Mary’s Christmas

 

By George Eleon 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.

 

A Bit Cuckoo

 

By G. E. Shuman

As I sit here to write this column, on the wall just on the other side of the room is my cuckoo-clock. It is an old one and is getting older (as am I) with every tick and every hour its little bird announces.

Cuckoo-clocks are sort of novelty clocks. I must pull those chains to wind the clock and the cuckoo twice a day, EVERY day. If I forget to do so, it will stop before the next twelve hours are over. So, with my memory being what it is lately, the clock stops quite often and must be reset and then wound again. The next time I will keep it going, I always think. Sure, I will.

The thing is that the clock is just a measuring device of sorts. The ticks and cuckoos measure the passing of time, but don’t keep time going. The clock often stops due to my inattention. Time does not.

But then, I now remember, I have always wondered if time, the thing the old clock is measuring, is really a ‘thing’ at all. If not, the old cuckoo behind the little door on the clock has wasted his ‘time.’ It is, of course, very handy to have something to tell us if we’re going to be early or late for work, I suppose, (or is it, really?) Our ancestors must have thought so, or they wouldn’t have put clocks in church steeples; or maybe they were only tired of people being late for church all the ‘time.’

The reason I’m not sure about clocks and the time they measure is that the only sure thing about time’s existence is existence itself. I exist right now. I don’t exist yesterday, at least not anymore, and I can’t exist tomorrow, yet, because tomorrow hasn’t happened yet. Nothing about it is real… at least it isn’t right now. Right?

In Philippians 3:13 the apostle Paul tells us to forget those things which are behind. For him that was a real mouthful. Remember, he was the guy who had held the coats of the crowd so they could stone the Christians. In Matthew 6:34 Jesus himself admonishes us to “take therefore no thought of tomorrow.” Why worry about something that doesn’t exist yet? 

So, the past is just a memory which shouldn’t be worried about, and the future isn’t even that yet. We live in the ‘right now.’ And that ‘right now’ is all we have. My cuckoo clock does tick off the seconds, (when I remember to wind it,) but yesterday’s ticks and tocks will never be heard again; tomorrow’s have not yet happened, and we have no promise that they ever will.

Look at it this way: A yard stick measures the length, depth, and breadth of an object; a clock only the length of the existence of that object. Duration is the fourth dimension, to be sure, but if the first three dimensions of a thing didn’t exist, there would be no need for it. I believe that when God created the first ‘thing,’ He began time and started the possibility of the necessity of a clock. Remember, nothing exists, right now, in the past or in the future. We would be wise to live in the ‘right now, of our own existence; for that is all we really have. Tick-tock.  Okay, I’ll admit that is a bit cuckoo.