Magnificat

I'm getting old and soft in my old age (I'm nearly 40!) On Saturday night, as a perfect antidote for the holiday blues I was feeling on Friday (I wasn't nearly in my right mind when I wrote that, as I discovered this morning when I got to work and saw the pile of obvious stuff that I'd been left to do by my bored little self on Friday), I took my youth group to see The Nativity at the local theater. We had quite a turnout - or, well, more than I expected anyway - and we all made it into the theater and sat down in time for the movie.

The movie is just what it says it is - a holiday picture postcard retelling of the Nativity story just as you've seen it reenacted countless times in church on Christmas Eve - only more so. Relatively big budget, at least in comparison to the average Sunday School nativity story, the movie looks and feels like it was filmed on location 2000 years ago. The dialogue is not entirely from the Bible as there would be very little to say in a two hour movie, but seemed relatively believable, all things considered - sort of a The Message version of The Nativity.

I was glad to watch it with my youth group in the darkness of a quiet theater because I admit to weeping at several points during the film - mostly for joy. There are some incredibly touching moments in the nativity story and the movie does a wonderful job of portraying those moments with sincere emotion. When Elizabeth greets Mary for the first time with her line straight from the Bible, "Blessed is the mother, etc..." she did it so well my eyes teared up just from the joy on her face. Here was Mary, teenager, panicked, distraught, and confused, going to visit her cousin Elizabeth to discover if she'd dreamed the whole thing with the angel, and Elizabeth greets her not only with confirmation of the angel's words, but also with the joy of the impending birth of her Lord and Savior.

This is a quiet movie of unusual beauty and though it follows the Bible fairly carefully it doesn't go for the Handelian moments of Hallelujah like exuberance - no singing choirs of angels, no In Excelsis Deo, no Hallelujah chorus. Instead, you get a scene where Mary meets a shepherd who offers to keep her warm by the fire. His gift, he tells her, is the one of hope for deliverance by his savior. A knowing look passes between Mary and Joseph at that point. And that scene, of course, pays off in the manger scene at the end. The look on the shepherd's face is ten times better than a singing choir of angels.

So, I wept. Tears streamed down my face at the sheer beauty of it all. I was reminded of the importance of this moment but also of the hope it engenders. And yet, I couldn't help looking at the joy on Mary's face at the birth of her son, and contrast that with the sorrow on the face of Mary in the Pieta. The happiness was bittersweet. Christ was born for us. But Christ died for us. And then Christ rose again for us!

There are moments when I feel like a youth leader and moments when I wonder what the heck I'm doing (which is probably when I really do feel like a youth leader ;) This was one of those moments and one of those adventures that made me feel like a youth leader. The second I'd seen the preview, I just knew I wanted to take the youth group to see this movie. I was right. It was a good choice. And I can't wait for the discussion that this movie will generate at the next youth meeting.

Its Christmas time, y'all!

P.S. On SNL on Saturday night (not two hours after seeing the movie) they had a sketch in which the live nativity was being performed and the two clueless people who were playing Joseph and Mary looked down into the cradle and said, "This doesn't look like Baby Santa Claus!" It made me laugh.