Which Nativity Piece Inspires You? | A Virtual Pilgrimage of Incarnation Reflections for Advent - Week 3

Inspired by his time in a Jesuit community that prayed with the characters and items in the manager scene, Fr. Kubicki reminds us that to truly receive Jesus we must be empty of the things which would block His coming into our own hearts.

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Transcript

Back in the mid-1980s, I was the vocation director for the Jesuits of the Upper Midwest, and I lived at our novitiate in Saint Paul, Minnesota. The novice master, who was a great spiritual director, and his assistant, who was an artist — a sculptor — came up with an idea one Advent. On the First Sunday of Advent they put the names of the various figures of the nativity scene into a hat.

We had a large community, and besides the usual shepherds, kings, sheep, an ox and a donkey, Mary and Joseph and Jesus, we also had a star — and a figure that Saint Ignatius felt ought to be part of the scene: a servant girl who was there to help Mary. After drawing a name out of the hat, we were told to keep the figure we had as a secret and to pray with that figure throughout Advent.

We followed this tradition for several years, and each year I had some very interesting and providential figures with which to pray. One year I was that maidservant of Mary, and I remember reflecting on how she cared for Mary and kept her comfortable during the journey to Bethlehem. Another year, when Mary gave birth, I was the donkey.

I have to admit that while I reflected a lot on all the times that I felt stupid or foolish, in the end I was proud to have carried Mary from Nazareth to Bethlehem and to have been so close to Jesus, who was there, present in Mary’s womb. And then there was the time that I was — believe it or not — the manger.

You might be thinking, How do you pray with an inanimate object like the manger? Well, in that particular year I had been struggling a lot in my work as the vocation director — the recruiter and gatekeeper of the province of Jesuits to which I belonged. Our numbers had gone from a class of nine novices the previous year to what was going to be only two novices in the coming year.

I was feeling empty and inadequate — perhaps like the manger. If it could feel, I felt like the manger was feeling poor. I felt like a very poor place in which the newborn Son of God would be laid. And yet — and yet — he would be placed in me of all places.

I was reminded of how Jesus is willing to come to me every time that I receive him in Holy Communion. He comes to fill my emptiness and inadequacies. He came to show me that the number of Jesuits that I was able to recruit — as though it were all up to me and not a matter of his grace — wasn’t what really mattered; that I shouldn’t base my self-worth on what I could do or accomplish, on my successes.

In the end, we are all empty. And that’s not only okay, but good. Because if the manger — or if we — were filled with a lot of things, there wouldn’t be room for Jesus himself. It’s the empty hands that can receive, the empty manger that can receive the baby Jesus, and the empty heart that can receive the only real treasure: the Son of God in the flesh — today, in the Holy Eucharist.

Now there’s more to this story, because the novice master’s assistant was a sculptor. He got clay for us, and we had to make the figure that we were praying with during Advent out of that clay. Then on Christmas Eve, before we celebrated Midnight Mass, we gathered in the living room and, one by one, shared with the community what it meant for us to be the particular figure from the nativity scene during Advent.

After sharing our reflections, each of us then got up and placed our figure under the tree. Of course, not all of us were artistically inclined, and some of the figures were fairly primitive, and some were vastly out of proportion to the others.

I remember one of the sheep was so large that it was almost as tall as the stable, and we gave it the name Shamu, after the orca whale that had been in the news at that time — Shamu the sheep. All in all, those Advents and Christmas Eves were a wonderful way to prepare for the celebration of the greatest birth in human history.