The Christ Baby

During every Christmas season I read my very-favorite-of-all short story, The Littlest Orphan and the Christ Baby by Margaret E. Sangster.  It moved me enormously the first time I read it several years ago, and it moves me still.  It moved me again last night.

Beautifully written, it’s the story of John, who never knew his mother or the circumstances of his birth.  He knows only that he’s lived, always, in the orphanage, among other boys who don’t have their mothers either.  However, some of them remember when they did, and John loves to hear their stories of other, better times.  To him, though, mothers remain mythical creatures.  John is five years old, and the youngest by far of the current crop of boys.

John does have available to him the Christ Baby, his term for the sweet-looking infant in the painting over the high, heavy mantel in the dormitory where the boys sleep.  He regards the Christ Baby at every opportunity, and sleeps under the gaze of the Christ Baby even though he can’t see Him in the dark.  He often feels as if the Christ Baby looks directly at him, and it warms him somehow.

One cold night, very late and unable to sleep, John takes it into his head that he must have the Christ Baby to hold.  It would soothe him, he thinks, to have the baby in his lonely bed.  He would get warm, he would be filled.  The Christ Baby would comfort him.

After a great deal of effort, as quietly as he could, John managed to gain the wide mantel with the use of a heavy table beneath it, and stood before the Christ Baby.  His small, frozen fingers lifted the picture off its hooks and he turned carefully around to face the black room of sleeping boys.  It was then that the Matron, who had no love for John, entered the room on her last round of the day before going to bed herself.

The calamity that followed you may be able to predict.  It involved a disastrous step out into dark space at her order to come down immediately, and an injury to John’s head and the destruction of the precious picture.  It was the night before Christmas Eve.

John spent the next day in bed, bandaged and bruised, while the other children got ready for the much anticipated Christmas celebration put on for and by the trustees that would take place that evening.  None of this mattered to John – all that mattered to the small boy was that the Christ Baby was gone.  Light and life were missing from above the mantel.  They would be/He would be gone from John forever.

Hearing the noises from downstairs as the guests began to arrive, and looking at the empty spot on the wall opposite him, John could only cry.  Then – a great and unwelcome surprise – the Matron arrived to inform him that a particular trustee and patron – the very woman who had donated the picture of the Christ Baby in memory of her young son, lost – wanted to see him.

After struggling into clothing with the brusque help of the annoyed Matron, John managed to get himself down the stairs and into position in front of Mrs. Benchly.  He feared the worst, and so, clearly, did the Matron.  She was right next to gleeful at the prospect.

But Mrs. Benchly did not react as anticipated.  To the contrary, seeing how small and frightened and ill John was, she took his disbelieving little form into her arms, placed him on her lap, and sent the Matron away.

The next few minutes showcase some of the finest writing I’ve ever been privileged to read.  John settled into Mrs. Benchly – and this sentence gets me every single time: “. . . he had never known before that there was a place in ladies’ necks just made for tiny heads” – and Mrs. Benchly, still grieving the loss of her own sweet boy, settled into him.

It was established immediately that John loved the Christ Baby – he said so repeatedly with great emphasis – and that the Christ Baby was his one true comfort.  For her part, Mrs. Benchly shared that it had been loved by her son also, and that he’d spent countless hours over his short life gazing at the original in his room.  His now empty room.  It was a copy that had been destroyed.

You surely know where we’re headed with this.  If you’ve guessed that John and Mrs. Benchly have found that their immense and individual needs can be met in one another, you’d be right.  But, oh, the sorrow and joy that have brought us to this place in our sad and beautiful story.

Each time I read it I’m reminded of my own needs – for comfort, for warmth, for assurance, for safety, for courage, for healing.  I’m reminded, in short, of my need for the Christ Baby.  And you have the same need.

Take Him into your bosom.  Be warmed, be comforted, be held, be healed.

Merry Christmas from me and the Christ Baby.