Florida Catholic | Editorial

Simplest story reveals great mystery

Published: 12.21.07

The story is so simple that a cast of 10 inexperienced actors knew it by heart and acted it out each year for just one or two performances. Playing multiple parts, the players helped the drama unfold: The Annunciation; a man, a pregnant woman seeking shelter face innkeepers who have no room for them; finally one overwrought inn owner offers the only space he has — the stable out back.

The scene changes, some rearranging of the “stage” and we enter the stable, where Jesus is born to Mary and Joseph and the Savior comes into the world. The angels (perched on the stairway above the family’s playroom) appear to the shepherds, assuring them not to be afraid, “for behold, I bring news of great joy.” The shepherds leave the fields, marching across the room, to visit the manger.

The Magi come too, to see the king, because this version of the story combined both Luke’s and Matthew’s infancy narratives. Sure it wasn’t scripturally correct, but it was the “Reader’s Digest condensed version” of the Christmas story.

These memories come from my early Christmases growing up in a family of 10 children. Each year we put on the Christmas pageant in our home for Mom and Dad. The cast was five times larger than the audience by the time all of us were born. Fortunately, we usually had an infant to play Jesus, but eventually a baby doll had to stand in as we all grew older. Occasionally, we took the show “on the road” to the convent to perform for the Adrian Dominican sisters who served at Our Lady of Loretto Parish in Hometown, Ill.

This Christmas Eve tradition ingrained in our family the simple meaning of Christmas — a baby came to a weary family on a journey. While he was not welcomed at first by the surly innkeepers who had no room in their hearts or at their hearths for the Holy Family, he was praised by angels and honored by humble shepherds and Wise Men alike. We may have been little kids, but we “got” it. God became man, and our family acted it out every Christmas in the small playroom of our house. And because of the faith and example of our parents, we lived out the story in our home and in our community.

That’s the mission for all of us today and every Christmas. We recall the simple story and are enveloped by its great mystery that God, in all his glory, became man, in all our humility — humility, the root of which comes from the Latin humus, for ground or earth, the dirt. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and the shepherds knew this was important. “We have to go see this child,” was the way it usually came out in our simple production. Luke says: “When the angels went away from them into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, ‘Let us go over to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has made known to us.’ And they went and made haste and found Mary and Joseph and the babe lying in a manger.”

God comes to us this Christmas, every Christmas, always, for all time. We must go to him.

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