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Christmas
The following is from ‘Whistling in the Dark’
by Frederick Buechner
The lovely old carols played and replayed till their He only just saw it. He whose business it is above
effect is like a dentist’s drill or a jack hammer, the everything else to have an eye for such things is
bathetic banalities of the pulpit and the chilling all but blind in that eye. He who on his best days
commercialism of almost everything else, people believes that everything that is most precious
spending money they can’t afford on presents you anywhere comes from that manger might easily
neither need nor want, “Rudolph the Red-Nosed have gone home to bed never knowing that he had
Reindeer,” the plastic tree, the cornball crèche, the himself just been in the manger. The world is the
Hallmark Virgin. Yet for all our efforts, we’ve never manger. It is only by grace that he happens to see
quite managed to ruin it. That in itself is part of the this other part of the miracle.
miracle, a part you can see. Most of the miracle
you can’t see, or don’t. Christmas itself is by grace. It could never have
survived our own blindness and depredations
The young clergyman and his wife do all the things otherwise. It could never have happened
you do on Christmas Eve. They string the lights otherwise. Perhaps it is the very wildness and
and hang the ornaments. They supervise the strangeness of the grace that has led us to try to
hanging of the stockings. They tuck in the children. tame it. We have tried to make it habitable.
Just as they’re about to fall exhausted into bed, We have roofed it in and furnished it. We have
the husband remembers his neighbour’s sheep. reduced it to an occasion we feel at home with, at
The man asked him to feed them for him while he best a touching and beautiful occasion, at worst a
was away, and in the press of other matters that trite and cloying one. But if the Christmas event in
night he forgot all about them. So down the hill itself is indeed—as a matter of cold, hard fact—all
he goes through knee-deep snow. He gets two it’s cracked up to be, then even at best our efforts
bales of hay from the barn and carries them out are misleading.
to the shed. There’s a forty-watt bulb hanging by
its cord from the low roof, and he lights it. The The Word become flesh. Ultimate Mystery
sheep huddle in a corner watching as he snaps the born with a skull you could crush one-handed.
baling twine, shakes the squares of hay apart and Incarnation. It is not tame. It is not touching. It is
starts scattering it. Then they come bumbling and not beautiful. It is uninhabitable terror. It is
shoving to get at it with their foolish, mild faces, unthinkable darkness riven with unbearable light.
the puffs of their breath showing in the air. He is Agonized laboring led to it, vast upheavals of
reaching to turn off the bulb and leave when sud- intergalactic space, time split apart, a wrenching
denly he realizes where he is. The winter darkness. and tearing of the very sinews of reality itself. You
The glimmer of light. The smell of the hay and can only cover your eyes and shudder before it,
the sound of the animals eating. Where he is, of before this: “God of God, Light of Light, very God
course, is the manger. of very God…who for us and for our salvation,” as
the Nicene Creed puts it, “came down from
heaven.”
Came down. Only then do we dare uncover
Image: our eyes and see what we can see. It is the
A Flock Of Sheep In A Barn Resurrection and the Life she holds in her arms.
Charles Emile Jacque It is the bitterness of death he takes at her breast.
