On the Wild Imperfection of the First Christmas

Maybe Love delights in coming into the least perfect situations.

What a terrible time to have to show up for a census: right when you’re about to go into labor.

As the Sunday school teacher flipped the ancient large-print coloring book, revealing to my kids the highlights of a two-thousand-year-old story, I marveled at a thing I’d never fully processed before. The conditions of Mary’s delivery pretty much sucked.

Don’t travel, we tell women in their last month or two of pregnancy, but Mary had to haul pregnant tail ninety miles. Up and down hills. On a donkey. Just so she and her husband could pay a big tax to an oppressive empire that hated them.

Be near your midwife or medical professional, we tell women, but Mary only had her husband, who maybe knew a thing or two about birth? But didn’t—if we believe the story—know much at all about Mary’s body.

And then, there were no rooms at the inn, the story goes, which sounds quaint because we’ve sung it, and inn suggests a village, and aren’t we all safe in a place called a village? Isn’t that what it takes to raise each of us? Get a village, we tell parents of young kids. But you know what it really meant? You probably do, because Truth likely dawns on you sooner than me, and I’ve been anesthetized by years of glittery, green-and-red Christmas wrapping, so this just dawned on me last week: No rooms at the inn meant a woman, on the edge of giving birth, along with her possibly very unprepared attendant of a husband, had nowhere to live. Were rendered homeless in the very hours that she was supposed to… and this is the kicker… birth God into this world.

I don’t know why, but the severity of the situation struck me this year. It struck me in a way that it hasn’t before. Away in a manger, no crib for a bed, we sing. The tune is sweet and peaceful, the passed-down image so serene, the faces always drawn peacefully in cards or sculpted in plastic on glowing lawn ornaments. Mary, never swollen. Mary, always thin-nosed, usually beige-skinned, hands in prayer, kneeling already, like she already has core strength, like she hasn’t torn, as so many first-time birthers do, like she doesn’t have a hundred tiny busted capillaries around her tenderest opening. As the stars twinkled above her and her babe.

When the Sunday school teacher turned the fragile pages of the decades-old coloring book, turned them so gently, so delicately, because they were floppy as bunny ears but thin as old newspaper, I just kept thinking: Wow, this is far from perfect.

And so is this world. Geopolitical strife. Our aging, aching bodies. Your neighbor’s passive aggressive notes about your failure to do lawncare correctly. I’ve been fretting about it, the imperfectness, the sorrow, the impermanence of this life, and channeling all that soupy grief into the fact that I have no nice dishware for Christmas dinner. (Seriously, I’ve been an adult for four-plus decades, and I don’t own a platter upon which to put a bunch of green beans.)

My own births were an attempt at perfect. Hypnotherapy audio recordings. A typed-up birth plan. A temperature-controlled birthing location with beds and zero cows, with an expert licensed midwife and a doctor on call. Zero sheep too. Chickens? F, no. Nary a lain egg. The only life-form laying something was me.

This world is far from perfect, but I at least wanted my child’s entry into the world to be so.

But perfect wasn’t even necessary for God. (And I realize I’ve just dropped the G-word twice now, so if you need a synonym, feel free to use Light, Divinity, Love.) That’s what the Christmas story reminds me of this year: Perfect was not necessary for God. When we rage against imperfection, we’re raging against the conditions under which God came to us.

Maybe God even delights in coming into the least perfect situations, brings Perfect Love to it. The scrappy stable of stinky animals. The bed where cow chow also lays. The Christmas dinner with paper plates.

Which means Love can be born inside the messy, sometimes shallow, often forgetful, anxious stable of my self, too. Cow cud and too much online-scrolling and all.

Merry Christmas, friends.