Matthew 1:18 Meaning Now the Birth of Jesus Christ Was

Mary is the skull, the human mind, the womb God enters, and every person is that virgin who conceives a desire without knowing how it will come to pass. To be found with child of the Holy Ghost is to carry an assumption fathered by imagination alone, not by any outer cause your senses could point to. This is why she is with child before Joseph and she come together; the conception is inward, made by the felt certainty that the wish is already fulfilled.

The birth of Christ is the same event in each one, imagination hardening a held desire into fact. No visible man supplies the seed. A person conceives the life he wants the moment he assumes its reality and carries that feeling as his own.

The awakened self is conceived without the mixing of the ordinary human will. Mary is the pure receptive soul, the still water in a person that takes in the higher life directly; the child forms in her by the indwelling breath alone, before she and the outward, laboring nature have come together. What is born of the deeper spirit does not begin in the striving of the surface self but in the quiet receiving of the source.

Joseph stands for the practical, providing side that has not yet joined the receptive soul; the conception is earlier and higher than his reach. The new life rises in the still, receptive depth of a person, formed by the source and not by human effort.

Mary: the pure receptive soul in a person, the still depth that takes in the higher life directly Joseph: the practical, providing side of the self, the outward laboring nature not yet joined to the receptive soul Holy Ghost: the indwelling breath of the source that forms the new life within, apart from human will

This same picture returns in many old myths: a woman conceives not by a man but by a god or spirit, and her child is no ordinary one. Such images rise from a deep layer of mind shared by everyone.

They describe the birth of a new wholeness in the soul, something a person cannot make by planning or effort. It comes from the part of us we do not control, as if given. So calling a spirit, and not the husband, the father means this new life is conceived in us from a source deeper than our own will.

A woman becomes the vessel that carries the presence of the highest into the world, and the strangeness of the claim is exactly the point. To say that this child is the meeting of God and man sounds like madness, and the story knows it. It teases us out slowly rather than stating it flat, because a truth this large cannot be swallowed whole. Mary stands where the ark once stood, the container of what is holy.

And unlike Isaac on the mountain, no hand will be sent to stay this sacrifice. The child is aimed at the cross. Given over from the start, he is carried toward an offering no one will interrupt. To bear the divine into a body is to bear, from the first, the whole weight of what that body will finally have to endure.