Today I am sharing an excerpt from the book Father and Son: a Nativity Story by Geraldine McCaughrean in which she imagines what it must have been like for Joseph to father The Son of God. Scenarios like this, though extra-biblical, help us to enter into the magnificence of the reality that is The Incarnation.
What lullabies should I sing to someone who peppered the sky with songbirds?
What stories can I tell him who wrote the whole history of the world?
Someone tell me: how do I protect a child whose arm brandished the first bolt of lightning, who lobbed the first thunderclap, who wears sunlight for armor and a helmet of stars?
How do I feed and clothe someone who seeded the oceans with fish and hung up fruit in the trees? Who shod the camels and crowned the deer?
And how shall I ever astound you, child, as my father did me? You are the one who fitted the chicken into the egg and the oak tree into an acorn!
I am a carpenter, child. By rights, you should learn my trade. But how can I teach you to plane a door, knowing it was you who planed the plains, who carved the valleys and hewed the hills, the wind in your one hand and rain in the other? How?
These imaginative fatherly reflections remind us why this event in history is so utterly astonishing and deserves to be celebrated with all the pomp and circumstance we can muster!
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