Feed the Baby

Glimmers

On the occasion of Christmas, 2010

I searched for her name several times in my foggy memory over the past several days. She was a part of my clinical pastoral education residency group at the University of Tennessee Medical Center in 1993-1994. I was remembering her in the context of Christmas’ soon arrival as I thought about something she had said about the same time of year in 1993. It fell to her as the chaplain on-call for the day to deliver a brief devotional message in the hospital chapel on the Friday before the Christmas break.

I could have looked it up, I suppose. I still have all the evaluations for the residency in my files and the group members are included, but I stubbornly resisted. Today, as I donned my sweats for my morning walk, her name suddenly popped into my head. Shelly. Shelly was an Episcopal priest in her forties, with nearly black hair and piercing blue eyes. She typically wore a white clerical blouse with a clerical collar and a skirt. Most often she wore a red blazer with it.

Shelly had suffered a stroke years earlier and with a great deal of determination and effort, she had recovered most of what she had lost. What remained was a bit of aphasia. She spoke slowly and deliberately and it took a bit of work to put her thoughts into words. “Wait, wait,” she would say when someone gave her a phone number to call. She would ask the caller to slow down and she would write it down and read it back to them to make sure she had recorded it accurately.

In her Christmas message, she re-told the ancient account of Mary and Joseph and the birth of Jesus. She talked of how God loved us and reached down to us, came to us in the form of an infant. It was all lovely and wondrous, she said, but it also required something of no small cost to Mary and Joseph. Babies have to be fed. This one was no exception. He would not survive, would not grow, would not speak and would not have amazed the hearers in Temple at age twelve had he not been nurtured and fed. He would not have performed any miracles or delivered the Sermon on the Mount. He would not have died on a cross or been raised from the dead, as Christians believe, had they not fed the baby.

Song after song this Christmas season reference this special, “most wonderful time of the year,” and it truly is wonderful. People smile easily, ask about other’s families and if they will get to see them over the holidays. And even though it is sometimes characterized by economic over-indulgence, it is just as often characterized by dropping money in red kettles, adopting an angel on a tree, feeding the hungry and Toys for Tots. Why can’t this Christmas kind of living and giving last all year? Shelly delivered the zinger with the answer right at the end of her Christmas message. “You’ve got to feed that baby.”

Merry Christmas

Jerald