Charles Williams, from The Descent of the Dove:
"At the beginning of life in the
natural order is an act of substitution and co-inherence. A man can have no child unless his seed is
received and carried by a woman; a woman can have no child unless she receive
and carries the seed of a man – literally bearing the burden. It is not only a mutual act; it is a mutual
act of substitution. The child itself
for nine months co-inheres in its mother; there is no human creature that has
not sprung from such a period of an interior growth."[1]
And behold, you
will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name
Jesus. He will be great and will be
called the Son of the Most High. And the Lord God will give to him the throne
of his father David, and he will reign
over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no
end." And Mary said to the angel,
"How will this be, since I am a virgin?" And the angel answered her, "The Holy
Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you;
therefore the child to be born will be called holy- the Son of God. And behold, your relative Elizabeth in her
old age has also conceived a son, and this is the sixth month with her who was
called barren. For nothing will be
impossible with God." And Mary
said, "Behold, I am the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to
your word." And the angel departed from her. [2]
Had he willed, he could presumably
have raised for his Incarnation a body in some other way than he chose. But he preferred to shape himself within the
womb, to become hereditary, to own to humanity the flesh that he divinitized by
the same principle – “not by conversion of the Godhead into flesh, but by
taking of the manhood into God.” By an
act of substitution he reconciled the natural world of the kingdom of heaven,
sensuality with substance. He restored
substitution and co-inherence everywhere; up and down the ladder of that great
substitution all our lesser substitutions run; within that sublime do-inherence
all our lesser co-inherences inhere.[3]
It is the manner of
childbirth. It is the image everywhere
of supernatural charity.” It is also the
bedrock of intercessory prayer when in a very real way, like Moses of old, we
stand in the breach for others, “Therefore he said he would destroy them- had
not Moses, his chosen one, stood in the breach before him, to turn away his
wrath from destroying them”[4] thus fulfilling the divine command, “Bear one
another’s burdens.”[5]
