Every year, I try to come up with a storybook that I can show the children at the early service. The books I have used have varied enormously, hewing closely and not closely at all (such as Wombat the Divine) to the birth story of Christ. Some are serious; some are gently humourous. Some have worked, others haven’t and some I haven’t used.
What an odd-lot selection! There’s The Cat in the Manger, which depicts the nativity scene from the vantage-point of a feline.
Or there’s The Last Straw, narrated by a cranky old camel with gout and sciatica that is asked to take gifts to the newborn king. His burden becomes mountainous and when a child asks him to take a piece of straw for the king’s bed, he is about to give up right then and there. But he manages to plod forward, despite his gout, sciatica and whatever else, under the light of the star, to get to the manger where he collapses on his knees. When everyone else kneels, he thinks they are mocking him, until he realises that he is the one who set the example. When the new Christ child touches him on the nose, he decides there will be no burden he will shun again.
Another animal-narrated book, The Donkey’s Dream, tells the story of a donkey who dreams all manner of things, including how he carries a lady full of heaven. (Her robes even have stars in them.) Eventually he realises that the woman, and the subsequent birth he witnesses is not a dream, it is for real.
Perhaps it is easier for children’s authors to interpret this incredible story through a familiar (and not-so) animal’s viewpoint (as if we were to know). There seem to be lots of animal-narrated stories out there.
Then there’s the absolutely gorgeous (to this medievalist) book, The Little Boy’s Christmas Gift, painted in the style of 16th-century Flemish art of the Brueghels and Hans Memling, complete with gold-guilded drawings.
I am always in search of Christmas books that will depict Joseph, Mary and Jesus in races other than Caucasian (as the tendency still remains to paint them in our culture’s predominant race). There is a picture book, The Story of Christmas (based word-for-word on the Gospels of Matthew and Luke) where this trio looks distinctly Latino or Palestinian. I love it.
This year’s quest for a Christmas book to use at the early service, culminated in The Huron Carol. I have to say that there were a few sceptical faces this afternoon as I read it to the children because they couldn't quite picture Joseph, Mary and Jesus as North American First People but I assured them it was OK.
The Huron Carol is an actual song, written by a Jesuit priest, Jean de Brébeuf, who came to Canada in the early 1600s. He settled among the Huron, or Ouendat, people in what is now Midland, Ontario. Even though he was a missionary, he learned the people’s language and wrote, in Huron, this famous carol. He and his fellow priests, known as the Black Robes, and many of their Huron parishioners, were killed in a raid by the Iroquois in 1649. But generations of the Huron continued to sing this carol, and in 1926, Jesse Edgar Middleton, wrote his own version of the carol in English.
What is striking about this picture book is that all of the imagery is Native American. Mary clearly is Native American as are Joseph and Jesus. The angels as well have Native American features. Jesus is not born into a Middle Eastern house, but into a long house. The animals are those of the north: bears, foxes, moose, deer, eagles, raccoons, beavers, porcupine, elk, and wolves. Jesus is wrapped in rabbit skin and he receives gifts of fox and beaver pelt.
The last verse of the hymn says,
O children of the forest free,
O sons [and daughters] of Manitou,
the holy child of earth and heaven,
is born today for you.
Come, kneel before the radiant boy
who brings you beauty, peace and joy.
‘Jesus, your king, is born.
Jesus is born.
In excelsis Gloria!’
Maybe some will find this version of the nativity story heretical, but to me it is a lovely rendition of a universal story that needs to be translated across time and cultures.
While Christ the Child is universal for all, the incarnation of Jesus in each one of us has to be particular. Each one of us, made in God’s image, is but one tiny, tiny fragment of the wholeness of God’s body across time and space. I marvel at all the variations of the human face and find each exceedingly wonderful.
So if Jesus is depicted as Japanese, Thai, Middle Eastern, Sudanese, Brazilian, Canadian First Person, or any of the hundreds of ethnicities, races and nationalities that enrichen our world, all the better.
I am fascinated by authors and artists’ attempts to render this ineffable into story and image. How does one take all the hopes and fears of all the years and compress them into a picture book? How does one take all the human yearning and reduce it to four verses of a hymn?
As for you and me, gathered here tonight, past some folk’s bedtimes and in the prime of the night for others, what brings us here? How do we see Jesus in our eyes, imaginations and hearts? How do we translate into our terms the awesome mystery of the incarnation, God-with-us, Emmanuel?
And why do we look again and again for the Christ child?
For what do we seek? To have our burdens lessened? To come close to the Holy not because we understand why but because we are drawn in year after year because our souls instinctively yearn for mystery?
Do we come here because the pains of the world are too much to bear and we need to find some place to drop them, or some place, a larger reality to make sense out of them?
Do we come because we know that this yearly journey on this holy night is essential to our well-being?
For these reasons, for any other reason, for however you see Jesus, whether in picture and story-book form or hymnody, know that you are God’s dearly beloved, too. Know that God holds you and cherishes you. God incarnate has many faces and yours is one of them.
On this night when the star shines over the Bethlehems of our lives, both those of the nativity story and the one in the Middle East, know that it shines over us, too. For God has blessed us richly this night… and always.
[Photo is of the church Christmas Eve afternoon before the 4.00 PM service.]
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