Another Christmas Story

 Bernadette Roberts

I want to tell you a little story. One Christmas Eve a family was going to go out to Midnight Mass. The mother went with the kids because the dad would not go; he was not a believer. Christianity didn’t make any sense to him, that God could be incarnate did not make any sense to him.  It was a freezing night, and there was a warning out for an even worse freeze to come during the night. After the family had left for Mass, the father went out to close the barn doors and see that all the animals were safely in.  Just outside the barn, he came upon a bunch of birds huddled together, already half frozen.  He felt sorry for them and he thought, “I’ve got to get them into the barn so they won’t freeze to death.”  As he approached them, however, they were terrified of the big human being, terrified.  They flapped and fluttered, and he couldn’t get hold of them.  It hurt him to think of those little things having to be out there freezing to death.  

They struggled terribly, even though they were half frozen and he thought, “How can I get them in to safety?”  Then something dawned on him.  He thought, “Though I want to save them – they are afraid of me.  I can’t save them because they are afraid of me, but if I became a bird, I could communicate with them and lead them into the barn.”  The meaning of this suddenly hit him. To be able to communicate and get people not to be afraid, to get them to really see, you have to become one of them. The story goes on that, afterward, he took crumbs and made a trail into the barn so the birds were safe and the story had a happy ending. It is a good story because it gives us a nice insight into the Incarnation and what that was all about. It was God communicating with us in our own terms, being one of us.  You can’t have any better understanding than that. 

(Told at an Essence of Christian Mysticism retreat)

[This story was also told by Paul Harvey in his radio broadcast, The Rest of the Story. Here is a Youtube video of that broadcast. ]