Often when we think of Christmas, we remember the splendor: the beatific vision of the miraculous Mary, the angelic heralds, a star called out of the night’s black ink, the professional magicians with expensive gifts for the toddler, the strategic battles with the treasonous King Herod, the anointed prophet the infant would become.
We also remember the census and the famously oversubscribed inn where the Messiah was born. In the language of Luke 2:7, Mary “birthed her firstborn son, swaddled him, and placed him in a feeding trough because there was no space for them in the inn.” Jesus’s mortal parents tried to find lodging in a faraway town, probably in a private home run like an ancient Airbnb, and they ended up in the ground-floor garage where the animals were stabled. Exceedingly pregnant and straining under the pressure of a state dictate to gather for a census, young Mary gave birth in the ancient, dirty equivalent of an attached barn and then stuck the baby in a feed box because she had no bed for him. What mother lives like that? What child is born in a manure-spattered hovel and sleeps where the donkeys, goats, and cattle eat their hay?
Homeless people, that’s who. They do it all the time. They don’t have much choice.
