As we prepare to embark on a journey south to spend Christmas with loved ones I will add one item to my packing list – a book that retells the Christmas story. It is too easy to disconnect from stories that we are familiar with and for this reason I am seeking to remember some of its truths at the end of a week saturated by news of unthinkable sadness.
The Christmas story is one of an imposed journey on a woman heavily pregnant in salacious circumstances. My eldest son as a two year old would become distressed when the Christmas story reached the part where Joseph and Mary can find no room at an inn. “Its scary!” he called out at the top of his voice at the same part of a community Nativity play. “Bloody scary.” I remember myself thinking. Recollecting my own pregnancies (and ironically recalling the limitations to travel imposed by airlines on women close to term) I can think of little as scary than being forced in the last trimester of pregnancy to travel a long distance by donkey only to arrive at my destination and find there was nowhere to stay. To then go into labour and deliver my firstborn in a stable full of dung, straw and animals – hideous. Lets not forget the very real risk to the lives of both unborn child and mother that giving birth in such circumstances necessarily conveyed. That out of these circumstances, a perilous journey culminating in a destitute birth would arise a message of Hope for the world is a true miracle.
So, while my family enjoys the Western trappings of Christmas, and I delight in my children’s joy at receiving their gifts I never, ever want to forget that the Christmas story is a gritty traveller’s tale or to abandon the Hope that it promises as I continue my own life’s journeys,
