Concrete Nativity

It was our church's children's pageant last Sunday, but instead of staging yet another play, they elected to do something different. 

Everyone was seated at tables instead of in rows, and each table had a different nativity set on it. As the children read the various scriptures of the Christmas narrative, we were all encouraged to pick up a different nativity figurine from our table and provide dialogue when prompted. For example, when the person at the front read, "soon after the baby was born, Joseph said...",  since I was holding the Joseph figure, I responded to my tablemates, "Actually he kind of does look like me, doesn't he?"

It was a fun and engaging service, and in addition to being highly interactive, it prompted us all to look at the oh-so-familiar Christ story from a different perspective, and I think some of that is due to the outrageous variety of nativity sets in play. There were realistic ones and cartoon ones, modern ones and classic ones, some from other cultures, an abstract one, and even a Peanuts nativity with Charlie Brown as Joseph and Lucy as Mary.

Like Shakespeare, people have transposed Biblical stories into other settings since forever, and looking at the panoply of creches and characters around the tables, I started to daydream about a modern North American setting for a story about the birth of Christ (and I know, I am hardly the first to do so!).

It doesn't translate too well in terms of a nativity set, but I can't shake the image of a concrete parking garage in a medium-sized hotel with a "No Vacancy" sign visible outside. The interior is bleak and grimy but not filthy, barren and desolate but heated.

When picturing Mary, I don't necessarily see a frightened girl in her early teens, as being with child at 14 or 15 was hardly out of place in first-century Palestine. I imagine someone young nonetheless, presumably questioning their own mental health having no father present, and only visions and dreams giving any indication as to his true identity. Maybe they've left university or college to deliver a baby under exceptionally trying circumstances. 

Which brings us to Joseph - does a modern retelling require a husband? I have had two friends conceive children without a partner because the pull of motherhood was that strong to them. Original Mary would have died without Joseph's willingness to take her in, and modern-day Mary can certainly use the support. Maybe our Joseph is her father or step-father, someone who thought he was done with raising children, but whose love for his daughter prompts him to step in and help once more.

And amidst all this, I picture three unhoused people with animals (a one-eyed dog, a mangy cat carried in a pocket, a tame rate perched on a shoulder) to replace the shepherds, who would not have looked like cute children with tea towel headdresses. Shepherds were perennial outsiders who spent most of the year sleeping oustide with their flock, keeping them from straying and protecting them from wolves. They would not have spent any time at all worrying about their clothes or hair, and would have appeared and smelled distressing to 'civilized' folk even then. How reassuring would it even be to have such rough folk assure Mary that 'sky people' or extraterrestrials had told them about her special baby, and thus paying their respects?

But there would also be renowned scientists staying at a convention at the same hotel. Drawn to the garage by an inexplicable phenomenon, they could assure Mary that the previous visitors were correct; her newborn child is both special and expected. What gifts might they bring - a warm jacket, an expensive watch, a synthetic diamond used in a demonstration?

The nativity is a difficult story to reimagine with modern sensibilities, when God no longer guides us with pillars of fire in the desert or burning bushes, nor corrects us with floods or plagues. A woman claiming to be impregnated by God was nearly stoned then, and would almost certainly be institutionalized now. The interactions and conversations are hard to reinterpret in a time where everyone must maintain some degree of both skepticism and cynicism.

But when I close my eyes, it is stunningly easy to picture the tableau; a gritty and dim cement enclosure, a rough shelter containing a radiant mother, a concerned father figure, wanderers, wise men, and of course, a miraculous baby, as all babies are.

Merry Christmas!

(Yet another interpretation)