The Holy Family: poor is not warm and nice

By Grant Swank

The Holy Family was poor. Really poor. Mary and Joseph were escorted to no inn room. The baby was born in a smelly barn. Not very private. The straw sticks in their stall as well as in any stall. Just because your name is "Jesus" doesn't mean that the straw doesn't poke your skin through.

Anyhow, we cradle the nativity set beneath the Christmas tree each season as if the threesome were cuddly comfy. We even put wisemen there. However, the Book tells us that the wisemen did not appear till later when the three were out of the barn and into a house. (In addition, we position three wisemen when there might have been three, but then again there might have been three dozen. The Book doesn't tell us the number; we get the notion that three fits because the men brought three different kinds of gifts).

But no matter how warm and fuzzy we make the nativity set up each year, the original tableau was sore and lonely, uncertain and no doubt frightening. After all, what do you do with the data that relates Herod's swords in search of a newborn baby boy? Scary. That's what.

How did they get the funds to make the 80 mile trip from Nazareth to Bethlehem? Only heaven knows. And what did they live on while in the House of Bread? Only heaven knows. Further, where did they get the money to escape for an uncertain time frame into the strange, southern culture — Egypt?

Poor. The Holy Family might appear middle class taken care of beneath your tree; but the original scene was anything but.

I never want to be poor.

I was once. And it's no fun. It's no fun at all. I was not young, married, one child in college, another in prison, and a third in another country. I had no sons-in-law. I had no father. My mother was 2000 miles away. I had no father-in-law. I had a mother-in-law.

I had no job except substitute teaching. My wife was substitute teaching. That meant we had no health coverage. We had small salaries tacked onto one another.

We lost our comfortable home for what I came to call "God's tin can." It was a makeshift trailer set alongside a woodsy road. The interior was dark fake wood walls and an orange carpet and drapes from the 50s. The front screen door had a screen that was busted halfway out. We were fortunate: we did have an indoor bathroom with tub and shower and running water — hot and cold. We had a refrigerator and stove. Other than that, when the Maine snowstorms came to fill up much of the space around the trailer, we were banked in for sure.

It was at that time that I lost it.

I was so devastated by the circumstances by which I lost my job — loss of a middle class salary, health plan, house with garage — that I "cracked up." There are clinical terms I could use but I'd prefer to stay with the street language on that one. It took me about an hour and a half to get it together each morning — emotionally, that is. That Christmas came and went; I don't recall much of anything. I wasn't much fun to be around. The next Christmas was the same.

Going to teach on weekday mornings was my release back into cleanliness, modernity, convenience and logical conversations with pleasant people. But after I left the classroom for the trailer, then heavy depression cloaked me in. Nighttime was horrific.

Our bedroom was bedroom, wall shelves of sorts made into a computer stand and phone lodge, storage for clothes and hideaway for everything miscellaneous. The floors creaked. The walls whistled with the night winds. The windows let in snow trim.

I would wake up mornings thinking, "We're poor." Then for the umpteenth time I'd add up our meager salaries, check out how much we paid monthly for our own health coverage — Cobra's outrageous payments, and then pinch what was left for gas and food.

My wife and I kidded ourselves on Saturdays by going around visiting mobile home sites. We walked through them. Then we'd chat with the salesman in our middle class verbiage and concepts as if we had a wallet to back it up. We didn't. The salesman didn't know that; so he was cordial and spelled out all the detail. It was only some time later that we realized that there was no way we could bring off moving into a modular. We had no land. We had no money. We had no down payment. We had — we were poor.

Sometimes there are movies and books that glamorize being poor. There is no glamour to being poor. We have a whole history of children's stories about the pleasant poor. We have some nursery rhymes about the pleasant poor. The truth is there is nothing pleasant about being poor.

And yet I know the truth.

It is that in comparison to most of the world we were not poor. We were well off compared to the orphaned millions in Africa. We were quite well to do when put alongside the discarded alley children of India — those who prostitute themselves nightly, begging in the streets, bedding down in the gutters and sometimes not seeing morning's sun.

I can't even go there. There is truthfully no way I can begin to imagine the utter poor, no matter how my Christian heart attempts to do so. There is no way. And, in fact, I have no desire to do that. Being as poor as I was for two years plus is poor enough for me. That may sound selfish, but it's really not. It's not selfish; it's self-preserving. I don't want to crack up again — ever.

Now it's Christmas. We have numerous nativity sets we've collected over the years — one special one we bartered for outside Bethlehem in the mid-60s. There's another one given us by Tanzanian missionaries — soapstone figurines. And so forth and so forth.

Some December evenings I turn on the carols and sit to look at the nativity scenes. I go from one to the other. I try to figure out the emotions and thoughts of Mary and Joseph in that first nativity set.

But there's one concept I stay away from. Is it cowardice? It is pain avoidance? Perhaps. I'm not all that strong at this point; I'll admit that. But the concept is centering upon the Holy Family — sheltering the Son of the Almighty God, the King in the line of David — being dirt poor.

I just can't dwell on that for too long a moment. It's not pleasant. It's just not pleasant at all.

© Grant Swank