What Child Is This?

Quite a lively discussion ensued in the comments section after yesterday's post on the Virgin Birth. Could I make a suggestion? Read this quotation from a letter from the novelist and Catholic convert Walker Percy to Robert Coles, the Harvard psychiatrist, about Percy's response to a Christmas Mass:

"The Mass was going on, the homily standard... A not-so-good choir of young rock musicians got going on Joy to the World, the vocals not so good but enthusiastic.
Then it hit me: what if it should be the case that the entire cosmos had a creator and what if he decided for reasons of his own to show up as a little baby, conceived and born under suspicious circumstances? Well, Bob, you can lay it to Alzheimer's or hang-over or whatever, but it hit me. I had to pretend I had an allergy attack so I could take out my handkerchief."

Percy obviously believed in the Virgin Birth, which makes Christ God's own son in a unique way, and which demonstrates God's love for us like nothing else except his dying for to pay our moral debts. Without the Virgin Birth, Christmas is an entirely different kind of event, missing the miracle of the creator of the universe born as a little baby.