We can’t find the Crèche

Written by Paul Donovan

After the Mothers’ Guild ladies had put up the Christmas decorations and the big tree stood so beautifully in the atrium, we decided it was time to set up the manger scene; after all, we had to be sure that the deeper, more significant meaning of Christmas was displayed along with everything else.  That decision set off a chain reaction of frantic searching for the crèche which had somehow been misplaced.

  As it turned out, I had put the crèche in the robotics room with the intention of adding a light to illuminate the characters.  Needless to say, no light had yet been added and I hadn’t even remembered that that was my intention until we eventually found it.

The search for the crèche reminded me of one of the meditations from the Ignatian Exercises that I went through a few years ago.  One of the techniques that Ignatius uses is to ask the retreatant to imagine himself in a particular scene from the Gospels and participate in the scene as it unfolds.  I had been asked by my director to do this with the so familiar Christmas scene.  My attempts at this meditation kept ending in an extremely unsatisfactory way.  I tried being Mary or Joseph but felt too inadequate for the experience to be meaningful.  Then I tried being the donkey but that didn’t work either.  In one attempt, I decided to be the innkeeper where Mary and Joseph would arrive Christmas night.  This attempt started quite well, the town was busy as people arrived for the census and I had a lot to keep myself busy as I searched for and prepared rooms for all of the guests.  But when Mary and Joseph arrived, not only was there no room at my inn, but I was so busy that I couldn’t pay enough attention to them to realize what was going on.