Birth is a bloody business. The women lies on the bed screaming. She twists her wrist around the metal bar that runs down the side of the bed. A nurse flings round the green curtain, like the veil of sentimental twaddle with which we hide the warfare of birth. The midwife is shouting, slapping the women's legs, "Come on, push, push. No, keep on, push. Don't you want to get out of here?" The women keeps screaming. Her face is slick with sweat and her eyes stare like the last moment before the car wreck. Later, she stops, quite suddenly, and her body seems to cave and her hands, which have turned white, gripping the bed rails, flop. Her eyes are still stretched to bursting, they look into the distance, frantic, disengaged, past the nurses, past even the infant girl, held up in the midwife's arms, twisted and bloody. A nurse wipes the head, there are angry blots around the cheeks, lips recede from the open mouth, disappearing into the gums. The head is cubist. They dump the writhing baby, yowling like a hungry cat, on the shocked ground of this woman. Her hands grope for the child, she clings to it like it was a stranger, a passer by in a hurry. The baby contorts and resists, her limbs twitching from the hard road to this sharp lit and urgent world. OK. You can lie there, little one, for a moment. You've made it, sort of. Don't get too comfortable, though. There is no resting here, in those clutching hands. Just wait, get ready, you must be born again.

"And the Lord God said to the woman, "I will greatly increase your pains in childbearing, in pain shall you bear children."

With Cain it was awful, and with Abel, worse, she thought he'd tear her apart. Seth was no better. Each time, everything seemed to leave her, ripping away what had quietly grown inside. She couldn't believe it was her, she seemed to hover outside her own screams. If that was all, though, she might have forgotten the haul of those hours, folded the memory up and tucked it away like a blanket. But it wasn't over and that struck her as hard and inexplicable, like God always meant more than you thought. The shock of bearing, the violence of it just carried on. They all pulled away. As soon as he could stand, Cain had that wary look, like he suspected she wanted to thrust him back into her. Abel would shrug her hand off his shoulder. Even her daughters, who stayed closer, would learn her ways, then take them from her, smiling with cold superiority. She remembered the big angel at the gate, checking over the arrangements. It was nonsense, but she'd always thought, when he came to childbirth, that he'd smiled at a private joke. She held onto that, just toying with the idea that the pain was not just a punishment. She was right or, at least, it was a good guess. She couldn't really see through hundreds of generations to one of her sons on a chalky road under a night as round and silent as a womb. Scared rigid perhaps, but he'd get there, and he'd sit at the table and ask the one question, the only question that has ever mattered, "How can the likes of us be born again?" Pity really, she didn't know, no more than old Nicodemus, that ever last gasp, every contraction, every moment of every painful push, and every pulling away, answered that one question. "How can we be born again?" "In pain shall you bear children," not a curse but a prophesy, the oracle in her own stretching flesh. One birth the sign of another, and this other birth, the only way back to the Garden, and beyond.

Three stations down the line, he was alone in the carriage. The blue light flickered in the train's rattle through the tunnels, and he dropped his head against the window. Vague thoughts formed on the vibrations and suspended themselves in the rattle and the flicker. Abruptly, he imagined that the train had stopped and it was now the city that rushed past him. Forwards, the stations passing, forwards time passing, forwards the past, catching up, his parents, young, standing on the last platform, waving him away. Then, the train really did stop. He got out, the blue light turned to yellow-gray, and he noticed how grimy the station was: peeling posters on dirty white tiles and rubbish tossed on spirals of air from the tunnel. Some peculiarly angry graffiti obliterated the name of the station, leaving only the letters, "H-E-L-L." He grimaced, "Well, that was predictable."

Turning up the wide, spiral steps toward the street, he started to get a headache. Even so, he took the stairs briskly. Then, after the second turn, he had the strange sensation that with every upward step he took, he was, in fact, going downwards. Nausea tightened his stomach. For the sake of reality, he turned round and started back down the stairs, then with every step, he felt, quite clearly, that he was actually climbing. Rather in a panic, he twisted about and, suppressing the sickness, clambered upwards till he reached street level. Beside the door underneath an unusually battered exit sign, was an old woman, surrounded by bulging plastic bags. She looked up at him, "Do you want to buy a work of art?" she said, holding out an open hand. He started to step over her but she grabbed his coat. "Just for change," she insisted. The headache drummed behind his temples. He dropped some coins in her hand and she handed him a white sheet of paper. There was nothing on it. "This is me and my mother," she said, "on holiday in a blizzard." "And this," she unfolded another blank sheet, "is me in a snowy field disguised as a snow man with no eyes." He grinned at her. "Do you have "Black cows at Night." "I don't do black," she said. "Then, I'll take the snowman." "You're very discerning," she patted his leg, "there's much more going on in that one." He started to push on the door, then felt dread, as if the moment he opened it, he'd see that everything had changed. He shook his head and decided that, when he got home, he'd take a sleeping pill. Then, he opened the door.

There may be something in being brought up by wolves. I've seen them, crowding around the cubs on a pile of gray rocks. They're an affectionate lot, wolves. Busy about feeding and grooming and protecting with that lanky shuffle they go in for. All in all, they are shifty and suspicious in all the right places, attentive and expert. In short, they know what they're doing. Their instincts are spontaneous, uninterrupted by the disturbance of thought. Not so my father, or mother, or me, for that matter. Unreadiness all round, we are untimely born to untimely parents. We make our appearance in the world so unfinished, and straight into the arms and laps of the perpetually unprepared. Children are always in advance of our intelligence, our wisdom lags behind their growing, the setting of that mystery within them, the hardening of their strangeness as they pull away from us, tearing away, as from the heaving of birth. We stay behind, like my mother with her anxious face pressed against the window. What they do is a surprise, and our experience only ever illuminates the ground over which we have already traveled. I was raised on worry. My father frustrated at my endless and unaccountable perversities. My mother always unable to distinguish between the murderous and the merely melodramatic. I am not really talking about them, though, but the necessary incompetence in which we are all raised, home never quite fits us, we never quite belong, always fighting through the birth canal, always untimely ripped. Among wolves, I'd be licked clean without fuss, fed in the regiment of the pack, given a clear example, known my place. Yes, I think I'd have been alright among wolves. It's a silly thought, though, childhood is designed for the discomfiture of children. A providential goading that intimates how, as the price of life, we must become at odds with the world. We are made ready to be vessels of freedom. Not yet free, of course, that takes more, it takes the necessarily brutal midwifery of the Holy Spirit. We must be pulled us into the light of Jesus who is saying, "Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple."

He hurried from the subway to the bus stop, holding his coat tight against a shower of greasy rain. A car swerved into the gutter, it sent up a spray that drenched his legs. He was alone but felt there was someone behind him, unfriendly, breathing on his neck. He checked, then checked again, before he forced himself to ignore it. Neon adverts flashed across the street, the glare poked at his eyes and fired up his headache again. When the bus came, the driver near threw the change at him. He stood, swayed, and looked down the rows of seats. The headache still buzzed but the faces, all the sneers, anger, resentment, hostility, disdain, cunning, they almost made him forget it. "Definitely the wrong bus," he thought. Looking out of the window, though, the pedestrians were equally uninviting. After a short, sodden walk and picking his way past a trash bin knocked across the sidewalk, he unlocked his door, almost in panic, then stood in the kitchen enjoying the relief. Then he felt the same unfriendly gaze behind him. There was something about the room, too, nothing missing, nothing changed, but everything altered. It is difficult to imagine kitchen furniture, wallpaper, a sofa, turning nasty but that's what it felt like, as if all these routine objects has just developed character, and bad character, at that. He sat down on a sofa that now seemed designed to consume him and stared at his small table cluttered with books and ornaments. Among them was a snow globe. He picked it up and noticed how the little row of houses under the glass seemed much like his own street. He held the globe on the palm of his hand and felt so very far way, from the houses, from the street, from the world. Off in space, watching a world so small he could crush it to dust. Suddenly, he felt sorry for it. His headache pounded. Without thinking, he shook the globe and the white flakes of imitation snow fluttered and settled. And they went on settling, they built up around the houses, covered the road, spread over the cars and the figures. The snow didn't stop. It was all going under, all turning white, all slipping into nothing. He felt terrible. He shook the glass to keep sight of the little street but the white flakes only whirled and thickened. He gripped the globe tighter, desperate to stop the snow, and the world went on getting white. "This is hell," he said aloud. But he kept feeling sorry. The headache heaved, a great bell swinging in his head, and grief swelled in his chest like a block of metal. He hated everything so much, yet, at the same time, felt a great pity for it all and dreaded the white obliteration. He burst into tears. Behind the sofa, an angel played the last hand with a demon, she flung down the ace of hearts and clapped her hands, "Born Again!" she said.

This is the way we go. No one is ever born, save there is great loss, and a mighty severing. Nothing comes of us without that tearing and ripping for which we are never ready, yet must always desire. The pains of labor are prophesy of a greater turmoil. How can anyone be born again? Can we return to our mother's womb? No, of course not, and that old departure from so small a room is not in mind here. Not that warm chamber but the world is womb to this next birth. "Anyone who does not hate father and mother, brothers and sisters... ." In the Spirit, we are thrown out of the world. We depart with great pain and daily sorrow. Following Jesus, who made his exodus, abandoning all and giving back to the Father, the creation that Adam stole. With Him, we must get going, tear ourselves away, suffer ourselves to be forced out of a world we don't really fit, a world with the look of enmity, an intolerable world. We leave as aliens and strangers, otherwise known the Church.

Surely, I'm exaggerating: aren't we supposed to be deep in the world, engage the world, change the world, put the world to rights? No, we're not. We are the last creatures to do anything with the world; we have done quite enough damage as it is. Instead, God must wrench us out of the world. We broke in anyway, climbing over the roof, digging through tunnels, breaking the locks, spoiling and plundering. We have made monsters of ourselves and "the world" is what we have made of creation. Which is why we must leave the world for the sake of creation. That's hard, so hard because it demands the agony and the sorrow of birth, a great and mighty severing. The world is what happens to creation when we seize it as our own; when we seek to rid creation of any God but one that will do our bidding; "the world" is stolen creation. Creation, on the other hand, is never ours but always the outward condensation of the glory of God. Grasped as our right, our domain, this gift of glory turns into mere world, that cramped and claustrophobic space, from which we must be born again.

Bruised and battered in their birthing, always a bloody business, and God's Spirit no gentle midwife, the new born must learn to live in creation. And the point about creation is that it is not ours: not ours, the elements, not ours, all growing and creeping things, not ours, the neighbor, the friend, the lover, the stranger, and not ours our very selves. We must leave mother, father, brother, sister, neighbor, friend, even life itself because we did do little good to any of them. From now on, the Son of God must always stand between ourselves and all that is. He is the only Mediator between heaven and earth, between ourselves and all other life, and between ourselves and ourselves. He and he alone must bring us together in the order of loving and suffering. Then we enjoy plenty without having it: we receive fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters - and "persecutions besides." Why persecutions? Because we are still being born, and because we must show the world the long haul of birth, without which creation is hidden in this world, in this valley of the shadow of birth. Bound to futility, in our clutches, creation strains and heaves in the pains of labor, suffering like Eve, groaning for the birth of the children of God.

Amen.