There is a moment in Arianna Franklin's tense historical
thriller The Serpent's Tale when the
story pauses, the tension of murder and intrigue halted for, of all things,
Christmas. As usual, Franklin has done
her research, and her depiction of the Angel Mass is rooted in the Twelfth
Century. In her prose, Franklin captures
the immediacy of the memory of Christ's birth to the medieval world. She
writes:
"There was a common and growing breathlessness as Mary
labored in her stable a few yards away...
"...When the abbot, raising his arms. announced a deep
throated 'The Child is born,' his exhortation to go in peace was lost in a
great shout of congratulation, several of the women yelling advice on
breast-feeding to the invisible but present Mary and prompting her to 'make
sure and wrap that baby up warm now.'
"Bethlehem was here. It was now."
That image of a medieval mass, filled with what we, in our
age of media and information, would consider "simple folk" might seem
charmingly parochial and ignorant. Yet
hidden within it is a lesson worth learning, a truth that our compartmentalized
and sterilized world has taken away from us as we celebrate the holiday season
- the unflinching humanity of the Christmas story.
In our world of elegant nativities and Christmas cards, it
is easy to relegate the event of Jesus' birth - the event that those who claim
Christianity seek to honor - to a beautiful, clean story. Certainly, some tellings emphasize the
poverty and humility of the stable or the difficulty of the situation. But rare indeed is the acknowledgement that
Jesus was born in blood and pain, covered in the same bodily fluids as every
other baby in history. He did not appear sweet and swaddled as he appears in
the crèche on the table; the story of Christmas is the story of a birth with
all its accompanying humanity.
Birth, in our age, is relegated to the cool, professional
sterility of the hospital. Most have
never seen a baby born; birth, we are told, is a miracle, and its depictions in
the media present us with clean, charming infants far beyond their own
nativity. Like so many other things in
our world, "birth" is an idea, not a physical reality, so when we
hear that Jesus was "born in a manger," our mental picture is of a
serenely swaddled, immaculate infant on the front of a Hallmark card.
By accepting that image, those who believe in the Christmas
story and the faith of which it is a part shortchange themselves and their
beliefs. Part of the great wonder of
Christ's birth is that it represents God with us, an act of relationship
building unrivaled in history.
Christianity is not merely a religious structure or a spiritual way of
thinking; it is an active process of establishing and nurturing a relationship,
the miracle of man seeking a rapport with God and discovering God is willing to
engage in that connection.
Looking at the birth of Christ in the way the
"primitives" of Franklin's medieval Angel Mass do changes the pure
ideological story of God sending Jesus to give a message into a messy, harsh,
and unspeakably beautiful narrative of God's willingness to take an abstract
and put it into harsh physical terms...all for the sake of forging a
relationship in our unspeakably human terms.
That story of blood and pain, of breast feeding and diapers may not be
pure and philosophically comfortable, but it is immediate and powerful in a way
that we often forget.
The people of the Twelfth Century were indeed ignorant; they
were superstitious and more often than not had neither access to nor interest
in Christian doctrine and ideology. We
are indeed more sophisticated and erudite than those folk encouraging an imaginary
Mary in a stall, yet our sophistication
may deny us the connection to the physical reality of Jesus' coming, and by
extension the potential of the relationship that coming offers Christians - a
God who chose to be incarnated in blood and pain, to live and laugh and sweat
and rage, and to die in agony, all without regret or resentment for the sake of
a relationship with us, His creation.
To me, as a Christian, that is the greatest miracle of
Christmas. I love my crèche, and I
cherish the greeting card images of the Little Lord Jesus, asleep on the
hay. But in my heart this Christmas Eve,
I'll be calling encouragement to a Mary in a stable long, long ago and
picturing a baby born in blood and amniotic fluid, not because it's comforting
or attractive, but because it reminds me of the true wonder of Christmas for
me...the wonder of a relationship between the glory of heaven and the grit of
humanity. That's something I need to
remember, to pursue, and to cherish.
Merry Christmas.
