A Watching Star

Mack Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

A Watching Star

On Christmas Eve in Bethlehem the Holy Family were put through a rough time, but they were spared moderns on MyMyMyFaceSpaceBook telling them how they got it all wrong: that science proves the Star could not have been there at that time, or that the Holy Family were cave-dwellers, or that someone’s misreading of this text or that inscription conclusively proves that, oh, a species of now-extinct giant hamsters, not oxen, were present.

Someone once said of a 2,000-year-old teaching “Well, maybe we’ve gotten it wrong for 2,000 years.”

How casually old stories and transcendent truths are tossed away.

No one has yet proposed that the shepherds weren’t present on that Night of all nights. They saw a Star and angels, not tweets or twerks, and in obedience to God, not to fashion, walked across the hills to see and to worship.

The conventions of advertising tell us that Christmas is only about really nice houses in the middle of snowy landscapes, and that people riding about in horse-drawn sleighs visit each other while laden with Orwellian telescreens and bottles of liquids labeled champagne (of the sort aged in railway tank cars for days), while some holly and lights and impossibly happy children hang about looking enthusiastically merry. Everyone, by the script, is home for the holidays.

In reality, on Christmas Eve a great many people aren’t home to hang socks on fireplace mantles. Just like the hotelier who had no room, and the shepherds watching their sheep, caretakers and guardians are out and about beneath our lesser stars: if the power fails, linemen will be out and up high in the cold and storms making it work again. Police will be on patrol because crime, too, will be on patrol, and hospitals, fire departments, railways, communications, air traffic control, and all the other necessities of a complex civilization will operating because a nation can’t simply turn off the lights for the night. Young sailors, Marines, soldiers, and airmen posted from Frozenb*tt Air Force Base in North Dakota to some rocky pit in Afghanistan must be awake and doing.

They are all our watchers, making our Christmas safe, and may that eternal Star shine upon them always.

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