I have always been uninterested in the religious, stylized, pictures of a blue-eyed Mary, shining in her unmussed perfection, hair neat, face tireless, not a speck of dirt on her as she sits with glowing animals in an oddly clean barn. I’m even less interested in the pictures of her child – over large for a newborn, gesturing to a flock of lambs as if holding court and actually talking, or smiling wisely – sporting a look far beyond his years –sometimes even adorned in flowing silk pajama-like gowns and a crown.
No, every time I see such pictures of the nativity, I wonder about the missing nitty-gritty details of riding on the back of a donkey– for days – into a strange town. I wonder about arriving without reservations, amid a throng of partying census participants, and finding yourself in what appears to be the early stages of your first labor.
Surely the nativity-story Mary, faithful and willing, was at least a little cranky and a little scared. She had to labor in animal hay, with no women to help her, many miles from home.
Several years ago, I saw yet another painting of the nativity-of-Mary, post birth, holding Jesus. But this one stopped me in my tracks. A poor, unknown artist from Peru had painted a squirming, wiggly, arching babe-in-arms, and a mother Mary – looking exhausted – trying to hold him. She is also trying hard not get her hair yanked by his eager baby-fingers. One of the baby’s hands, having no hair to pull, grasps instead toward a star in the sky. I bought the small painting.
We can only imagine such things.
Perhaps the towns of Nazareth, of Capernaum, of Cana settled under darkness, quiet and cool while in the hill country of Judah, in the crowded city of David, under the star of prophecy, a woman labored.
Perhaps the pain scared her. Perhaps she had been trained by other women on how to ride the waves of it, how to make it through, how to pace herself, breathe, keep her panic at bay.
Perhaps Joseph helped her hold it together, held her hand and held her up so she could meet the contractions one after another.
Perhaps she labored as the air around her fell dark and expectant. Perhaps she was not silent: We do not come into this world easily, even if the birth is fast, or practiced, or numb.No birth is easy – real or metaphorical. All beginnings, all remakings – demand toil, concentration, and work. They are never free and never simple.
Moving, from one home to the next, is hard.
Eight years ago I started looking for gritty, real, depictions of mother and child. They aren’t easy to find.
I now have two. The second is from Africa. It is scratched in clay – a simple depiction of a barefoot Mary bending to put her child in a crude basket. Both small paintings remind me of our responsibility to hold each other through the large and small births we face, and of the stark demands of any and all faith.
We have to believe things we can’t see.
We have to answer calls we can’t hear.
We have to rise to occasions absurd, and hard, and fanciful.
Perhaps, tired and spent, Mary held her new baby. Joseph, relieved, held him too. Perhaps both parents were unnerved, wondering what this small addition would mean to their lives. Perhaps both parents were full of the hope of faith, full of the hope of God, full of the hope that they’d survive as a family of sorts. Perhaps.
Today the world is hungry, for peace, for safely, for light. The reality of such need is stark, shocking.
Tonight, I pray hope for our lives - that we each find ourselves filled up with God, filled up with faith – whatever faith it may be – and that no matter, we each know it as real when we see it, feel it, hear it, imagine it saving us.
