Soul Food: Week of December 24, 2023

“Soul Food” is a regularly updated calendar of meditations sometimes questioning conventional wisdom & often suggesting eternal values …

Sunday-Saturday: The shepherds came in [to the cave the Angels had said the Messiah was just born], the cowls down off their heads. Their hair was long & ringleted, the beards trembled with murmured prayer, the hands were clasped piously before their chests. In the flickering yellow light of the oil lamp, they saw the child-mother, seated on straw. …looking over the side of an old manger … Without looking up, the mother knew that they were [also] trying to see her precious baby, so she stuck a finger into the white cloth & pulled it away from the infant’s face.

The men looked, with mouths open, & fell to their knees. They adored the baby & thanked him for coming to save the nation … Joseph, standing aside, was amazed that so many strangers now knew the secret.

The scene in a chilly manger, warmed by the bodies & breathing of the animals, was, to the shepherds, closer to their hearts than if the Messiah had come on a big cloud with trumpeting angels [as they had been taught.] They understood babies, and they understood animals, and they murmured with delight that God would see fit to come to earth in an abode only slightly less worthy than their own homes in the hills.

Excerpted from Jim Bishop’s “The Day Christ Was Born”

Davd Soul