Principal’s Connection                Gold, Circumstance and Mud                December 24, 2007

It was the week before Christmas. A friend of mine shared that he had been babysitting with his four children. To John babysitting meant reading the paper while the kids messed up the house. Only that day he explained he wasn’t reading. He had been troubled by how every page in the paper reminded him that only six days remained to rush out and buy what no one could afford and nobody needed. He had been wondering what did the glitter and rush have to do with the birth of Christ.

Then John told me that one of the kids knocked on the door to the study. He could hear Nancy’s voice, “Daddy, we have a play to put on. Do you want to see it?”

He didn’t but he had fatherly responsibilities so he followed her into the living room. Right away he told me he could tell it was a Christmas play for at the foot of the piano stool was a lighted flashlight wrapped in swaddling clothes lying in a shoe box.

Rex (age 6) came in wearing John’s bathrobe and carrying a mop handle. He sat on the stool, looked at the flashlight. Nancy (10) draped a sheet over her head, stood behind Rex and began, “I’m Mary and this boy is Joseph. Usually in this play Joseph stands up and Mary sits down. But Mary sitting down is taller than Joseph standing up so we thought that it looked better this way.”

Enter Trudy (4) at a full run. She never has learned to walk. There were pillowcases over her arms. She spread them wide and said only, “I’m an angel.”

Then came Anne (8). John knew right away she represented a wise man. In the first place she moved like she was riding a camel (she had on her mother’s high heels). She was bedecked with all the jewelry available. On a pillow she carried three items, undoubtedly gold, frankincense, and myrrh.

She undulated across the room, bowed to the flashlight, to Mary and Joseph, to the angel, and to her dad (John) and then announced, “I am all three wise men. I bring precious gifts: gold, circumstance, and mud.”

That was all. The play was over. John said he didn’t laugh. He prayed. How near the truth Anne was! We come at Christmas burdened down with gold—the showy gifts and the decorated tree. Under the circumstances we can do no other: circumstances of our time and place and custom. And it seems a bit like mud when we think of it.

But John said he beamed at the shining faces of his children, as their audience of one applauded them, and remembered that a Child showed us how things can be transformed. John said he remembered that this Child came into a material world and in so doing eternally blessed the material. He accepted the circumstances, imperfect and frustrating, into which He was born, and thereby infused them with the divine. And as for the mud—to you and me it may be something to sweep off the rug, but to all children it is something to build with.

Children see through the tinsel and our bad habits and the earthly, to the love which, in them all, strains for expression, like John’s children. What a blessing our children are to us at Christmas and all the time.

Dr. Falkner