The Littlest Angel
One of the things I read every day is the blog of a Unitarian minister in Massachusettes, PeaceBang. Reading her post of her Christmas Eve sermon about the story The Little Drummer Boy, I suddenly found tears running down my face. Are they tears of grief? Tears of release? Tears of pity? They come from somewhere deep within. They are tears, I think, of yearning.
My own favorite Christmas story is The Littlest Angel, about a young boy who dies and finds himself not fitting in in Heaven at all: he can't sing, he can't fly, he swings on the pearly gate, he is constantly losing his halo. And more than that he misses his family-his mother and father, his dog and his friends. Then he meets a wonderful kind young angel who helps him get his box of precious treasures to remind him of home: a broken dog collar that once belonged to his loyal pet, a couple of pretty rocks he found on the riverbank with friends, a butterfly, some string... It is a box of utterly ordinary, earthly things.
And then comes the day that God's Child is to be born. The angels bring gifts upon gifts, each shinier and more wonderful than the last. But the little angel has nothing to give. Nothing shiny and marvelous. He so wants to give a gift, though, that in the end he gives Jesus his box of precious things. It sits on the gleaming pile of presents from the angels looking shabby and shameful, and the boy angel runs and hides, fearing God's wrath at being so insulted.
But God knows what is in our hearts, and what a child, God's own Child, will treasure. God chooses that box of ordinary things as the most precious gift of all. God lifts up that unsightly box and makes it glow with celestial light, setting it over Bethlehem to be the guiding Star.
I think my tears come from wanting to believe that. From wanting desperately to believe that God could treasure me and my poor, shabby gifts. That is the message of The Little Drummer Boy, too, is it not? That if we give God our love, in whatever form that love can take, that the giving of that love is what makes it a worthy gift, no matter how meager it seems to us in the giving.
Merry Christmas, PeaceBang. Thank you for being one of the guideposts in my own journey across the desert to find God newly born and full of promise.
Nezuko
My own favorite Christmas story is The Littlest Angel, about a young boy who dies and finds himself not fitting in in Heaven at all: he can't sing, he can't fly, he swings on the pearly gate, he is constantly losing his halo. And more than that he misses his family-his mother and father, his dog and his friends. Then he meets a wonderful kind young angel who helps him get his box of precious treasures to remind him of home: a broken dog collar that once belonged to his loyal pet, a couple of pretty rocks he found on the riverbank with friends, a butterfly, some string... It is a box of utterly ordinary, earthly things.
And then comes the day that God's Child is to be born. The angels bring gifts upon gifts, each shinier and more wonderful than the last. But the little angel has nothing to give. Nothing shiny and marvelous. He so wants to give a gift, though, that in the end he gives Jesus his box of precious things. It sits on the gleaming pile of presents from the angels looking shabby and shameful, and the boy angel runs and hides, fearing God's wrath at being so insulted.
But God knows what is in our hearts, and what a child, God's own Child, will treasure. God chooses that box of ordinary things as the most precious gift of all. God lifts up that unsightly box and makes it glow with celestial light, setting it over Bethlehem to be the guiding Star.
I think my tears come from wanting to believe that. From wanting desperately to believe that God could treasure me and my poor, shabby gifts. That is the message of The Little Drummer Boy, too, is it not? That if we give God our love, in whatever form that love can take, that the giving of that love is what makes it a worthy gift, no matter how meager it seems to us in the giving.
Merry Christmas, PeaceBang. Thank you for being one of the guideposts in my own journey across the desert to find God newly born and full of promise.
Nezuko