Reflections on Life and Faith,
by David Keating

A New Perspective

January 6, 2007

 A minister friend of mine passed along a reflection that he had written for Christmas. The season may be over but I hope that the spirit is not. He called his reflection "and now a good word for the innkeeper".

You see, what he did was to look, from a different perspective, at the oft maligned fella who couldn't squeeze Joseph and a very pregnant Mary into some corner of his lodging establishment on a busy night.

Inns in Bethlehem a couple of thousand years ago weren't exactly what we would think of as five star accommodations. Everyone was generally bunked down in one big ol' room. Mary wouldn't have had the Vibra-matic 3000 to massage her aching muscles, cramped up from a long donkey ride.

And here's the thing. For Mary to have given birth to Jesus inside the inn, in the company of all those other travelers, she would have, under Jewish religious law, made everyone in the room ritually unclean. Everyone would have been required to offer sacrifices to God, a dove or two pigeons if I recall correctly, in order to be ritually purified. Otherwise they could not join the community in worship. Not to mention the shame that would have attached to Mary for such an occurrence.

The innkeeper was far from cruel or without compassion. In fact, from my friend's perspective, the innkeeper went out of his way to help not only Mary and Joseph but also all of his other guests. He was the consummate host.

It seems to me that this is a good lesson for us to take into a new year. If our vision of the innkeeper can be so radically altered by a fresh perspective, what might happen if we tried the same thing in other areas of our lives?

Astronauts are often quoted as saying that their perception of Earth is forever changed by experiencing the sight of our little blue globe from space. Most of us will never have that opportunity, but maybe we don't need to. Maybe we can try the same thing my friend did. It’s a New Year; maybe we can look at it with new eyes.

Instead of looking at our next door neighbour and seeing a guy who lets his lawn grow too long and never paints the trim on his veranda, we can see the family who let our kids come in out of the cold when they forgot their keys and we were late getting home from work.

Instead of looking at the person who has seventeen different coupons and takes forever to get through the check out line, who's delaying our oh-so-important day, we can see a person who's stretching every dollar so that they can afford one small treat for their kids.

A new perspective is what Christmas was all about. And yet we have let it become routine, a familiar refrain of presents and music and hustle and bustle that really doesn't require a lot of thought on our part. Last month we hardly needed to look at any of those manger scenes to know all of the players. And the roles they played.

Or so we thought.

If my friend is right, and he has a lot of experience in this area, our assumptions have done the innkeeper a great disservice. Instead of maligning him all these millennia, we should have been honouring him.

A fresh perspective shakes up the things we have come to take for granted. It lets us look at the world in a new way.

And if we look at it differently, we just might want to treat it, and each other, differently as well.

David Keating