I love the Christmas story. I really do. I love the carols, the music, the centuries of medieval and Renaissance art, the legends, the imagery. As a feminist, I have to cringe my way through some of the readings and try to re-frame it all, yet it's still there, part of my life, my spiritual DNA, the holy music that surges through my veins.
A few new and old considerations made their way through me the last few days. A new one: really imagining the dirt, pain, mess and grime surrounding an outdoor birth two thousand years ago. Mary's robes couldn't possibly have been jewel tone blue, or her demeanor "meek and mild," as she gave birth under the stars or the dusty roof of a shed or cave. Let's hope the holy couple found a few women willing to boil water and help as midwives. Let's hope someone gave them rags to use for swaddling and diapers. Let's hope that (as the current joke going around the internet puts it) someone brought the equivalent of a hot dish to feed the couple for a few days, and clean water to refresh the exhausted mother and bathe the baby.
The old consideration (and this has been on my mind for decades): is there a parallel universe somewhere, where prophets foretell the birth of a wise girl child? Where her birth and life are celebrated for thousands of years in song, art, myths, peals of bells, and religious liturgies? I look at so many of my wise female friends, and in my heart, the Christmas story extends to them, to me, to all women. Somewhere in the heavens, the angels were singing when we were born, too.
