The nativity set on my mantel features a doleful looking Joseph, arms crossed and scowling, an ox and donkey with chipped ears, a shepherd without a nose, a three-legged lamb, and the rest of the cast all painted in 1970s burnished gold and silver. The figurines were a gift to my parents from my Aunt Betty, now deceased. Nostalgia, like the soft glow of candlelight, diminishes their imperfections.
Whether tacky or tasteful, life-size or miniature, naturalistic or stylized, a crèche is a Christmastime tradition that goes back nearly eight centuries. St. Francis of Assisi created the first nativity scene, according to his biographer St. Bonaventure, in a cave in the village of Grecio in Italy in the year 1223. While villagers gazed upon a manger, ox and donkey, Francis preached of the babe of Bethlehem. A holiday tradition was born.
Today, crèches are commonplace and yet the ceramic figurines on the mantel strike me as surprisingly uncommon. Itap a curious scene that collapses time to represent two events separated by months or years — the visit of the shepherds and the arrival of the magi. And, in that impossible moment, two betrothed teens, some foreigners with gifts, a few shepherds, and several animals gaze upon a newborn asleep in a feed trough filled with hay. The motley assembly on the mantel shares in common the scrapes and scratches of years of hasty handling but the people they represent share something more profound: they were all outsiders in the culture in which they lived.
Whether you believe the Christmas story is true or consider it just that, a story, you have to admit it has an odd plot: the creator of the universe appeared first to the alienated, the poor, the foreign, and the hooved. Mary and Joseph arrive in Bethlehem to register for the Roman census. At a time when families traveled together, the two have come alone. Was her pregnancy during the engagement too shameful for their families to bear?
Itap nighttime and she’s in hard labor. Because there are no rooms available, Mary must give birth on the floor of a stable. Shepherds tending their flocks in nearby fields come to see what angels have foretold — a baby lying in a manger. Strangers from lands east of the empire, astrologers following a star in search of a king, arrive bearing gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh.
Itap a strange story. What kind of deity reveals himself to outsiders and nobodies? If true, it suggests the human value scale may be upside down.
Regardless of one’s faith tradition, the crèche offers an alternative value system that has particular salience this Christmas. Itap been a hard year — disease, riots, catastrophic fires, hurricanes, economic woes, and drought. Of the four horsemen of the apocalypse, we’ve yet to see war but of course, there’s still time before the end of the year.
The pandemic has distanced us socially and the necessity of masks has rendered us faceless just when a reassuring smile might ease the tension. The nation is divided politically and trust in institutions is waning. Under the weight of adversity, stress fractures in the body politic have multiplied into a thousand fine lines between us and them, insiders and outsiders, those who belong and the other.
Whereas 2020 exemplifies a kind of coming apart, the crèche represents a coming together. The poor and prosperous, learned and illiterate, male and female, foreign and native, young and old, angelic and beast are bound together as witnesses to an event that changes history. The outsiders have become insiders. There is no them; only us.
The crèche challenges us to see different people differently, the imperfect more perfectly. And so I will greet the new year with these words, attributed to St. Francis, though likely apocryphal, “Lord, make me an instrument of your peace; where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is discord, union; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; and where there is sadness, joy.”
Merry Christmas.
Krista L. Kafer is a weekly Denver Post columnist. Follow her on Twitter: @kristakafer.
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