Mirror, UK
From earliest memory, my fascination at Christmas has always been with the nativity–not with Santa Claus. Certainly, as a child I was interested in him. Notions of his sleigh and reindeer, of a dwelling (a village, even) in the snowy reaches of the North Pole, the idea that he bounded through the sky and visited the home of Every Single Child in the world in a period of twenty-four hours–these things most definitely seized my imagination.
But Santa Claus didn’t compel me. Not really. Somehow the man in the red suit was, for me, a limited narrative. My mind didn’t return to it.
The story of the nativity, though. I loved it. Here was endless opportunity for the mind. So much travel, for starters, which to be sure Santa has in spades. But the travel in the nativity story isn’t global and broad. Instead, it’s specific and compelled: Mary and Joseph must go due to the census; the shepherds and wise men must go due to joy.
Then there’s the cast of characters. What a strange lot! Shepherds, wise men. I knew–know–neither of these. Not, anyway, in the sense of their portrayal in the gospels. And Joseph and Mary. An inn-keeper, perhaps. Somehow none of them were ever bland types for me. They suggested themselves as real, once-living individuals, replete with personality and possible pain. These were the audience for a newborn King, but they were also people, and as such, they responded uniquely to the strange events that comprise our understanding of Christmas. And how did they–each of them, in her own way–respond? “But Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart.” And I did, too.
The gospels tell the story as they must, and scattered throughout are hints and glimmers that also tell parts of the story. “They laid the baby in a manger.” A manger? My upbringing in Pittsburgh’s suburbs, in the outskirts of a Japanese fishing village, in a suburb outside of New York City, held no mangers, no sheep, no shepherds abiding in fields. It was all strange and foreign, and yet somehow, I was invited too. Like the shepherds, like the little drummer boy, I might have been among the unlikely gazers clinging at the worn barn-door–if, in fact, Jesus’ manger was in a barn. For all we know, Jesus was born in a field or inside a sheep fold. His birth was an impoverished one. That much, I think, is certain.
When I was about nine I wrote a nativity play, mostly plagiarized from the Bible. I tried to involve the neighborhood children. Everyone was cast in a role, and the script involved the timely insertion of Christmas carols. I remember one afternoon rehearsing it in the Munns’s basement, so excited that we were all going to perform it and feeling frustrated at the waning interest among my friends. I think I still have my copy somewhere, written in pencil on stapled sheets of wide-ruled notebook paper. It is permanently furled into a scroll because I rolled it repeatedly in my palm.
It wasn’t my friends’ fault that we never went into production. When can you cram upwards of fifteen kids of various ages into a neighborhood basement and produce anything like a finished play–all without adult supervision? Our hearts, I think, were in the right place, which is all that matters.
Anyway, I know I am not alone in my fascination with the nativity. Many of us are held by it. At this time of year, we erect small modeled reenactments of it in our homes; we cast the tableau among the youngest members of our congregations. Here in Durham, a local, dominantly African-American high school annually presents a “Black Nativity.” And this year, I’ve been invited to a Facebook group celebrating photos of nativity sets.
Is observance of the nativity just habit? The *thing* that accompanies and gives (perhaps peripheral) meaning to all the rest of the activity at this time of year?
Perhaps it is for some. We are creatures of habit, comforted by the rituals of tradition. Many, I know, would argue that the story of Christmas is just that: a story.
Except that Jesus is an historical person, his birth and death historical events as real as Caesar’s crossing the Rubicon. His resurrection is attested to in the gospels, his missing body confirmed in biblical and other historical writings. And the impact of his resurrection still speaks, still makes its claim.
This year, I am thinking in new ways of the nativity, specifically of that moment in the fields. Shepherds, shocked by the sudden appearance of an angel (an experience that is apparently always initially terrifying), are then treated to a musical performance that must outshine any concert experience ever conceived. The night sky splits wide, and “a great company of the heavenly host” appears with the angel. They say,
Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace to those on whom His favor rests.
What stuns me this year is this: never, anywhere else in scripture short of Revelation, do we find a moment like this. Not even at the resurrection of Jesus Christ do we have a glimpse at the merry exultation of heaven. Only here, on His birthday, do the heavens crack and give us a look at the joy.
And why? Why would it be at his birth and not at his resurrection? Why here at the beginning, so to speak, and not at the triumphant *end*?
I think there’s much to be said here about time and timelessness, about the wisdom of revelation, about God’s kindness in choosing the humble and poor shepherds in this specific moment.
And there is something to be said about Christmas, about what it is that has held me in the nativity, that has so many of us returning to it again and again due to the time of year and the mystery of that holy impoverishment. I think it’s that in the moment of His birth, in the physical presentation of the Incarnation, the whole of the salvation of God was eternally and for all time effected. The fragile and vulnerable infant was indeed God, was the Lamb slain before the foundation of the world, was the Life that would make all things new and whole and right again. Here, at the beginning of His earthly life, the work of Christ was already finished.
In glory, every tear will be wiped away. His will be the only body with scars.
This is the story of the nativity.
For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. John 3: 16-17
mind without soul may blast some universe
to might have been,and stop ten thousand stars
but not one heartbeat of this child;nor shall
even prevail a million questionings
against the silence of his mother’s smile
–whose only secret all creation sings
ee cummings
Merry Christmas.
Meridian Magazine
