Excerpt from The Link: December 1971, the Manger Mouse, What if They Never Hear, “I’m Staying in the Ministry
I have walked through the Christmas story time and time again, looking for anything that might have been missed. It seemed that all had been discovered. Music, art, and literature have always been busy in the manger scene. I have wondered whether anything at all could possibly have been missed. The sheep have been saved the donkey, the cattle every creche on our mantels has seen to that. Drama has presented Mary, Joseph, the Babe, angels, kings, and wise men, to which every Sunday school superintendent will attest. Specially to the wrapping of innumerable turbans and the draping of outsized robes Everything gets into the act.
St. Luke said it best, of course, but might not a watcher yet find something unreported from that night of nights? I thought it likely, so I pried into every corner, of the stable, peering here, listening there, and then suddenly, I saw in the corner of that manger What had been missing for centuries, poetry-wise. There I caught two periods of midnight looking out through a window in the straw where a mouse has been watching Christmas for two thousand years.
Surely, you might suggest, a mouse is too small a creature to botherwith in the light of the Christmas scene. But wait. There was a time back in Second Kings, when Hezekiah was ruler of Jerusalem, that mice saved part of our heritage.
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