The Second Day of Christmas: Behold

Our “Weihnachtsengel” (Christmas Angel) with the manger scene.

Dear Fellow Travelers,

Hannah is adamant that the figures in the manger scene in our Christmas Angel are Mama, Papa and Hannah. No Joseph, Mary, and Jesus baby. No way. I have tried to dissuade her from this fantasy, mostly because it disturbs the way I want to experience the scene. But that is why I use the word adamant above: Hannah simply reasserts who is who, sometimes accompanied by “Nein!”

As I was talking with Almut about this, she suggested that Hannah had a point. “One can see one self in the scene,” she said. Then the light clicked on, “Of course! It is like the Jesuit ‘Imaginative Prayer’ practice of projecting yourself into the story” I replied. “Nein, it is deeper,” she said. “We really are Joseph and Mary and Jesus.” Then I grasped it (however faintly): Not delusions of grandeur, but the vision of the holy in all the ordinary, even in our own ordinary stories. The thing that makes our family sacred (not metaphor…