tlf news Vol. vii #3 December, 1986


Slouching Toward Bethlehem






We have just completed the first year of our ongoing project of dramatizing the Gospels. As we dig into the second Christmas cycle of ĦEl Evangelio en vivo!, I find myself drifting back a dozen years ago to Christmas Eve in the Andes.

The night was sparklingly clear and the moon silvered the whole valley and hung it from the ringing snow-caps and I remember vividly the feel of being in a Currier and Ives in spite of it being my first summer Christmas. El Vicu and I were skirting a field with a group of chattering menudos; the chapel was a warm blaze of light in the distance and the wind floated the sound of the bell around us.

Two pacers came shouting back toward us and the rest bolted forward with them, and when we came to a cross-path they insisted we go to the right instead of left toward the church. The vanguard pair was led by a young Indian woman and they were translating her Quechua to the others who were jabbering back to us to hurry. Something about a family quarrel and the padres should come and--. My fledgling Spanish was useless in this multi-lingual babble; I tagged along to watch and to breathe in the peace of the night.

The tribe turned into a gate in an adobe wall and we entered a courtyard. They disappeared into the shadows ahead and El Vicu followed them. I leaned against a post, lit a cigarette and looked around.

Muffled noises issued from the multiple habitations around but they were all in deep shadow. I was aware of being surrounded by people about their normal nocturnal business, but they were lost in the shadows of the house and I was alone on this moonlightspotted stage.

Not alone. Each corner of the courtyard was occupied: ahead framing the gate, a pair of soundly-sleeping oxen; to the right behind, a burro, and in the other corner a family of alpaca. I stepped back. The post I had been leaning against was one of the supports of an arbor; the vines stretching above dappled the moonlight and created a sheltered space carpeted with filigree glass. A new space set apart from the muffled human darkness and the silvered band sleeping animals.

I know the place. I have been here before. Is it Giotto? or Fra Angélico?

I never noticed the smell of the animals before. Nor the soundtrack of coughs and groans and sighs emerging from the shadows outside the frame. The stippled carpet of light and shadow carefully and ready for the curtain to rise....

I know this place. I have been here before.

The menudos tumbled out of the shadows and through the gate and I followed along and we retraced our steps back to the cross-path and continued straight, toward the chapel. Things seemed to have been calmed down behind us but I didn't pay to much attention to the details because I was still standing in that courtyard as we quickened our pace along the path.

The kids broke into a run and the strains of quena and charango and guitar broke the spell of the stable and we rounded the corner and the brilliant halo of an incandescent bulb overpowered the silver wash as I stepped into a Peter Brueghel scene of swirling reds and yellows and blues prisming out of a base of sparkling off-white pants and flying skirts, and regrouping into a copper brown that contained all the world of color accented by shining teeth and laughing eyes and dark brows, and anchored above to a slicked-back jet-black frame. the stamps and shouts of the cueca ordered the blur and the smell of alpaca sent an intoxicating charge through the crisp night air.

We went inside to prepare for Mass. We were three concelebrating that night and to me fell the lot of reading the Gospel. It was my first Christmas as a priest and it was the first time my Spanish would be tested in the face of a large group and I was cagado.

The color and light and the music and the smell tumbled into the chapel and kaleidoscoped around the still center I created in order surreptitiously to study the text. An elbow jab signaled me my cue and I stepped into the whirl and stumbled through the first sentence and no one got straight from where the decree went forth nor who was governor in what strange-sounding place nor why it was they had to go. Then the whirl slowed and started to come into focus and the waves of Eau d'Alpaca settled into calm swells and I felt the moonlight carpet dim up around me as I described the strangers who had arrived. That was their burro sleeping up-right behind me and they came here because there was no room for them at the pensión in the village.

"And there were shepherds--"

I was intensely aware of the alpaca smell suddenly and I looked up from the page at the faces looking up at me and I choked and had to start over, slowly, very slowly to get it right.

"And there were shepherds abiding in the fields,
Keeping watch over their flocks by night."

And the smell triggered some part of the actor in me and the focus locked in on a riot of individual faces as the voices of the angel spoke very clearly to the shepherds. And I watched the scene from outside and I saw that the angel was speaking to the shepherds. The shepherds are here. These are the shepherds.

"And suddenly there was with the angel
a multitude of the heavenly hosts,
praising God and singing:
'Glory to God in the highest,
and peace on earth, good will towards men.'"

I stepped back into the role of narrator and explained how they (you) went in haste down the path across the fields to that gate in the adobe wall that opens into the courtyard where the moonlight weaves a lacy carpet under the arbor. And they (you) found Mary and Joseph and the child wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying there in the manger. And they understood because they had been there many times.

After Mass the cuecas resumed and the strains of the guitar and the charango and the quena carried the shouts and laughter through the valley. Of which latter not a small portion being occasioned by a strange gringo who couldn't tell his right foot from his left and who could never get it right which hand the handkerchief should be in. The first hints of a new day were dimming up as we made our way back along the path. I hesitated when we reached the cross-path. The kids' voices called to me to catch up so we could all get to bed and I turned homeward and trotted after them.

That was the night that ĦEl Evangelio en Vivo! was conceived.

We are far away from that night. Time is the greatest distance between any two places, and El Progreso is nearer to St. Louis that to Bolivia. We abound in pigs and chickens and burros and oxen. And dogs. But there's not a llama nor an alpaca to be seen. The shepherds are unemployed. They have no flocks; they have lost their land; they wander the streets peddling and shining shoes and looking for odd jobs; they while away the vacant hours on the street corners or in the pool halls; they pray for a winning number in the lottery.

And I step back and I look around and I see with horror that story continues.

I see Caesar's mercenary legions unleashed and the four dreaded horsemen taken to winged steeds to rain their terror from the skies. I see Caesar's puppet Herods dispatch their armies of thugs to search and destroy and to massacre the subversive children of Bethlehem and all the region roundabout while Pilate's centurions oversee the maneuvers from their helixed watchtowers, and many are they who must take the child by night with its mother and flee into Egypt.

And I hear the voice of the Great King crying out from courtyard after courtyard:

I am hungry and thirsty and my belly is bloated with pain;
I am forced to flee the thugs who raped my mother and dismembered my father and destroyed our village, and have not clothing nor shelter.
I am sick with a multitude of maladies.
My body is burning from the soldiers' scourges as I groan on the cold floor of this stinking cell.

And we feel rather silly when we reply: "Well, we can juggle." But then we glance up at the sea of faces watching us juggle. And the moonlight carpet dims up to full and the alpaca incense floats in and the shepherds listen in awe to the tidings of great joy to be shared by the whole people.

After all, even the angels have only made it up to the singing chorus.


The Oxen

Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock.
'Now they are all on their knees,'
An elder said as we sat in a flock
By the embers in hearthside ease.

We pictured the meek mild creatures where
They dwelt in their strawy pen,
Nor did it occur to one of us there
To doubt they were kneeling then.

So fair a fancy few would weave
In these years! Yet, I feel,
If someone said on Christmas Eve,
'Come; see the oxen kneel,

'In the lonely barton by yonder coomb
Our childhood used to know,'
I should go with him in the gloom,
Hoping it might be so.

--Thomas Hardy


From all of us at teatro la fragua:

Our sincere prayer for a Christmas filled with peace and joy.
And may you help bring that peace to this world of darkness in the New Year.

Peace,

Jack Warner sj

Edy Barahona
José Ramón Bardales
Reyna Yolibeth Camacho
Oscar A. Cardoza
Fredy Humberto Carranza
José Obdulio Cueva Padilla
Guillermo A. Fernández
Rigoberto Fernández
Karen García Reyes
José Ramón Inestroza
Mario Alberto Inestroza
José Edgardo Izaguirre
Alberto López Pineda
Edwin Landolfo Marin
Zoila R. Murillo
Pablo Oyuela
Carlos Ríos


Jesuit Mission Bureau, Inc.
4511 West Pine Blvd.
St. Louis MO 63108
U.S.A






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