It’s
Christmas Day and time to reflect on
the Christian religious origins of
this holiday with traditions borrowed from pagan
times and which has been
overlaid by more than one secular
celebration.
In
1223 St. Francis of Assisi is said
to have created the first recreation of the birth scene in a cave near Greccio in Italy. He was inspired by a recent trip to the Holy Land.
It was a living Nativity tableau, with people representing the Holy Family, shepherds, Magi, and angels and live animals, including an ass and an ox for
realism. The custom quickly caught on
and spread across Europe.
Soon the scene was being reproduced in religious art,
both paintings in sets of figurines to be displayed in the Nave of a Church or, eventually, in the manors of the wealthy. By the early days of the Renaissance the scene was somewhat standardized. Instead of St. Francis’s Grotto, the birth place was usually portrayed as a stable, often
with a thatched roof and skeletal or broken walls, the participants garbed as
peasants’ or lords of the day.
It is this familiar scene, often erected in religious
homes, and adorning countless Christmas cards that most of us have firmly in
our mind when we hear a reading of the Biblical nativity story.
With that in mind, I composed a poem for a Christmas Eve
service at what was then still called the Congregational
Unitarian Church in Woodstock, Illinois more than ten years ago. I used the classical crèche as a metaphor for the Congregation. The poem was included in my 2004 collection
of poetry, We Build Temples in the Heart and has frequently been used in Unitarian Universalist and other
worship settings since.
Let
Us Be That Stable
Today, let us be
that stable
Let us be the place
that welcomes at last
the weary and rejected,
the pilgrim stranger,
the coming life.
Let not the
frigid winds that pierce
our inadequate walls,
or our mildewed hay,
or the fetid leavings of our cattle
shame us from our beckoning.
Let our
outstretched arms
be a manger
so that the infant hope,
swaddled in
love,
may have a place
to lie.
Let a cold
beacon
shine down upon us
from a solstice sky
to guide to us
the seekers who will come.
Let the lowly
Shepard
and all who abide
in the fields of their labors
lay down their crooks
and come to us.
Let the seers,
sages, and potentates
of every land
traverse the shifting dunes
the rushing rivers,
and the stony crags
to seek our rude frame.
Let herdsmen and
high lords
kneel together
under our thatched roof
to lay their gifts
before Wonder.
Today, let us be
that stable.
--Patrick
Murfin
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