Slouching Toward Bethlehem

Our local paper carries a column called, “A day like today” which lists historical events that took place on the publication date.  I’ve developed the habit of glancing over it each morning.  As I scanned the roster on July 26 the following item caught my attention:  “In 1956, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal.” 

Of course, like everyone, I immediately thought of the first page of Katzuo Ishiguro’s novel The Remains of the Day.  It reads simply, “Prologue - July 1956.”

The novel consists of a kind of diary or travelogue kept by Stevens, longtime butler of Darlington Hall, a manor house which has for centuries belonged to one of England’s aristocratic families.  The subtle irony of this opening entry lies in the aging servant’s cluelessness as to the importance of the date.  Nasser’s powerplay amounted to an affront to the United Kingdom, a gauntlet flung down at the feet of John Bull.  In the end, Prime Minister Anthony Eden, his country fatigued and impoverished by the Second World War, failed to assert English dominance.  Some historians see July 1956 as the second date cut on the tombstone of the British empire.  In other words, the story begins on the day that Stevens’ world, the world for which he has lived, the world of lords and ladies and butlers and footmen and grand country houses, ceases to exist.  The protagonist splashes through his own saga like a clueless ichthyosaurus who manages not to notice that the Jurassic has ended, the Cretacious is on the rise and the plesiosaurs are taking over.

The whole thing got me to wondering about my own opacity.  Through what epoch-making events do I walk unscathed, my denial ensuring my demise? 

Sixteenth century Flemish master Pieter Bruegel painted a canvas entitled “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.”  The picture shows a ploughman driving his team on a cliff above a busy harbor.  In the middle-distance a herdsman gazes absent-mindedly skyward as ships ply the waters behind him.  If you look carefully, you can just see a pair of legs which thrash above the waves in the lower right-hand corner.  The son of Daedalus has just paid the price of soaring pride, has lost the glorious gamble of a grab at godhood, has embodied the hope and the hopelessness of being human . . . and nobody much noticed. 

Another Bruegel, “The Numbering at Bethlehem,” portrays a busy European town at midwinter.  Children play various games, laborers frame a house, and a crowd gathers outside the local tavern which has been commandeered by the IRS.  Amidst all of this bustle a man with a saw on his shoulder leads a mantled woman on a donkey through the mob.  The incarnation arrives in the hometown of David and nobody seems aware.  “Just think!” quips George Bernanos, “The Word was made Flesh - and not a journalist in the world wrote it up!”

This train of thought raises several unsettling questions for me.

To what extent do I execute the graceful steps of a dance now devoid of meaning, moving with dignified expertise through the drawing rooms of a genteel churchmanship which no longer conveys the gospel to a world that emerged while I wasn’t looking?  Did the “colonies” of Christianity in the global south suddenly assert their independence through a vigorous and indigenous faith while the hereditary lords of Christendom lounged in the leather upholstered categories of a theology we mistook for God himself?

Have I developed such a fixation for ploughing my furrow that I failed to see the magnificently tragic fall of my fellow human being?  As a shepherd who longs to be faithful, have I focused on the 99% perfect flock before me so exculsively that I failed to hear the shriek as one sky-crazed wanderer plummeted to his death?  Doubtless he is lost, perhaps he is guilty - but perhaps he deserves my respect for getting so magnificently off-course, and doubtless he deserves my love simply for being beloved of God.

Would I recognize, in my busy religiosity, a woman big with the potential presence of Christ?  Would I see in the hard hands of a carpenter the ministry of conducting the incarnation into my midst?  In his science fiction novel A Canticle for Leibowitz author Walter Miller, Jr. has a scholar describe a passing peasant to a Catholic clergyman.  “Illiterate, superstitious, murderous.  He diseases his children.  For a few coins he would kill them.  He will sell them, anyway, when they are old enough to be useful.  Look at him, and tell me if you see the progeny of a once-mighty civilization.  What do you see?”  And without denying a single item in the previous indictment the minister replies, “The image of Christ.  What did you expect me to see?”  But if I don’t see the image of Christ in everyone, I can’t expect to see it in the one who perhaps bears it with particular power - because that one will look like all the others. 

On a day like today an empire fell.  On a day like today a failed god dared the sun and died.  On a day like today Christ came to town on the back of a donkey and the inside of a teenage girl.  What is God about in a life like mine, on a day like today?

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