Story of Mary and Joseph is far more human than what is told

The Boston Herald

Beverly Beckham

A friend stopped by with a book she suggested I read during Advent.

"It will open doors for you," she said and it has, although I've only just begun it.

"Two From Galilee" by Marjorie Holmes is not a new book. It was published 20 years ago. But it's new to me. So is the idea behind it.

It's a love story, my friend explained, the story of Mary and Joseph.

A love story? I was a little stunned. Never, in a lifetime of Christmases and Easters and Catholic school and Sunday school, had it occurred to me that Mary was in love with Joseph. "In love" was a phrase I'd never even heard.

Apparently Holmes hadn't heard it either. She was sitting in a church beside her teen-age daughter one Christmas Eve so close to the manger that all she could smell was hay, when it dawned on her that the Christmas story was more than just a tale.

"For the first time in my life," she writes in the book's introduction, "I realized, `Why, this really happened! On this night a long time ago, there actually was a girl having a baby far from home . . . in a manger, on the hay."

The girl was not much older than her daughter. She was a real girl with a real girl's feelings.

All my life I have pictured Mary only as the mother of God - not as a girl, not as someone's daughter, not as Joseph's wife, not as anyone's friend.

And never as her own person.

Mary was patient, good and kind, pure of heart and pure of thought. She was "chosen" because of her perfection. That's what I absorbed.

But this perfection is the thing that has distanced her.

"Hail, Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women."

She was flesh and blood, yes, but she was also divine. She was 14, but she was ageless.

Strange, isn't it? God went to all the trouble of choosing a simple, ordinary girl in a simple, pre-industrial time so that His son could walk the Earth as a common man.

The message He was sending is crystal clear: Common, ordinary people, with common, ordinary wants and needs, were so important to Him, so extraordinary in their individual uniqueness, that He chose to come through one of them and to one of them.

He could have selected a queen for His entrance. He could have been a king. Instead He became one of millions by choosing Mary, an ordinary person.

And look what man has done. Stripped her of the very thing for which she was chosen. Imposed on her what God did not. Man put the crown on Mary, painted her in gowns of gold, bejeweled her, added a halo, tidied the stable, omitted the human sounds and smells.

In pictures a holy woman in blue sits on a donkey. A solemn man in a long robe leads the way. In stories there is no room at the inn but there is a stable and a warm night and soft hay and no blood and no tears.

This is the Christmas story. But the real story is far more human.

Once upon a time there was a 14-year-old girl betrothed to a 21-year-old man she had long loved. And God sent an angel to this girl who said that she was to give birth to the promised Messiah. And the girl said, "Thy will be done."

But she must have been terrified - of having a baby, of telling Joseph, of losing his love, of shaming her family, of giving up her dreams, of being so far from home when she gave birth.

For she didn't get an exemption from hurt and fear and pain and worry and disappointment when she said, "Thy will be done." She wasn't transformed into someone else.

That's what we need to remember when we think about Christmas, when we stand before the creche and study the fragile, glass figures. Mary and Joseph were not glass. They were not symbolic inventions.

They were real people, in love, living their lives, raising a family, trying to do the will of God.

In that, they were no different from billions of other people the world over.