By Lacy Thompson
“Does it look right?”
“What?” he asks, without moving his eyes from the television screen. It is the football rivalry game of the year.
“Do I have it right?”
“Do you have what right?”
“The nativity scene. Have I set everything up right?”
A pause in play. He turns to her, glances at the newly situated scene on the credenza top, then returns to the game. “How would I know? I wasn’t there.”
—–
Two thousand years ago, give or take a dozen: The birth of Jesus. The Incarnation. The dividing point of human history. The Christ-event.
Use all of the theological, mystical, fairy tale words available. Talk about the star, the innkeeper, the shepherds, the magi, the gifts, the angels, even the little drummer boy.
Did it happen – or is it the world’s greatest myth, no more than playing make-believe with toy-sized statues each year?
He stares at the credenza-top scene later that evening and wonders.
—–
Everyone is there. Joseph, Mary, the magi, all reverently crowded around the smallest of figures, the baby Jesus. All except one.
In the back, behind the others, as if he has wandered into the arranged scene without invitation.
The shepherd’s shoulders are bowed, likely as much or more from the weight of his days as from the weight of the small sheep he carries across them. There is a grim evenness to his mouth. His left eye looks out of line, which happens when he is very tired.
He is very tired this night.
It was hours earlier, after he has completed the long weekly return from the fields, that he realizes a sheep is missing. Back he turns. No rest. He has a lost sheep to hunt, and the night – with its own less benevolent hunters – is near at hand.
When he ate last, the sun was overhead. By the time he finds the wandering, hoarsely bleating sheep, the night sky is spangled with stars.
The second return from the field is unmercifully long. His stomach growls. His back groans. Home seems as distant as hope for even one day free of tedious toil. The promise of sleep seems as unattainable as clutching the light of a night star.
He reaches the edge of town with shambling steps, his legs stiff and heavy with fatigue. Home is a short distance now, but work awaits there, work that must be completed prior to food and a snatch of fitful sleep before the grinding wheel of life begins to turn anew.
He hears the undertone of hushed voices as he enters the alleyway, sees the cluster of shadows ahead. He remembers the household and his encounter with its host on his earlier return.
The man greeted him with a sigh and a shrug as he carried bedding into the animal pen area below the living quarters. “So many here that some must sleep with the four-legged relatives. But — what is one to do?”
Now, deep in the night, something is restlessly astir among the four-legged relatives, enough to draw the two-legged members of the family to crowd the lower entrance.
The worn shepherd hears snippets of hushed questions as he moves past. “Tonight of all nights, a baby is born?” “Is it a boy?” “Praise heaven, is it well?”
The exhaled questions are enough for the shepherd to understand the scene. What a lowly way to enter the world, he thinks. Well, at least, the child will know what to expect of the world.
“How is she?” comes the whisper. “I would have given my spot upstairs if I had known.”
“They will call him Immanuel.”
“Immanuel,” the shepherd whispers to himself as he turns into a smaller, darker alley. He intends a tone of irony, but in the darkness the utterance sounds more like the fading fragment of a muted petition.
The sheep stirs on his shoulders.
“‘God with us,'” the shepherd whispers as if in conversation with the small animal. “From my mouth to God’s ears, if only it were so. I could use a bit of God in my life — even a bit as small as a baby.”
—–
“You changed the scene,” she comments the next day. “You moved the shepherd closer.”
He shrugs. “I wanted it to be right. Turns out, I was there after all.”
—–
Truth told, we all were there, like the shepherd, weary, wanting, too worn to hope for the impossible, too long tired to the bone of the world in which we live and move, too often desperate beyond even our own understanding for a reason to believe, even the smallest of reasons.
“Unto you is born this day in the city of David a savior, which is Christ the Lord.”
Yes — we were all there.
We still are.