~:: Of Birth and Holy Birth ::~

I have to explain how I feel about nativities.  My first experience with one was when I was in high school and my dad built a bunch of crèches in his workshop.  Every year, he made stuff in the shop – one year, dainty keys, about a foot long, painted with intricate Pennsylvania Dutch detail, and lined with useful little hooks.  It was a key-keeping key.  I still have one.  With keys on it.  They were gifts for friends and neighbors.  And so were the crèches – made of wood, a stable for the Christ child. I don’t remember the figures we put there.

And there was the tiny one I put carefully on the tree every year.  I’d find a safe, deep cave in the greenery for it, a tiny stable with a little picture of the Family pasted on the back, the roof covered with glitter.

Low light.  A little blue.  But the vinietting around the sides is cool because it’s actually real condensation on the lens – I had just come in from an hour or so of shooting the tremendous snow we got last night, and digging out the horses at the barn.

When I grew up and had my own house and children, I thought about buying a nativity set.  But I found that I couldn’t love ANY of the ones I saw.  They all had the baby in a manger, which – yeah – fits the story and all.  And Joseph standing to the side, always looking a little non-plussed.  But it was the way the artists did Mary that put me off.  She was kneeling first of all.

Show me a woman who wants to kneel right after giving a birth.

And she was mostly always praying, her hands pressed together, a look of holy rapture on her face.

It was wrong.  Not the reverence.  But the humanity.

You don’t give birth to a warm little person and then kneel there and pray to him.  He’s your BABY.  He may be the Son of God, but he’s still your baby.  Later, you’ll yell at him for missing the caravan home from Jerusalem and scaring you have to death.  But in those moments of his birth, sky full of angels not withstanding (could they hear those angels in town?  I don’t think so, or more than shepherds would have known) – that mama is going to have that baby in her arms, pressed against her cheek.  She’ll be tearing up and loving him—you KNOW she would.  And Joseph?  Would he really be standing aside, watching his newly post-partem wife kneeling on the ground?

I looked for years to find a  group that spoke to me—of the terrible/wonderful thing that had happened that night, of Mary’s travail, and of her mother’s heart – of the dearness of that little baby, so new, and just as helpless and innocent as any baby, just born onto a rough and tough planet like ours.

And then I found one.

And I added all the animals and shepherds and attending angels I could find.

But at the center of all that, the family.

Just as it always should be.