Georgie Blaeser rscj
Province of the United States  | Sometimes one can get a new perspective on the Scriptures by taking up one's metaphorical paint brush and giving a few dabs of extra colour here and there. I have been doing that recently with the story of the shepherds in Luke's corner of the picture and it was fun.
Shepherds of Bethlehem, rough and tough we are told, hard-headed shady characters sceptical about most things and possibly of criminal bent are however not beyond experiencing a sort of celestial “son et lumière” out there on the hillside. Whereupon, thoroughly scared and with eyes seared by the sudden vision they do what a friend of mine who, knowing nothing of the niceties of grammar or tense but a great deal about humanity, invariably terms “lost the head “(sic!). Abandoning sheep lambs and logic off those shepherds go helter skelter to Bethlehem to find the Lamb of God. Of course that was their job, looking out for new- born lambs.
Here I must point out that our shepherds are not aware of the nature of the picture in which they find themselves. No one has told them that they are racing across a canvas which is in reality a dense web of connections and interconnections, and that here nothing or almost nothing is what it seems. Their path winds through a sort of exegetic minefield. But that need not worry us and it certainly does not worry them.
On their arrival at what seemed to be the right place I think they must simply have fallen silent and ruminated, an activity (if one can call it an activity) to which shepherds are notoriously prone. And talking of ruminating I am reminded of a television documentary I watched recently on the mysterious prehistoric megaliths of Stonehenge. One of the geologists there, a shaggy bearded man rather like a shepherd himself was turning over in his hand a fragment of the rare blue stone of which the inner circle of trilithons is formed. He was, one felt, searching into the heart of that miraculous crystalline chip. His brain was probably echoing to the crash of ancient meteoric collisions and cybernetic storms and the bubbling of molten matter seething in a cosmic cauldron. Whatever he saw there must have rendered him speechless. He was silently ruminating. Which was probably all he could do considering the unimaginable provenance of that chip of stone.
It must have been something the same with the shepherds. No great talkers at the best of times, when they found themselves bending over the tiny chip of humanity in the manger they too were bereft of speech. But being no Einsteins, they didn't try to tell themselves or anyone else that here they had found their God cradled in the curve of the space-time manifold. And I'm sure they didn't even think of Adam or Abraham or Moses or David. No, they were probably thinking that the birth of any baby beggars the tongue, but to be born a Saviour and Christ the Lord, maker of the universe and everything in it, including oneself, is right off the map. The language the shepherds needed doesn't exist. So very wisely they just stood there, bent their shaggy heads and ruminated.
I don't know how long they ruminated for. One can't measure such things. But after a time, across the living silence of the cave, they would have begun to distinguish as from a distance, the muffled chime of sheep bells, and the chilly bleating of new born lambs shivering in their little silken fleeces. Then the shepherds did what everyone who has found the peace of Bethlehem must do. They turned and went home, back to their cold hillsides their dumb flocks and the humdrum of their less than perfect daily life. It was only later facing the radiant dawn that they found their tongues again. 'Glory and praise to our God' they sang at the tops of their rusty voices.
Here I have a question. What did the shepherds hear that night in the cave? Joseph was saying nothing though he was probably thinking hard. Mary was saying nothing. She was pondering in her heart. The shepherds themselves had fallen silent. And the baby, being a real baby, was certainly not talking. Not a word from anyone. How did the shepherds know they were in the right place? But apparently they did know. They were absolutely sure about it. This was the manger. This was the lamb they had come looking for.
Still. I must admit before I tidy away my paints that this little lamb can pose a bit of a problem, at least for some. Not for the shepherds. They have made the connection. They have suffered the light. They have “lost the head” and found in the manger the solution to all problems. But there could be a problem for those of us who are still blundering about in semi-darkness and a welter of mixed metaphors, and who might happen to trip over it or rather bump into it in the course of our dim speculating. To tell you the truth I'm not even sure myself what the problem is. Perhaps it's so big that one has to get on to another plane to see it at all. Maybe it's a bit like Stonehenge. You get a much better view of that from the air they say. But then perhaps it's just a baby in a manger, a small fragment of divine humanity. I don't know. But I do know that if there is a problem for any of us we're not going to solve it in the dark. That's for sure. And if we want to try to solve it we'd better do something about it, like get into the picture with the shepherds where the light is blinding. We need to abandon logic and go where tense becomes irrelevant. We need to have “lost the head”.
And…….? The future is always a surprise they say. So heaven knows where we'll all end up. Ruminating probably! Nan MacKinnon rscj
Province of Ireland - Scotland
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