Mystically at the Crib
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| (Found here) |
What do we see there? What we see, or don’t see, reveals us,
just as the sight of the scapegoat reveals us: do we see the poetry of truth,
the true myth, or are we too ensconced in the poetry of the world, the
narrative of the inner circles, the drama written by the powerful?
There was a great cartoon posted on Facebook recently: It
was a couple, the woman pregnant, dressed in the clothes of today’s poor:
hoodies and shabby jeans. The man was on the payphone, and the woman was seated
on one of those kiddie rides you see sometimes outside grocery stores—a donkey
that rocks back and forth when you put quarters in it.
It is an exercise in seeing: what would you see if
transported, as you are mystically, to the cave outside Bethlehem? An
insignificant, poor couple who were not important enough to have a place to
stay; a tiny baby that in all probability would either die before adulthood or
become another insignificant, poor person struggling to survive. A scrap of
human flesh hidden in the arms of a woman, another kind of insignificant in
that culture and time.
Would you be a wise man? ‘The beginning of wisdom is the
fear of the Lord.’ Wisdom is the ability to see beyond, to recognize truth, to
know enough of God to know that He is capable of becoming a baby, to follow His
star no matter where it leads, and beyond human expectations of palaces, to
follow that light to Weakness Incarnate.
Would you bring him gold nonetheless, though it may appear
to be throwing it down a charity hole?
Would you know enough to bring him myrrh; would you know
that the sweetness of the nativity scene was also a vision of a more profound
form of suffering and emptying than anything you could imagine on your own?
Would you, as Caryll Houselander said, see the wood of the cross embedded in
the wood of the cradle? Would you see that He was already on the road of
suffering, taking the form of a poor flesh-scrap, intentionally risking the
suffering of being profoundly misunderstood?
Would you know enough to bring him frankincense, the precious
granules that were only burned before a god? Would you know that the telos of
frankincense was now finally realized as the smoke gently rose before the poor,
the laid aside, the refuse?
Would you be a shepherd? Like the poor child in your
poverty, unsurprised by the animal stench and the rawness of the scene, but
drawn in because in your familiarity with life outside the city, you could see
what was different here? Could you look past the suffering and see unusual
beauty in the face of the Mother, in the aura of angels surrounding the Child?
Would you be, instead, an innkeeper, with so much else
before your eyes, so many pressing concerns, that you only saw the
insignificant poor couple who could not pay hiked rates for rooms? Would you be
one of those crafty people who, as Jane Austen said, have ‘a presence of mind
[which] never varies, whose tongue never slips’?
Would you be a Herod, a mover and shaker who, though
pretending to be pious, are instead in love with power, with influence, with
your own abilities, your own intellect—who sees only two categories for the
Christ child: either someone to be used, or someone to compete with? Are you
daunted, scandalized, fearful of God’s choice to totally empty Himself and to
suffer? Are you doubtful?
Let the Christ child reveal you to yourself. Perhaps you
will find all these characters inside. The suffering of the child, of the
mother, of the foster father is meant to assuage justice, to test you, to
educate you, and to save you. He cannot save you if you do not know yourself,
know that you need to be saved from selfishness, fear—and above all, as Fr.
Zossima in The Brothers Karamozov says, from ‘the lie to yourself.’ He
cannot love you if you do not know you need His love.
The scapegoat, for the first time in history, will, in the
power of love, turn the scapegoating into a feast of love, and healing. He will
become the Feast.
The baby in the cave is a paradox that reveals you and
demands your potential for dignity, sacrificial love, demands in love that you
become what you were made to be—and does this with the sweet, absolutely
helpless cry of a newborn child. His very helplessness, like the poor of the
world, the helpless, the humble, calls you out. What will you see when tonight,
you stand outside the cave among the shepherds and wise men?”
~T. Renee Kozinski
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