For Christmas, Alex, who will be marrying Cole next summer (yay us!), gifted me three books I love and have been reading all at the same time. My favorite is My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante, the first of a four-part series that takes us through the lives of two friends, Lenu and Lila, growing up in a working-class neighborhood in Naples in the wake of the World Wars.  The book’s worth it just for the way it pulls the reader into the violence, tumult, despair, and passions of that time. Still, it’s the intense, entangled friendship of the two girls that I can’t stop thinking about– particularly how the narrative that Lenu tells of Lila defines, expands, and limits her vision of herself.

Lenu is limited—even as she moves beyond Lila to middle and high school and out of Naples to college on an academic scholarship—because she sees Lila (who teaches herself much of what Lenu is learning) as her superior in mind, body, and spirit. Lila sees Lenu’s gifts more clearly but cruelly mocks her at critical parts of Lenu’s life and goes on to make a series of colossally bad choices in her own. Neither girl’s story holds all the facts, but the narratives the girls invent about each other and themselves shape the core of who they become–creating selves truer and more real than their visible accomplishments and failures.

Reading this book this season has me thinking about the Christmas story, also one of my favorites.  All my life, I’ve loved everything about the narrative of Christ’s birth: angels telling everyone not to be afraid (seriously, ANGEL?); the young couple, the shepherds, and the magi heading to Bethlehem believing the impossible; and the birth in a simple dwelling, all backgrounded by the violence of the Roman empire.  

Over the years, my understanding of this story has changed and grown, sometimes in ways I embraced (Mary’s Magnificat!). It also, twenty-five years ago, led to my most serious crisis of faith when I read the claim of scholars investigating the historical Jesus that there was no Census around the time when Jesus was born and that the whole journey was largely an invention of the writers of Matthew and Luke, intended to tie Jesus’s birth clearly to the events and prophets of the Hebrew Bible.

Since then, I’ve read other theologians with equally plausible arguments for the story as written. I’ve noticed, too, the way we continue to lovingly embellish the story without regard for how Matthew or Luke actually told it. There’s no donkey anywhere in the Gospels until Jesus rides a colt into Jerusalem; Matthew’s story mentions three gifts but never three kings. Still, those kings and donkeys have become indispensable parts of our creches and Christmas pageants.  

And so, over the years, I’ve gradually let go of my need for certainty about what is historical event and what is parable in the Christmas story. As in My Brilliant Friend, I’ve come to understand that the narratives we create about others and ourselves are never completely factual recordings of exactly what happened. They also often contain the truth of things in a way that a listing of the facts never could.  

Just as Lenu and Lila tell differing stories about their lives, the four canonical Gospels contain different stories of Jesus’s life.  Mark and John, for example, ignore Jesus’s birth and childhood altogether.  Each writer shares unique stories about Jesus and places similar teachings and events differently. The Gospel writers were far less interested in constructing an exact chronological history than in exploring the essential, profound mystery of how God, through Jesus, lived and acted among us.  

It may be that Joseph and Mary escaped to Egypt as Herod’s soldiers slaughtered other parents’ small ones, or it may be that Matthew was remembering and recreating for his own time and place the story of the slaughter of innocent children in Egypt as the Israelites escaped over the Red Sea. It may be that Mary said the words of the Magnificat to her cousin Elizabeth; it may be that Luke revisited the song of Hannah, giving it to Mary to sing again.   Either way, core truths about the great mystery of Jesus’s birth are revealed

Truths about what it means to hope when hope seems impossible. The truth that terrible suffering continues to happen in this world–suffering that is sometimes random but too often caused by powerful people careless of the lives of other human beings. Truths about the way God’s compassion and justice always bend toward those on society’s margins.

The story of Christ’s birth invites us to let go of the fear that binds us, like Lenu and Lila, to what we see as facts that are too often, instead, a lesser vision of who we are and what is possible.  It invites us, like Mary, to open ourselves to the presence of the unknowable holy: to say yes when that voice one day asks us to believe that we are beloved and blessed, able to hold the impossible within the limits of our beings.

And if we say yes, the Christmas story has the power to start us on our way–with Mary and Joseph, the shepherds, and countless magi–to Bethlehem, that backwater town where a young shepherd was once tagged as king, where one thousand years later, a baby was born who grew to be the One whose story is all we need to save us from ourselves,  all we need of Love.