A Touch of Serenity

The Star-Swallower, the Great Gyrator of galaxies, who makes the novas churn in a swirling iridescent whirlpool of light, with belts of deep, dark reds and ripples of white-green flames. Our milky way is but a tiny speck on the tip of his eyelash, or maybe even a more invisible particle than that. You would need to live seven billion lifetimes, light-speeding through space, in repeated cycles of birth and death, and then you would only travel less than the span of his fingernail. When he sighs the bounds of the universe expand, and when he laughs whole constellations shake in their places. His love is the gravity that holds things in their place, and his holiness causes the dimensions of space and time to crack asunder.

The Great Omnipresent,
all of a sudden,
with a warm,
beating,
beating,
heart.

And also a baby sniffle.

And can you imagine him then, with those small soft hands brushing gently against the hay, with his mother wrapping him in the cloth. And around the manger all those cows mooing, the lambs bleating, and the doves on the rooftop cooing in mellow tones, while one little cow huddled beside his mother asked, “Mommy, who is that baby?”

“Hush now dear, it’s the King of the Universe, the one who made the stars, this world, and all cows like you and me.”

“But mom, why is he so small?”

“Because great love is like that my child, able to give away everything to become smaller than small, even smaller than you,” and she smiled.

“Does that mean he’s no longer a King?”

“Oh he’ll never stop being the King, but tonight he shows the world that through his humility, people can one day be like him, and soar through the stars.”

And if cows could cry, here certainly, a tear slid down the mother cow’s cheek, and when the little cow saw his mother’s face in anguish, through a bright glimmer of starlight through a hole in the roof, he, in his small, little cow way, understood, that in becoming a baby the Star-Maker had also chosen to die. And yet, he took comfort in those words, “He’ll never stop being the King.”

So before the shepherds came running from the fields, and the magi came from the ancient kingdoms of the east – though history does not tell us so, those cows in the manger were some of the first to bow low and pay homage to the eternal King. And perhaps the baby Jesus felt a ticklish feeling as our young cow gently, and reverently, once licked his tiny, baby feet.