menino Jesus

Vales tu
e assim nós,
visita-nos
que despenhámos,
e no vale
lá em baixo
esperamos tua voz.

Até ao Natal

(...) In so far as it depends on the Blessed Virgin's own testimony, the Virginal Conception is a divine fact, not an inference of faith. Luke's Gospel takes as its sources those who had been witnesses "from the begining", those, that is, immediately associated with the Virgin, and for essentials the Virgin herself, the only witness. But before such testimony could be sought, gathered, and (though depending on only one witness) believed, there must have existed already in the Christian mind some sort of anticipation of that virginity. And this largely derived, even before explicit belief in the Lord´s divinity, from belief in the Resurrection. The way in which faith thought of the body of Christ as having escaped corruption, and left the sepulchre alive, was an invitation to reflect on the nature of that body during the earlier period. For thought like that of the Jews, referring so readily from end to origin -origin being conceived as an image of the consumation- there was a natural tendency to conceive the entry of Jesus into mortal life on the model if his manner of leaving it.

    Virginity before childbirth is clearly expressed in Matthew and Luke, and doubtless too in the Gospel of John. But there is no mention in any of the Gospels of virginity in partu. Here can be seen a direct development of the Resurrection. Christ, so the Fathers observed, had left his mother´s womb as he had left the sepulchre, virginally. Therefore Christmas, in the eyes of faith, is a unique miracle, analogous to the mistery of Easter of which it is the figure. (...)

in Le Problème de Jésus, Jean Guitton (trad. A. Gordon Smith)