A Christmas Prayer:
Away in Your Manger
i was raised on a farm,
on a beautiful, arid, prairie landscape.
i never grew tired, jesus, of deeply gazing
and daydreaming upon the vastness of the sky and hills
surrounding our home.
i prayed often to you, in wonder and awe,
from the arms of a giant old cottonwood tree,
a forever friend,
now dying due to winds and lightening bolts
and just age and life,
like all of us.
we had a barn, jesus,
a cool red and white barn filled with odors of barn stuff,
you know, dirt, straw, piss and poop from the years of rescuing baby calves from blizzards,
baby pigs nursing momma hog,
and a horse or two living there from time to time.
it was fun, jesus, to climb around in the barn and discover forgotten, ancient tools
of other eras and times,
sneezing the dust surely left over from the great american depression.
we had a manger.
yep. we had a genuine official manger!
my brother and sisters and cousins would leap over the manger,
vaulting over it, to show it could be done.
it was real holy, jesus, as holy as any sacred place could be…
for many years we would find momma cat hiding and giving birth to her kittens
in the manger.
i would, of course, wonder if this was like the place in which you were born.
i don’t mean to offend, but of all the moments in your life, jesus, of all the beautiful, terrifying,
tragic, brave, courageous, lonely, amazing moments the one that touches me most deeply
is that you were born in a place that is most like our soul…
dank, dark, dirty, smelly.
i never like anyone, especially some god, sniffing around my soul,
listening to the haunting whispers in my manger.
paranoid fears of shame, justified or not, overwhelms and
scares me to death…
but you came without any pretense, jesus,
without any sense of seeking to humiliate for our deepest and darkest sins,
real or imagined.
you came as a vulnerable, tender, touchable baby
in a dank, dark, dirty, smelly manager.
will we ever get it?
grace in our manger.
