God takes on human flesh and gives himself to us. He becomes the Gift.
We have to expand our understanding of who God is to appreciate the tremendous gift of the Incarnation. It’s such a common thought, something we may have known our whole life: Mary was overshadowed by the Holy Spirit, conceived a baby, and her Child is God in human flesh. Children enact the narrative each December. A three-year-old can tell the story. Women get pregnant all of the time. The miracle centers on Mary getting pregnant without having “relations.” Christmas pageants skip from the Annunciation, to the journey, to the shepherds, to the stable. We don’t talk about the biology of the overshadowing. Mary’s conception is so much more than biology-at-a-distance. Creator God himself overshadowed her. The single cell Baby in her womb was God himself. A tremendous mystery.
Creator of the vast expanse of the universe, the One who called into being everything that exists out of the void of nothingness, is contained inside Mary; he is too small to see, smaller than the period at the end of this sentence. He comes to Bethlehem to give himself to us. His gift . . . himself. Given.