“There are only two ways to live; as if nothing is a miracle or everything is a miracle.” A Einstein.
One of Patricia’s and my favourite TV shows is Call the Midwife, a BBC period drama series about a group of nurse midwives working in the East End of London in the late 1950s and early 1960s, (based on the book of the same title). The living conditions are often harsh and by our standards somewhat primitive and the medical services basic but the quality of caring and the valuing of life in the midst of these hardships is inspiring and empowering. There is seldom an episode that we are not moved to tears by the indomitable human spirit, the power of love and the miracle of birth.
The exception would be the Christmas episode where, instead of portraying life in its most real and earthy, there is a felt need – because it is Christmas – to layer everything with schmaltz and candy-cane sweetness. At the one time of year when displaced families and unplanned pregnancies and back alley births, and blood and placenta and pain and near-deaths should hold centre stage, they default to a romanticized notion of how we wished everything would be – a Hollywood Bethlehem with the straw neatly arranged in a safety-approved crib and central air conditioning and stable housekeeping services and freshly laundered sheep and the cattle quietly lowing and the poor babe awakes but no crying he makes. Not.
If only God were a Hollywood producer…
We cling desperately to the conviction that life should be pain free and all our misadventures have a happy ending and our wayward wanderings end at a Howard Johnson’s. We have problems with real, especially when it comes to birth and death and all the messy points in between. Which is why we attempt to rescript everything Bethlehemish.
We don’t need a neat and tidy Nativity. We need a true-to-life, feet-firmly-planted-in-cow-manure nativity that serves as the archetype and vision of hope for every refugee family, every politically oppressed minority, every unwed mother, every poor displaced homeless family spending Christmas outside in the cold. (And believe me, in Edmonton we have plenty of all of the above. )
Stereophonic choruses proclaiming the Christmas story in golden-gilded cathedrals with full orchestration won’t cut it. Our reality-starved, hope-deprived, post-truth world needs a Christmas narrative that proclaims all of life is sacred, that love will triumph, that hope will win the day against despair and peace will indeed someday flood the land, in the face of all appearances to the contrary.
We need a Christmas pageant that shouts from the roof top of a back-alley stable amidst the huddle of bleating sheep and defecating cattle, that the greatest gift that we can give anyone at the beginning or end of life, is to stand alongside in their struggle to thrive or even survive, to hold their hand and encourage them to breathe and to anchor deep in your heart the truth that this too is a miracle.
Quote for the Day taken from a favourite blog post of mine:
Regrettably, the history of almost every religion begins with one massive misperception: a fatal distinction between the sacred and the profane. Low-level religions put all their emphasis on creating exclusive sacred places, sacred times, and sacred actions. … Once we can accept that God is in all situations, and that God can and will use even bad situations for good, then everything becomes an occasion for good and an occasion for God. “This is the day God has made memorable, let us rejoice and be glad in it!” (Psalm 118:24). Our task is to find the good, the true, and the beautiful in everything, even and most especially the problematic. Trust me on this: The bad is never strong enough to counteract the good. Richard Rhor