Something’s missing from the traditional Nativity story. The night is silent; the stable, too silent. There are no baby’s wails, no groans from a heaving Mary. “I’m dreaming of a white Christmas” isn’t a carol about St Joseph passing out. What’s up?
When Sherlock Holmes heard that the household dog didn’t bark on the night of the crime, he deduced it was committed by someone the dog already knew. And, over time, Christian reflection has come up with various explanations for the missing sounds of Christmas.
One traditional answer is that Mary, born without sin, was spared the pains of labour, said to be one of the wages of sin. A modern, feminist interpretation is that the Nativity scene is written from a male point of view. It excludes not just a woman’s perspective but all women, other than the indispensable mother.
It’s certainly true that the traditional picture has a male bias. Scholarship suggests, for example, that there is nothing in the Gospel account that specifies that the magi were all men (or even just three).
The magi could easily have included wise women (which, not so incidentally, would conform to the Old Testament story of the Queen of Sheba, who travelled to meet Solomon and presented him with gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh).
There is also nothing in the account that excludes the presence of several women assisting the birth. It’s incredible that Joseph wouldn’t ask the shepherds to fetch some help or that no one would have done this spontaneously. Such neighbourly assistance was routine in the Middle East up till the advent of hospitals within easy reach.
Perhaps these details were excluded because they were taken for granted. The Gospel writers were, no doubt, familiar with the struggles of birth. And it would be strange if Mary had not recounted her experience during the days leading up to Pentecost, which she spent locked up with the frightened apostles. After all, she told them so many other details: her visit to Elizabeth, the manger and the presentation at the temple.
Should the blame be placed on Christian prissiness? That doesn’t fit the general earthiness of the Gospel accounts. It doesn’t fit the whole of Christian tradition, either. In the Middle Ages, both artists and popular piety paid attention to details we consider important when sharing baby stories.
Portraits of Mother and Child, as well as devotions, highlighted the baby’s weight, the complicity in the looks shared with his mother, even breastfeeding.
It seems the struggles of Christ’s birth were excluded on purpose. Given the Gospel writers’ deliberate economy of detail in all things, what artistic purpose could they have had in presenting the birth almost as the discovery of a foundling?
Maybe modern writers can give us the vital clue. Many notable authors have tried their hand at a sub-genre of the short story, with a baby at its centre.
Just as painters have often treated the subject of Mother and Child as a challenge – a staple topic through which they could express their personal vision and technique – writers as diverse as Graham Greene, Donald Barthelme and Muriel Spark have used stories about babies to create narrators and worlds that are entirely their own.
Over time, Christian reflection has come up with various explanations for the missing sounds of Christmas- Ranier Fsadni
Greene’s narrator encounters a baby in a train carriage and in his imaginary dialogue sees the smirking baby as already caged in by the self-satisfied class-based system in which it will be raised. But the story is really about the narrator’s sense of being trapped in a destiny he did not choose.
Barthelme’s narrator chaperones his own baby and, carried away by the lightheadedness of a second childhood of his own, ends up descending into a spiral of irresponsibility. And, this being Barthelme’s world, the spectacle is comic, urbane and violent.
Spark’s story is original in that the narrator is the baby itself, born in the penultimate year of the savage Great War (sharing Spark’s own birthday) and drawing strength – as though breastfeeding – from the terrible news arriving over the radio as well as the sounds of the family patter. The baby is a quintessential Sparkian woman, assimilating good and evil and cheerfully embarking upon life as though the world were new.
None of these stories are about the birth itself. They are, effectively, about rebirth. For Greene and Barthelme, the grown men gaze upon the baby and are born again, not necessarily in a good way. Spark takes the baby’s point of view but delivers the same verdict: the world will be born anew with its presence.
Could this be why Christ’s birth pangs were left out by the evangelists? Because they wanted the focus to be on how those around him were born again?
Christian history is full of stories of the drama of rebirths and their pains, as men and women were wrenched from their comfort zones and plunged into a new life.
St Paul, after two years in a dungeon, tells his captors of Christ’s birth in him and they think he’s raving. Augustine was concerned about his promising career. Francesco created scandal in Assisi. Teresa of Avila struggled with the meaning of the system of social honour in which she was raised. St John Baptist De La Salle’s stomach heaved at the disgusting table manners of the teachers he shared his meals with.
Mother Teresa had radical doubts about what she had dedicated her life to.
Maybe the messiness and sounds of birth are part of the Nativity, after all. The Gospel writers left them out so that, like the medieval artists, we could fill them in.