When Things Get Broken

My granddaughter Lucy and I have been working a day each week at the Thousand Villages home office in Akron, PA (1), lately helping inspect, photograph, and catalog new products the organization buys from artisans from various places in the world. Last week I handled a tiny nativity scene from Peru, the characters of which are nestled inside a three-inch, hollowed-out gourd. The figures, ranging in size from ⅓ to ¾  inch, include Mary, Joseph, a lone wiseman (2), a lamb, and the baby Jesus. 

Choosing a piece of cardboard as a backdrop for a photograph, I positioned the tiny creche on a table. In the second it took to position my phone-camera, the cardboard fell forward, pushing the gourd off the table and sending it bouncing across the floor. The gourd landed undamaged, but Mary, the wiseman, and the baby Jesus all broke out, their tiny, flat forms scattered abroad. 

For the next hour or so I worked to glue the figures back into their rightful places and found the task to be exceedingly difficult--mainly because the opening in the gourd was too small to admit both fingers and figures. The tweezers one coworker found helped a bit in coaxing them into place, but the cement glue was runny and slow to set and coated everything so that Mary, the wiseman, and Joseph, now also broken out of his place, stuck to my fingers. If getting everyone appropriately back into the gourd was hard, stabilizing them once they were in place seemed impossible; each time I got one to stand, another would fall backwards into the gourd or forward onto the table where I was working. Clearly, the scene had originally been assembled outside the gourd housing and then placed inside. 

Finally and somehow, Mary, the wiseman, and Joseph remained standing straight or kneeling properly long enough to fit the tiny baby Jesus figure, glue streaming from the bottom of it, finto ts central place. For a few long minutes I held the gourd–and my breath– and then, very,very gingerly, set it on the table. The miniscule community held together with no sign of damage. I breathed.

Later in the day a coworker in high anticipation the nativity's arrival came over for a view and expressed such joy that the piece was faithful to the photograph from which it was chosen. Thank goodness you didn’t leave it in pieces, I said to myself. I had nearly given up. Several times.

Of course the world would still have turned had the little ornament shattered beyond repair. Though unique and precious, it is a prototype. Once approved, the scene will be duplicated and distributed to various Ten Thousand Village stores for purchase. The story the tiny manger scene reflects, however, is priceless, unrepeatable, irreplaceable and, as I think about it now, also very fragile–truly a nail-biter in the telling. Given the various conflicts and risks from the Annunciation to the flight to Egypt, we should wonder how it is that the most precious gift in all eternity is offered as a human being to human beings to have and to hold. We know very well that we are both breakable and liable to break things. In the words of Ebenezer Scrooge, we are mortal and liable to fall. 

The writer of Hebrews speaks of the child born to Mary as holding everything together through his powerful word, yet in some important way, we also hold him: that which was from the beginning…our hands have held, John writes as he looks back. How courageous of God to trust the only begotten son with us, Jesus’ very young brothers and sisters, to hold him and the story.

Now and forever there are assaults on and attempts to hijack this story–some accidental and some on purpose. Yet even as we are at times (ok, often) given to clumsiness and, sometimes, defiance, we’re invited to incarnate this gift of God; to house the treasure Jesus is in the fragile jars of clay we are, to bear witness to what Jesus means to the world. God knows better than we do that we won’t always do it right and stays with us when it seems impossible to fix what gets broken. But fixing the broken and out of place is his mission from the beginning and is the heart of the gospel: good news for the poor, liberty to captives, recovery of sight to the blind, release for the oppressed.

And here I have to acknowledge my contribution and bent to damage and wonder how many times my actions and inactions have broken the story in myself and others; wonder where repair may be needed even now, and how to do the tricky, messy, sometimes humbling, business of restoration.(3)

While I'm still in wonder that the broken parts of the nativity scene in the gourd actually came back together in the end, the experience has birthed in me a deeper resolve to join the blessed, restorative work of the gospel. Despite all the dangers and threats to the story every manger scene represents, the author of the story refuses absolutely to give up on it or on us. Even as we hold and carry it forward, we are held by the One represented by a ¼ inch figure sleeping in a three-inch gourd. 

1. Ten Thousand Villages is a non-profit organization whose mission is to develop partnerships with artisans in under-resourced communities, helping them earn income by bringing their handcrafted products and powerful stories to our global markets. Dan Alonso, Lucy’s dad, leads the organization. 

2. Yes, many of us are aware that the wisemen were not present in the stable but showed up some time later. Because so many of the Ten Thousand Villages manger scenes include the wisemen, a customer felt the need to register a mild complaint.  Fine, but I still don’t mind wisemen showing up in the nativity scene on my mantle. 

3. Restoring those crushed beneath the world’s system is often a dangerous business. I’m remembering that the people from Jesus’ hometown tried to throw him off a cliff the day he announced his mission.