To be perfectly honest, I do not really know if the Christmas story really happened the way it is described in most church Christmas pageants. In fact, the story doesn’t hold up too well to rational scrutiny.
The Wise Ones are supposedly following a star, but end up in Jerusalem, not Bethlehem. The name of the child is supposed to be “Immanuel,” but they call him “Jesus.” The child is the supposedly the miraculous offspring of God and a virgin, but Joseph is still evoked to tie Jesus to the line of David.
It seems to me that manger scenes are not to be understood as historical facts. They are wonderful cosmic poems using paradoxical imagery to drive us deeper into our own psyche.
I like the way D. H. Lawrence said it:
“Myth is an attempt to narrate a whole human experience, of which the purpose is too deep, going too deep in the blood and soul, for mental explanation or description.”
When we look at the human condition objectively it is possible to see ourselves as cosmic accidents. From a nihilistic perspective we seem to be born of random forces and die into nothingness.
But something deep within us tells a different story. Our heart swears that we are not just isolated individuals but members of one human family. The animal within us testifies that we are cells in one ecological being. The heavy metals in our body seem to bear witness that our story really began in exploding stars in distant galaxies.
When we look at manger scenes, or Buddhist mandalas, or dancing Shiva statues we are seeing symbolic maps of our deeper and wider lives. In a manger scene there are animals and stars, family and strangers, rulers and peasants. Is this not similar to the mosaic within our own souls?
Religious symbols sometimes evoke that same strange and familiar sensation we get when looking into a campfire, or listening to a running stream, hearing the wind blow through trees or touching a rich soil. Why do Earth, Wind and Fire give us such a sense of a primordial home from which we come and to which we return?
Symbols remind us that what sometimes seems like an indifferent materialist universe has risen to consciousness in us. The symbols of the solstice remind us that, in very real sense, we are lights shining out of the darkness and that we hold the universe within our deeper and wider selves.