[Note from Rowland: apart from the word ‘invented’, this is very moving].

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Harry T. Cook

12/21/08

One of my sons and his wife built a pole barn out behind their house in the country, which is home to their horse, Buddy, their children’s pony, Coco, and various and sundry barn cats, as they are called, which are just a notch above being feral.

There’s nothing to compare with the odor of that barn — the smell of hay, manure and general funkiness that is natural to such a venue. My kids wear “barn boots” to do their barn chores, and no wonder. The Christmas crèche or “nativity scene,” as it is known, is heavily romanticized in our religious lore. Every display of it — whether life-sized or larger than life or in miniature — seems so antiseptic. There may be straw — though often faux straw — in the manger, but all the figurines are painted just so, the baby needs no change of diapers and the animals do not smell. Those who value the constitutional separation of church and state routinely object to the placement of the Christmas crèche on public land because the United States of America is a religiously pluralistic state. Millions of dollars have been remitted to law firms as fees for services rendered in battling that constitutional principle. Here and there, now and again such battles have been won so that Jesus, Mary and Joseph, the shepherds and their flocks plus the Magi compete with the Civil War cannon and the World War II tank on city hall lawns all over the country. So much for the wisdom of Jefferson and Madison.

The Christmas crèche becomes an instrument of religious triumphalism when placed on land that belongs to the public. When it is displayed in a church or on church grounds or other private property, it is anything from a symbol of religious piety to an affect of the holiday decorator. The 21st-century version of the manger can be seen on the mean streets of any major American city, and certainly the city of Detroit, of which I am a native and in which I have done much of my life’s work. There is no room in the inn of economic justice or security for many people whose lives are circumscribed by those streets and their sketchy possibilities. You, fellow suburbanite, would not willingly go to any one of those streets to visit, much less call a house on one of them home. You would not park and leave your car along the curbs of those streets. You would not, in fact, unlock your car doors from the inside and venture out, particularly at night. Likewise, nobody checks into the barn for the night when his wife is on the brink of being delivered of a child. So, too, the wise person stays on the main thoroughfares, preferring the freeways for ingress and egress from such a city as Detroit. Who needs the hassle and the danger of its neighborhood streets? So when you light a votive candle to the crèche or sing “Away in a manger,” try to conjure up the smell of straw sodden with animal urine and excrement. And the cold, the bone-chilling cold: try to feel that, too. Feel the abandonment of polite society and the absence of common amenities. Figure out that you have gotten about as low as you can get.

That’s what the person or persons responsible for the Gospel according to Luke was getting at when he or she invented the inn at Bethlehem, its cattle shed and the feeding trough turned into a cradle. Luke’s shepherds redolent of their flocks added to the image — animal herders in that time and place being close to the bottom of the societal order. Luke’s crèche was meant to put the stamp of peasantry and poverty on the Christ figure. Plus to have Luke’s angel choristers proclaim him “the Messiah, the Lord,” as they did, was to tell whatever part of the world was listening that Augustus Caesar and all such caesars that came before and would come after him were jokes, really. The power they possessed consisted in horses and chariots and armaments intended to intimidate and destroy.

The power of the malodorous manger was the power that counted, because there, if anywhere, justice and gentleness could be born. So the gospel comes to life in squalor and deprivation, on the mean, litter-strewn streets of such a city as Detroit, among incidents of crime with roots in the desperation and hopelessness of ones who were born as innocent as any human babies – just like the one Luke said was born in Bethlehem of Judea during the reign of Caesar Augustus when Quirinius was governor of Syria.

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© Copyright 2008, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.