Welcoming Baby Jesus
Preparing our children, and ourselves
by Melanie Bettinelli
in Faith
on Wednesday, December 23, 2009 6:00 AM
We got the boxes down from the attic in time for the first Sunday of Advent. Our Advent wreath blazes on our dining room table every night at dinner and we say an extra prayer. There’s a box of Christmas picture books on the coffee table and the girls love reading all the stories and singing the songs. A wreath hangs on the front door, bought from the children at our parish school. Advent: the time to prepare.
I hadn’t yet got around to pulling our nativity scene out of the box and setting it up in the living room. Three year old Bella didn’t seem to miss it, though. She found a way to make room for the Baby Jesus in her own way.
One morning I discovered her arranging various animal magnets on the bottom panel of our refrigerator. She explained to me that all the animals were for the baby Jesus. It was an eclectic assortment of cows and ducks and horses, pandas and lions and elephants. There may have been a dinosaur or two. I smiled at the seeming conflation of Noah’s ark and the animals at the manger.
Then she returned with a little wooden step stool and a baby doll, which she set in front of the refrigerator, laying the doll on top of the stool. “Here’s a manger for you, Baby Jesus.”
On and off throughout the next week she played this very serious pretend game, talking to her doll as the Baby Jesus. She cradled Baby Jesus in her lap as she ate her breakfast. “Baby Jesus is crying,” she told me. She comforted the doll with shh-shh noises just as she sees me comfort our five-month old baby Ben.
“When Baby Jesus is hungry, I can give him some cherries. And some pomegranates. When Baby Jesus poops, I can change his diaper.” And suddenly I saw that she had grasped the essence of the verses in Matthew 25:
“For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, a stranger and you welcomed me, naked and you clothed me …”
More, she was pointing the way for me to draw closer to Jesus this season. “Unless you turn and become like children, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven.” Yes, I can become like my little child and see the face of Baby Jesus in the babies I tend.
When I nurse the hungry baby or when I spread peanut butter on bread I am feeding the hungry Baby Jesus. When I pour sippy cups of milk I am giving him a drink. When I wash and fold their clothes and then when I pull the clean clothes from the drawers and dress my babies and toddlers, when I brush their hair and put it up in piggy tails, when I change the incredibly foul diaper, he is naked and I am clothing him. When I hold them in my lap, kiss their bumps and bruises and give them hugs, I am providing him shelter.
It’s nothing new, the Church has always taught us to perform the Corporal Works of Mercy; but I tend to think that to really do it right I need to seek out strangers on the streets, serve at a homeless shelter or soup kitchen. Those are indeed good actions indeed; but I find that right here, right now, I have these little people who I sometimes treat with less kindness than the stranger in the street.
It came as a shock to me as a new mother to find that, especially in my sleep-deprived state, the new baby that I found myself bringing home from the hospital could seem to be an invader in my peaceful home. Although this little person has spent nine months growing in my womb, his face is new and strange, his habits are unnerving. Even after three years, the whiny voices and needy bodies and dirty hands can try my patience and make me question my sanity.
Read the newspaper and you will find all too many sad stories of mothers and fathers who have found it too much to welcome this little stranger and who have turned him away at the door. Sometimes it takes courage and supernatural grace to keep my cool at three in the morning, to see the face of Baby Jesus in the face of my screaming son and daughters.
This season, I am begging him to open my eyes and my heart so that I may serve them better, more patiently and lovingly and prayerfully and in stooping to serve them that I might serve him, the King who humbled himself to become a little baby.
—Melanie Bettinelli is a yawning wife and mother of three who writes from her home in Massachusetts. Read her blog at The Wine Dark Sea.
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