As They Lay: A Christmas Tale

Before the angel came, long before, they lay in the field, on a cold winter’s night, and wondered.

The world is a cold place regardless of the season, of the weather, the climate. People are apt mostly to worry about their own lives, even those charged with watching over others. These huddled few, though, these shepherds, they had spent long hours discussing things, and they had always been a little different.

Just imagine the life. Watching over sheep, all day, every day.

We will give these shepherds names, not the names they would have had, not names they would have known, but names you will recognize, for your benefit: Frank, Mel, Joe.

Frank could be taciturn. He could be cold, but there was no one who knew his work better than he did. He always thought, regardless of what others did, that it couldn’t hurt to sing for the sheep. Mel was the wild one. If you knew him it was as likely you would love him as think him strange, and it mattered how you encountered him if it mattered at all. Joe, he was the one who thought most deeply, who was most passionate, of the three, who was most easily dismissed by outsiders, but who was the best of them.

They were of varying ages, Mel the oldest, all of them driven from the mass of humanity into the field, and yet they had somehow retained their faith in the world. They held to it for a simple enough reason, and that was the idea of God. For them, God did not make things happen. It didn’t even matter if God had made the world or would ever appear in it, if God took an interest in a single life from throughout the vast length of human history.

Nothing so crass. Not even the idea of God as some perfect being, some example to strive toward. Not a hope for a change one way or another. They led simple lives that were by and large the same from day to day, year to year, and they saw little point in changing their fate.

They saw God as something good.

That night, when the angel came and called to them, it was certainly strange. They knew all about the Hebrew faith. They knew about angels, no matter how rare. They had never expected to see one. When it appeared, the angel blared like a trumpet. The sheep scattered, startled. They were in truth a little annoyed.

But they knew. 

The three of them, they never uttered a word to each other. They left the field immediately, and sought out the manger. The child, when they saw him, was crying. 

Frank began to sing, Mel asked to hold him, and Joe spoke with the parents, about nothing in particular, just how things were going.  They didn’t say a word about God, about destiny, the future, what the child would become. And none of them had ever been happier.

Later, when they were back in the field, gathering the flock, silent, they thought how good it had been. They were glad. Their lives continued as they had always been. Nothing changed. They never left the field, or the sheep, again.

And yet they were happier, knowing this child had entered the world.