Real life doesn’t unfold in scenes, but here are a few
scenes that stand out in my mind nonetheless.
Scene one: There is a bar, favored by off-duty police and
breakfast drunks, that opens around 7 a.m. In the same run-down commercial
strip is a storefront community center that hosts a meeting of the local
Alcoholics Anonymous group. There are sometimes people gathered out front
waiting for one or the other to open up for the day, and one cannot help but
imagine that there are at least a few souls out front who haven’t decided which
door they will walk through.
Scene two: Some years earlier, an American newspaper
reporter visits Calcutta and imposes himself on the Missionaries of Charity,
hoping to catch a whiff of whatever spiritual stuff is behind Mother Teresa’s
gang and its work. But instead of demi-angels blissed out on agape, he
sees mainly women who are stern, stoical, even grim-faced — not necessarily
pleasant at all — and the word that comes to mind isn’t anything from the
Christian tradition but karma, the most literal translation of which is
“work.” There is a kind of high seriousness evident, but not the kind that
smells of incense: “Here is a very hard and thankless job,” they almost say.
“And it falls to us to do it. Why? We can explain it to you, but we cannot
understand it for you.”
Scene three: He was adopted — it is important to keep that
in mind. Even if we approach the story with narrowed 21st-century eyes, the
outline is familiar enough: The father knows that in the strictest biological
terms, this is not his son, but he has determined to care for him nonetheless,
to love him and to raise him as his own. He has his suspicions about the
mother, too, and her incredible story, but he is setting those aside. The
raising of children is a very hard and often thankless job, and, in this case,
it falls to him to do it. Why? He could explain it to you, but he cannot
understand it for you.
The father is not the only one who has adopted the boy in
the barn. The three mysterious strangers are there, too. They are foreigners,
wise men in some tellings, kings in others, but, whoever they are, the infant
is not of their family, not of their tribe, not even of their nation. They
bring gifts that are precious in and of themselves and heavy with meaning:
gold, the traditional tribute to kings; incense, as befits a priest; and, most
perplexing for a newborn, myrrh, which is used in the preparation of corpses
and in other funereal rituals.
Ordinary people come, too, repeating to the young parents
what they themselves have been told by mysterious voices: “Fear not: for,
behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.
For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, which is Christ
the Lord. And this shall be a sign unto you: Ye shall find the babe wrapped in
swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.”
The mother, unmarried and having borne a child not fathered
by her intended husband, must have expected abandonment rather
than . . . all this. We are told she “kept all these
things, and pondered them in her heart.” No doubt. Surely that is an
understatement for the ages.
The boy grows into a man, and the question of family is
always at the center of His thinking. “Who is my mother, or my brethren?” He
asks. “Whosoever shall do the will of God, the same is my brother, and my
sister, and mother.” He tells of hated foreigners adopting the wounded and the
vulnerable of His own nation as their own, and shames His own people with that
story of alien kindness. One of His last acts before death is arranging an
adoption, pointing His own mother out to a follower and saying: “Behold thy
mother.”
His followers are sometimes thick-headed (Peter’s last act
in the company of the Prince of Peace is to start a knife fight), but they
eventually get the message. The Architect of the universe has “predestinated us
unto the adoption of children by Jesus Christ to Himself.”
None of this seems quite possible. None of it really is
possible. We hear stories of His followers not only healing the sick but
raising the dead. We ponder this in our hearts — skeptically. “How shall this
be, seeing as . . . ?” But it is not for us to do the
impossible. Not necessarily. The possible will do. We are not the mystical
traveling wise men, only the shepherds. For us shepherds, the possible is
enough. We decide which door to walk through on any given morning. We decide to
take up such hard and thankless work as is given us. We see the sign in the
child born into a world that had only known blood and tribe, and indifference
and cruelty to all those beyond our own people — a world that had taken
extra-lineal cruelty as a positive virtue — and we try to listen, to understand
what that gold, frankincense, and myrrh all adds up to. We have questions: “And
who is my neighbor?”
“Behold your mother. Behold your son.” Behold. In hospices
and soup kitchens, in mental wards and solitary confinement, in high places and
in low places. In the cancer ward. In the labor camp. Among strangers and even
among our enemies. “Let us now go even unto Bethlehem, and see this thing which
is come to pass, which the Lord hath made known unto us.”
