Mary’s Christmas

 

By G. E. Shuman

 

         Today I have been thinking about Mary, the mother of Jesus.  As a protestant Christian, I think about her son a lot, but not so much about her.  Today I have been thinking about what she went through for her son, and what she might have been experiencing in those days surrounding the first Christmas. 

The Bible does not say a lot about Mary, and so the world knows little about her.  But she was a real, live, feeling, caring person.  She was young. She was also without the benefit of history; to even be able to know the whole story of the very history she was helping to create.  Here's my idea of what she may have been thinking on part of that first, very real, and rough Christmas day.

          I imagine that Mary might have awoken after a short evening's nap, to suddenly realize once again that she had just given birth.  Before rising she may have looked up into the rough rafters of the shoddy stable in which she lay and pondered exactly what was happening to her.  Barely more than a child herself, here she was, with an infant son asleep in the stable’s manager, only inches from where she slept on the hay-strewn floor.  And this was not just a child, but one miraculously born from her own young womb, from her own virgin body.  He was a son for which she had been visited by the angel Gabriel months before, who had proclaimed to her that the child within her would save His people from their sins. 

Mary may then have been stirred from her thoughts as she heard the baby move a bit, and whimper where he lay.  Still unrested and uneasy, she was somehow comforted by her tired young husband's loud breathing as he slept in the hay, just to her other side. 

Mary thought again of the angel's visit, and of their hard recent trip by donkey to get to this town of Bethlehem, so that Joseph could pay his taxes.  She may have then recalled the bumpy ride, the cold nights along the way, and her husband's smiling glances back at her as he led the beast upon which she rode.  She likely remembered the innkeeper's gruff voice and awful smell, as he told them to stay in the barn if they had to, and then slammed the door in their faces.

The Bible says that Mary later thought about what the shepherds had reported.   Their talk included the angel which had spoken to them, and she might have wondered if it had been the same angel, Gabriel, as had come to her on that seemingly long-ago night.  She may have well imagined the heavenly host those shepherds described, and pondered their quick trip to this very place, to see her sacred son.  She may have remembered, only briefly, that agonizing thought of whether Joseph really, genuinely believed what she had said about the angel’s words, and of the bigger fact, that she had never known a man.

          Mary would have arisen to pick up her tiny, sweet son from the manger hay, and then hold this most precious one to her breast.  How, as she did so, would she not have also wondered and worried for the future of this nursing infant child, this most Holy One, born in such a noisy, dirty place.

          None of us can know what Mary actually thought during that wondrous time… but think she surely did.  The stable, the chilly air, the smell of manure, the hard ground and the soft and dusty hay were real.  So also, was her own body; real and still sore and tired from childbirth.  Mary certainly considered that the greatest reality of all was that the child which she now held and felt in her arms was none other than the very Savior of the world.

 

"And all they that heard it wondered at those things which were told them by the shepherds. But Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart."  Luke 2:18-19.

 

It’s About Time

 

By G. E. Shuman

 

This is the time of year when I usually write a column or two about the passing of time, about how fast the year has gone, and about what we may have in store in the next year. It may touch on things recently experienced and be a bit about how quickly we get old… things like that.

This year I thought I’d do something a little different. It is true that the year has gone by quickly, as usual, for me, seeing that we are already halfway through December. Twenty twenty-five will be here seemingly any minute, for sure.

The ‘different’ thing for me this year is that I recently experienced something in my life that sort of grabbed me by the collar, shook me around a bit, and made me re-think exactly what the times of our lives are, and even more, what time itself is. If you don’t mind, and at the risk of you thinking me even more strange than you might already, I'd like to share some of that with you.

I love books, and believe it or not, stating that now should make sense to you in a few minutes. It’s not that I’m a voracious reader, as is my wife. In fact, I probably write a lot more than I read. Writing sort of invigorates my mind; reading a lot seems to put me to sleep. Go figure.

The books I do love best are the really old ones. The Bible is the one that is understood as my favorite, but also other old and brittle, well-worn tomes full of even more worn pages are wonderful too. Those books bring the past, the ‘then-present’ thoughts of long-ago people to our own present, to the ‘now’ of our own existence. In this way I think of old books as time capsules. Those people who wrote them share their ideas with us; their ‘present’ moments are presented to us in our own present moment, if you see what I mean. The author had the same thoughts at the moment of writing as I do at the moment of reading, regardless of the number of years or even centuries between my time and his or hers. (That makes my brain hurt, just a little.)

I’d like to do a short object lesson regarding ‘time’ and maybe the fact that we really don’t need to worry about things in the past or the future. To do an object lesson you need an object. Our object will be a book. It doesn’t need to be an old book, just a book. So, go get a book. I’ll wait.

Now if you could just hold the book in your hands and let it open, maybe somewhere in the middle, although about eleven twelfths of the way toward the back of the book would be perfect. It is December, which will be in the back, but it’s just an object lesson, after all. Find a page in the book and hold that page between your thumb and forefinger. That’s right. Just like that. Now imagine that the pages to the left of your fingers are the pages you have already read, or the days of this year that you have already lived. The days, the pages to the right of your hand, although just in your mind, would be blank, as those have not been experienced yet. That part of the book has not even been written yet; you have not ‘lived’ those days yet.

If you think about it, maybe not completely clearly, but somewhat objectively, the page in your fingers is all we really have. We live ‘on the edge’ of that page, a fleeting moment at a time. The pages of life, of the year, of the months and weeks and days of it, are all either in the past or the future. Sure, you can re-read those old words of the past, written to the left of where your page is, but you are reading them in the precise ‘now’ of your time. You can attempt to write on the pages of the future, but only in vagaries and hopes of what will happen during them.

To me, all that means, if it means anything at all, that we don’t need to worry about the past, as it no longer even exists other than as old words. We don’t need to relive it all the time. It has been said that “Forgiveness is giving up on having a better past.” Interesting.

And looking at the blank pages of the future may help us sort out and manage tomorrow’s time a bit, but that also does not YET exist. All we can do is try to pin those pages down with what we think, or wish will happen.

So, my good friend, time as we know it may not exist at all, other than as an invention to keep things mentally ordered.  We have no promise of tomorrow but exist on that thin edge of the page called ‘now.’  As the next year approaches, let’s remember to live in the present, where we belong.