Cold, Tired, and Scared
“I love Nativity scenes—but I also find them irritating. Our
house is resplendent with more than half a dozen from Asia, Latin America,
Europe and the Middle East; all colorful and joyful; they brighten up every
dark corner of our house and dark recess of our minds. But, like I said, they
also can infuriate me. They are too clean, too bright, too warm and nuzzling.
That serene smile on every Mary, the glowing eyes of every Joseph, the bubbly,
happy baby, sometimes are just too much. That wasn’t the way it possibly could
have been. Sometimes I wish for a real manger scene, with the donkey braying
and the sheep bleating and even the camels spitting. I can see the tired old
man wondering what he had gotten himself into and the young girl frightened for
her young babe and herself. All of them shivering in the cold and the dark. And
the sound of the animals so loud and dissonant that the baby keeps waking in
tears, and the mother tries vainly to soothe him back to sleep. And then the
shepherds arrive, smelly, sly, ignorant, wanting to see this strange phenomenon
they are drawn to beyond their comprehension. And the mother now worried about
how to cope with a crying infant and so many unexpected guests—she was a Jewish
mother after all! I like this starker nativity scene because it is more like
what we all go through and certainly what the poor and discarded experience
every day. I like the thought that every broken person, every young scared and
scarred mother, every confused and weary father, every destitute and despairing
family, can identify with and appreciate that small family of three searching
desperately for shelter 2000 years ago. No more than refugees—internally
displaced people as we bureaucratically describe them today—struggling just to
get to tomorrow, with no thought of grander or sweeter days ahead. For so many
of the poor and broken to embrace life and joy under such circumstances is
itself a daily miracle that humbles me. And so maybe in a deeper sense and at
the risk of contradicting myself, the ‘cleaned-up’ Nativity scene gets it
exactly right: Underneath all the dirt and noise there is a serene smile of a
young mother despite the worries, there are warm glowing eyes of an old father
despite his exhaustion, and there is a babe bursting with life and joy despite
being hungry and cold. They may have been a ‘holy family,’ but they were also a
‘wholly human family.’”
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