither too much nor too little. It must both astonish and still somehow be recognizable as good. This balance is precarious and threatens like a body on the edge of labor. Yet our God is intent on giving good gifts, undaunted by the likelihood that they’ll go awry.

God came to us in a uterus, in the stone walls of a stable. This gift is a surprise that stretches our capacities to the breaking point. What if God came to us in a palace, like a king whose star had risen? Herod hears of it this way and pays his homage with a massacre. “A difficult gift,” wrote Milbank, “might be wrongly received as a curse.”

What if God came to us in a temple instead, a child to be dedicated? Simeon welcomes Mary and her new baby with these words: ‘‘This child is set for the fall and rising of many.” A gift that does not disappoint may utterly undo us. “And a sword will pierce your own soul also,” Simeon warns (Luke 2:34-35).

I do not beg for the coming of Christ. Because I’m afraid that he will. He will come, and I will be undone. I could not welcome my own children without crushing despair at what their beautiful lives would cost me. How, then, do I think I will handle the Christ child?

If you asked me to labor today, to be broken open by God and be astonished to the point of devastation at his coming, I would say No. I do not want to. It is too much. I am not ready.

Day in and day out, I shepherd women across a threshold to somewhere they have never gone and could not begin to imagine. I am just a midwife. I cannot tell you how to get ready for Christmas or what to do with the Christ child when he comes. I cannot say that I know.

I do know — as a midwife knows — that the Child will come. I am terrified that he will. And I beg for courage to cry out with you and with all creation: Come quickly, Lord Jesus. Come!