Choosing our Pageant Stories

Dear People of Christ Church,
The Christmas Pageant returns to Sunday this week! 10am, all the sheep, goats, angels, innkeepers and magi lead us into the Christmas story. A few weeks ago I heard the cartoonist Alison Bechdel (most recently author of the truly marvelous graphic memoirs Are you My Mother and Fun Home) on the radio show The Takeaway. She was talking about the importance of stories to help us be ourselves—she said they help “organize our thinking.” Stories are what we tell ourselves to remember who we are, to know where we are going, to frame where we have been. She was talking about the post-election world: she needs the characters in her comics, like friends.
Sometimes, of course, stories can get in our way. If you’re wailing about some failure on someone else’s part or some seemingly deadly inadequacy of your own, chances are good that you have developed a narrative that has very little to do with reality. You have, perhaps, lectured yourself for being a hopeless idiot (you’re probably not completely hopeless). You have, perhaps, dismissed another person as incapable of compassion or sensitivity (they may, in fact, be able to muster just a little, once in a while). A Buddhist-influenced spiritual director I had once was always telling me, “Drop the story line” as a way of getting underneath my own judgmental feelings to help me reflect on what was really happening. When someone forgets your birthday, you get angry. It’s one thing, though, to be angry about one particular sadness and another thing to dismiss that person completely as a selfish monster who cares only about themselves and actively wants you to feel bad.

It’s human nature to create stories; we have narrative minds. That’s why it’s so important to be aware of our stories and choose them wisely. This brings me back to the Christmas pageant. Yes, a fun way to invite our kids into the center of our community. Yes, it’s a way to bring out performance and joy and creativity.  It’s deeper than that, though. Seeing our own kids as Mary and Joseph and being face to face with Jesus with animals and chaos all around—that gets us into the story on a profoundly different level than just hearing the words.

The pageant smashes the whole story together—Joseph’s dream (the Gospel that’s actually assigned for Sunday) is in Matthew, which also gives us the magi. Luke has shepherds, magnificat, and no room at the inn. Joseph listens to his dreams. The innkeeper finds space. The magi bring gifts that symbolize power and kingship (gold and frankincense) but also death (myrrh for anointing  a dead body). Mary sings about a God who comes to the help of those who are poor and suffering, not those who are rich and already have plenty. Any one of those stories could feed your spirit for a year, and there they all are all at once!

The Christmas story is about possibility, solidarity, joy, and love.
Definitely words I want to write my story with.

Blessings,
Sara+