As a child, I gave little thought to Mary’s birth experience in the Christmas story that I heard. She shows up on the donkey, beds down in the manger for the night, pops out the Savior, and shortly thereafter kneels in a neat and tidy manger scene wearing white without a hair out of place.
It was not until I gave birth to my own child that I came to appreciate the audacity that this telling of the Christmas story displays. In a holiday where childbirth is literally the main event, the actual labor and delivery is erased. After going through one of the better childbirth experiences myself – thirty-two hours of no sleep, waiting impatiently until the contractions finally became unspeakably painful so I could go to the hospital for actual labor, six hours of excruciating physical exertion, the usual amount of tearing and stitching, and the standard several weeks of postpartum bleeding – I had a few questions about the details of this story.
Mary wasn’t, heaven forbid, in labor on that donkey, was she? If so, shouldn’t her doubling over in agony every few minutes be a standard part of pageant reenactments? Did she have a midwife, or at least the company of someone who knew what they were doing? And never mind what the wise men’s gifts were, what happened to the placenta? You’d think the placenta Mary used to nourish Jesus would be kind of a big deal.
Any storyteller knows that the details the teller chooses to include can turn the same event into completely different stories. Whose interests are represented? What details are deemed relevant versus unimportant? The story of Christmas would be very different if it were told by a culture that centralizes the experience of women. Take, for example, the part of the tale where Mary agrees to bear the Son of God. The current tale goes out of its way to tell us how Mary’s husband reacts to his wife’s miraculous pregnancy – he even gets a divine visitation to soothe his ruffled feathers – but what about the details that are relevant to her? The angel’s notification is missing a few things. The start of the pregnancy being itself a miracle, all bets are off regarding how the rest of it will go. One can assume that proper prenatal care will be provided from on high, but is this a please-accept-this-epidural-as-a-token-of-Our-appreciation sort of situation or a plan-to-die-in-childbirth-as-a-sacrificial-lamb kind of thing? Mary may be a devoted servant of God, but even the ultimate sacrificial lamb got a heads up with regards to his fate. The angel Gabriel is clearly willing to answer questions. Indeed, he spends a great deal of time zipping about appearing to her husband, her relatives, shepherds, wise men, etc. to make sure things go smoothly. Surely at some point during the nine months, he’d think to fill Mary in on the details of the actual birth. Should she be looking for a midwife who has led a particularly saintly life, or will the angels be handling the birth logistics? Will painful labor still be part of her pregnancy, and if so should she do anything special to make her spilling blood into a sacrifice? And what should be done with that placenta? Even without any other context, it is obvious from the details of the story alone that it was not written by or for people who had experienced childbirth.
In storytelling, the author’s worldview, whether real or adopted for the story, is visible in the shadows cast by the details they choose. Are all five senses relevant? Is darkness associated with good or evil? Is intercourse described as penetration or envelopment? Is the schema for conception that of the man plowing his seed in the woman’s passive earth, the vamp sucking a man’s juices out of him, or a partnership where a sperm seeks out an egg that takes an active role in reeling it in?
The awesome power of how we choose to tell stories didn’t fully strike me until I became an author myself. Starting to put words to paper for a new book is somewhat intimidating. I can do literally anything to the characters. Their lives, experiences, interactions, and emotions are completely in my hands. Going over my plot outline actually involves a fair bit of wrestling with my conscience. These might not be real people, but nonetheless, do I really have the heart to do anything that bad to them?
Telling real stories, or even mythical ones, on the surface seems more constrained. After all, we are theoretically limited by actual events. But one of the things I learned from writing is that the overall outline of the plot does far less to shape the story, certainly to shape the reader’s experience, than the myriad of tiny decisions about the details. The unadorned plot is that egg and sperm ended up in the same place at the same time to create a child. The End. But that’s not the story of a child’s conception that anyone would expect a writer to tell. Instead, we expect stories about what it means, it’s implications and connection to other events. That space, the space between an event and the interpretations of it, is as immense as the space between the nuclei of atoms. At first glance, there seems to be no space at all, but diving deep we discover that there is almost nothing but space.
We cannot tell the full story of any event – it is beyond our power to describe the movement of every single atom, much less all the conscious and unconscious thoughts of the participants – so we instead pick and choose the tiniest fractions of details to stitch together into something that our brains can grasp. That is what makes narratives so powerful; they tell us what details are relevant versus what can be ignored. Perhaps the surprise, then, is not that profoundly important things get erased, but rather that cultural forces are powerful enough to get us on the same page as often as we are. Even more remarkable is the power of culture to elevate one story to the only true story and to make incredible all the other stories that could be constructed from the same event. Why is it, for example, that children who read Christmas stories today learn what frankincense and myrrh are, but not that the baby Jesus would have been nourished by a placenta and (presumably) breast milk regardless of whether or not his parents got that meal at the inn? Why does Christianity revere the story of miraculous loaves and fishes but not the miracle of Mary spontaneously producing milk? The stories that we do not tell say as much about us as the stories that we do.
I do not make these points in order to start a trend of decorating Christmas trees with little plush placenta ornaments or some such. I merely point out, as I also do in my fiction writing, that there is nothing inevitable about the way that we organize our society and explain our world. We human beings put a remarkable amount of effort into creating stories that try to use some sort of natural or divine fact to justify why human relations are organized as they are. What tends to go unnoticed is that those same natural (and even divine) facts could just as plausibly legitimize a completely different arrangement. It is in exploring those alternatives that we see our own traditions in a new light and understand better who they serve – and who they can be made to serve better. Is there really any reason for cutting Mary’s experience so ruthlessly out of theweeks and weeksof Christmas celebrations? One need not abandon the faith to consider that it might make sense to put a higher priority on honoring those who experience exactly what Mary experienced than on waiting for Santa. What else might contrasting stories have to teach us about ourselves?
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