Happy Christmas.

To all my subscribers, whether you observe Christmas or not, my wish for you is that you're happy and in the company of the people you love.

Giving thanks.

I’ve been on a bit of a break these past couple of weeks, working on and off but not filing to the Post or the Citizen. There’s just soooo much going on in my beat that it’s not easy to look away, and the stories I’m poking away at in the meantime are pretty dreary, but I’ve refused to let it get to me.

It’s Christmastime. My daughter Zoe is town, I’m returning to relations and friends I’ve left unattended, I’m looking forward to a campfire deep in the bush before I’m back at my desk, the nights are growing shorter and I am happy.

Mary was just a teenager. Her son changed the world.

I don’t have much of a story for you this morning. I mainly wanted to use the opportunity of access to your inbox to say thank you, a million times over, for your support during what is closing in on two years of The Real Story. And to say Happy Christmas.

Just a couple of things to notice today.

Here’s a little essay by the great American poet and novelist Sherman Alexie, of the Spokane Coeur d’Alene tribe: Saint Paul of the Spokane Indian Reservation.

He makes an observation, in passing: Jesus was only in his early 30s when he began his ministry. I did research and discovered that the Apostles were probably all under 20 years of age when they were traveling with Jesus. And some of them might have been as young as 15.

I’ve noticed this too about the great movers of history, the navigators and ships’ crews commanded by all the great explorers, the generals of the great emperors. They were teenagers.

What the Magi Found That Night

One thing Catholic and mainline Protestant theologians agree on about Mary is that she was likely in her mid-teens when she gave birth to Jesus. When the baby was born, she and a carpenter named Joseph, who was either Mary’s husband or her fiancé at the time depending on which version you want to interpret, were homeless.

There’s a lot of boring argumentation about Mary. So far as I can determine a lot of Christians say one should not pray to Mary, which would pretty much upset the applecart altogether for Catholics of my family’s tradition. For our crowd, Mary was at the heart of everything, a Jewish girl who happened to have borne a child who went on to become an especially disputatious rabbi who the Romans put to death on account of his troublemaking.

Mary barely makes an appearance in the Bible at all (it’s perhaps helpful to understand here that our crowd didn’t hang its hats on any particular book) but in the Quran she’s all over the place. Seventy references, and several more in the surahs.

As the story goes, at the time Mary gave birth to Jesus, or Yeshua, or Isho, there was much tumult in the land. Word was going around that a king of some kind was about to be born. Some high-born men from well to the east of Judea, probably from Baghdad, saw a star and followed its course across the night sky. The believed for some reason that the star’s movement portended something important.

They ended up in Bethlehem, a no-account village down a dirt road from the Way of the Patriarchs, the main thoroughfare between Jerusalem and Hebron. In Bethlehem they found this “king,” so the story goes, and it was just this newborn baby, whose no-account parents had laid him in a feeding trough in a barn, or in a cave, or some such thing.

They chased a brand new star ever towards the west
Across the mountains far, but when it came to rest,
They scarce believed their eyes. They'd come so many miles
And this miracle they prized was nothing but a child.

That’s from Steve Earle’s Nothing But A Child. I’m as sentimental as the next guy around this time of year I suppose, but it’s always struck me that hardly any song in the vast genre of Christmas songs is about what Christmas is about. Not a complaint, but there we are. That Steve Earle song is different. It’s about what Christmas is about.

That’s all there is. Just some kid. But it’s all there had to be. It’s all there has to be.

It seems to me that whether you’re a Christian or not, a believer of any kind or not, it really does take one’s breath away. There was this Jewish girl, down on her luck in a time of strangeness and upheaval and rumours and prophecies about 2000 years ago, and she had a baby. Jesus, or Yeshua, or Isho.

Within a few generations of the baby’s birth his story and what he had to say for himself were already transforming the whole world. And down through the ages and all the empires and the wars, a particular notion of divinity, a particular idea of forgiveness and a particular kind of hope persists among us to this day.

People still get together at Christmastime and try to be good to one another, all bound together from a foundational belief, whether we’re conscious of it or not, in vain or otherwise, that some day, somehow, everything’s going to be alright.

That’s the one thing I can confess that I believe, because I have to. The rest is just surrendering to an unfathomable mystery.

Love,

TG.