How babies teach us to be human

They make us love them. No matter how closed our hearts, no matter how battered and crusted over with scars.

Every year as I'm unpacking my grandmother's nativity set, I hide the ceramic baby in a drawer. My grandmother installed the baby in the manger on the first day of Advent, but it's a tradition in this house to wait till Christmas morning. I like the reminder of an empty manger: Advent is a time for waiting.

When my youngest was hardly more than a baby himself, it became his job to hide the nativity baby from all of us and bring him out again on Christmas Day. My boy had solemnly claimed this responsibility for himself, and I couldn't hurt his feelings by reassigning it to one of his older brothers, who might be less apt to drop a ceramic figure that could never be replaced. But unlike the shepherd and the wise man, whose heads are now glued on, and the cow, who is missing both horns, the baby is still in one piece all these years later. It may qualify as a Christmas miracle that my grandmother's baby Jesus still spends Advent safely tucked into a drawer.

It's the old nativity set, mended but still itself, now merged with memories of my own babies in Christmases past, that make me marvel every year at the perfection of the Christmas story. If I were trying to write a story of love and belonging and healing, a story for everyone, whatever they believe, whoever they might be, I hope it would occur to me, too, to start with a baby. For how is it possible not to love a baby?

This is what babies do: They make us love them. No matter how closed our hearts, no matter how battered and crusted over with scars, along comes a baby and the carapace softens. A baby fills us with more love than we knew we were capable of feeling. Again and again, we scoop the baby up and hold it close to us, feeling its small head nestle into the small hollow above our own collarbone. Again and again, we undo its swaddling clothes and marvel at its tiny red feet.

Just when its exhausted parents have reached the edge of sleepless sanity and are now poised to tumble into the abyss, the baby looks into their eyes and breaks into a gummy smile. No one has ever smiled at them with such pure, unadulterated love as this baby is smiling now.

A baby in a grocery cart spies the next person in line, and suddenly the baby is wreathed in smiles. If you are the next person in line, no matter how tired, no matter how fearful of what might be happening in the world or in your own life, you smile back. A baby turns every stranger into a friend. You don't have to want a baby of your own. You might not even like babies very much. None of that matters when a baby smiles at you. You can't help yourself: You smile back.

If there is anything better than a baby's smile, it's the way a baby's smile is a full-body experience. Babies wave their arms and kick their feet. Soon enough they learn to laugh. Even when nothing is funny, they laugh anyway, because a smile is never big enough to contain a baby's joy.

Is it any wonder that this is the Christmas story? This: the unearned, illogical, overwhelming love. This: the laughing, body-shivering joy.

Then, too, there's the way babies turn us into protectors, the way they reach straight for the place in us where we are our tenderest and also our strongest. In their vulnerability, they engage in us such a primal need to protect them that we cannot believe our own fierceness. We would topple mountains to protect these helpless little beings. If it would save a baby in danger, we would heave an automobile into the air or bring a speeding train to a screeching stop.

Thinking about that atavistic urge again at Christmastime makes me wonder: Could we learn from it to protect the vulnerable who are no longer babies? What if that's the whole point of the babe in the manger?

A good story can mean more than one thing, and there are ways to tell this tale to suit yourself. You can make this question of the Christmas baby a metaphor. You can call it a fairy tale. You can trust, against all reason, that this is a holy story, one that happened in a distant land to humble people chosen to be the parents of a savior. A good story meets people in many places, some of them not at all hospitable to stories.

But I cannot imagine any interpretation of this ancient tale that has God returning to earth surrounded by armed militias, or bearing legislation designed to divide people into those who belong and those who do not. This is not the story of a God who finds the poor inconvenient, who leaves the sick to fend for themselves. This is not a call to barricade the doors ("No room here!") or to pronounce some love good and some love bad, or some selves good and others bad.

In a world that has never been free of fear and hurt and confusion and fury, surely this story is calling us to something better. Something that looks like love and mutual help and belonging and the smiling tumult of full-bodied joy. Surely this story reminds us to welcome the stranger, to shelter the homeless and feed the hungry and succor the distressed. It is, after all, the story of a baby born into the quiet darkness of a stable, a baby who, like all babies, was made from love and fashioned for love. A baby who, like all babies, was primed to smile, even in a world of strife.