Eating Christmas
At year end, the world begins a meal
cooked up by old gospel chefs, a gourmet feast.
Here are the ingredients familiar to all:
ONE wildman in wilderness (call him John)
munching on grasshoppers
shouting for change
washing up those willing in a creek;
ONE young teenage mother-to-be named Mary;
ONE no-account descendant of David
the likely disgruntled fiancé
yet father-to-be named Joseph from
ONE dusty backwater town–
a bump on a knot that mattered not–
named Nazareth, lost in
ONE tiny twig of a country
whose back is broken
by an insatiable superpower;
ONE angel named Gabriel
with the persuasive pitch of a used camel cart salesman
joined by a throng of celestial outsiders;
ONE little cluster of second-class citizen shepherds
tending clumps of woolly sheep;
ONE little town of Bethlehem; at
ONE rickety shed, all mixed in
with supposedly friendly beasts; and finally,
ONE little baby boy.
Though this is removed from the oven,
chilled and served for two thousand years
in bold recitatives, bright arias
and sweet carols, poignant prayers,
triumphal trumpets, and thoughtful meditations–
unless all this is chewed over slowly–
these characters, creatures, and communities
at the fringe, the margins, the periphery,
all meek and lowly outsiders–
it’s a recipe still difficult to digest.
– Angus Watkins