When I lived in the UK, every city I visited usually had some type of tourist experience based on the history of the area.

The one in Canterbury told the story of the pilgrims who would come to see the shrine of Thomas Beckett and it used Geoffrey Chaucer’s poem “The Canterbury Tales” to tell the story. A feature of the experience were the smells in each room to really help you feel like you were there in the late fourteen hundreds.

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As we approach Christmas and prepare for services and celebrations, we will be making everything as beautiful as we can, ignoring the real down-to-earth history and its smells. Smelly BO, musky animals, and manure. This is the environment God chooses to be born into. The exact opposite of what any human king would choose.

When the heir to the throne is born, they are surrounded by the best doctors in the most comfortable palace. The Christ Child is born among the animals and laid in a feed trough. Our nativity scenes make it look rustic, beautiful but lack the authentic sights, sounds and smells.

When the human heir to the throne is born the elite nobles are the first to be told, with the information trickling out and down the social layers of society. Jesus’ birth is announced to the shepherds on the hillside. Again, our beautiful scene has rustic shepherds on a hill, watching their sheep, visited by angels with the wonderful message. The reality is, these shepherds are the poorest of the poor, not trusted to give evidence in a trial, unwashed, and scared out of their wits at the sight of these angels.

When you start a new job or new project one of the best pieces of advice is “start how you mean to
finish”. This is exactly what God does here. God wants the full human experience; not a comfortable
cushy life.

God puts the socially excluded first. God came into our world, smells and all, to know what being
human really feels like. This Christmas as we look at all the beautiful nativity scenes, take a moment to
imagine all the sights, sounds, and smells.
De Colores,

Fr Mark Cooper

3

One of my favourite stories is St Francis and the wolf. A wolf is terrorising the town of Gubbio and when St Francis hears of it, he goes there to tame the wolf. When he meets the wolf, he arranges a peace by promising the wolf if he stops, the people of the town will make sure he doesn’t go hungry.
The townsfolk agree and from then on, the wolf roams freely throughout the town, well-fed by the residents. When the wolf finally dies, he is mourned by every person in the town.

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I love this story for a few reasons. The logical way of resolving the problem of the wolf
is to hunt him down and kill him. St Francis’ way is conflict resolution. Both sides have
to want to repair the relationship and both sides have to give something up. The
ending that would have happened if the village hunted down the wolf would have been
cheering his death. The ending we get, though, is sorrow at the wolf’s death.
Conflict resolution is never easy.
We will often put ourselves in the initial role of the villagers; “I’ve done nothing wrong, it is all the
other person’s fault”. Can we open ourselves to the possibility both of us need to change?
Maybe this relationship can be salvaged?
We can’t make the other person come to the table, but I never want to be the one who is the
obstacle to reconciliation. I don’t have to give up everything. I don’t have to let the other person
walk all over me, but I do want to be sitting at the table with an open mind and a listening ear.
De Colores,
Fr Mark Cooper