Today, we celebrate the Feast of the Epiphany. While we remember the visit of the Magi, I am struck by the very end of our Gospel reading: “And having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they left for their own country by another road.” The Magi have an encounter with God Incarnate—and then leave. I wonder what encountering the divine means for those of us who cannot leave our circumstances. I think of my family in Hong Kong who have been living in a state of heightened social unrest for the past seven months.

Christmas is the celebration of a birth. But a Christmas Jesus is a clean baby wrapped up in cloths, not a sticky one emerging from Mary’s body. Why is that? Is it our discomfort with our bodies, and in particular, women’s bodies (trans or cis)? The strangeness of the incarnation, this mixing of divine and human, that we don’t want to recognize? I’m not entirely sure. But I know that this Christmas, I want to see birth. I want to see a woman’s body intermingled with the divine. I want to see a record of the pain that comes before the joy.