Imogene Herdman, Mariologist

Revisiting the greatest book ever written about the Incarnation

“Today I am of no use for such things at all. For me, all forms are too rigid, all speech-making too tedious and cold. Itself unbounded by speech, the subject of Christmas claims, indeed creates in me a speechless joy, and I cannot but laugh and exult like a child.”
-Friedrich Schleiermacher, Christmas Eve: A Dialogue on the Incarnation

“And next spring, when the pussy willows come out, I’ll stick a pussy willow so far down your ear that nobody can reach it - and it’ll sprout there, and it’ll grow and grow, and you’ll spend the rest of your life with a pussy-willow bush growing out your ear.”
-Imogene Herdman

Since the earliest days of Christianity, theologians have struggled to articulate analyses of the Christmas story and the Incarnation, of what it means, theologically, that God chose to become a human being and live among us. All of those theologians are trash compared to Barbara Robinson, author of The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, which remains, to this day, the best work of Incarnation theology ever written. This is especially impressive given that The Best Christmas Pageant Ever was not written as a work of Incarnation theology, is not explicitly Catholic, and is in fact an eighty-page comedic chapter book written for fourth graders in 1972.

Robinson’s novel - adapted many times for school plays and once for a made-for-TV movie - focuses on the Herdmans, a family of six absurdly delinquent children who delight in tormenting and bullying their teachers and classmates. In the course of doing this, they accidentally drive out the traditional leads from their Sunday School’s annual Christmas pageant and inadvertently end up in the six lead roles of Mary, Joseph, the three wise men, and an angel. Pageant is hilarious in its depiction of passive-agressive Sunday School and parish politics, and in the over-the-top antics of the Herdmans; the various siblings blackmail their classmates and raise feral cats, and oldest sister Imogene is a fourth-grade girl who chain-smokes cigars and threatens to plant a pussywillow tree directly in a classmate’s ear as an intimidation tactic. Naturally, she ends up cast as the Virgin Mary, and during breaks in rehearsal, she sneaks off to the bathroom to smoke cigars in costume.

Through the course of rehearsals, though, it becomes obvious that the Herdmans not only are basically un-directable, but they also have no idea what the actual biblical Christmas story is, and they have to hear it from the first time out of Luke’s Gospel. As the narrator - one of their classmates, working a background role in the angel choir - points out, everyone else in the pageant knows the Christmas story by heart and barely gives it a second thought. But for a group of children coming into the story cold, “you would have thought the Christmas story came right out of the FBI files”; a scared couple in an unfamiliar city has no roof over their head, with a baby on the way, and a king planning to assassinate their child as quickly as he can. And the Herdmans’ wide-eyed wonder from coming into the Christmas story cold jars both the narrator and the reader.

By the time the actual pageant happens - after multiple hilarious rehearsals that all fall apart - Mary and Joseph, as played by the dirty and clumsy and foulmouthed and exhausting Herdmans, look very different from their previous depictions in the pageant:

“Ralph and Imogene were there all right, only for once they didn't come through the door pushing each other out of the way. They just stood there for a minute as if they weren't sure they were in the right place - because of the candles, I guess, and the church being full of people. They looked like the people you see on the six o clock news - refugees, sent to wait in some strange ugly place, with all their boxes and sacks around them. It suddenly occurred to me that this was just the way it must have been for the real Holy Family, stuck away in a barn by people who didn't much care what happened to them."

By the end of the pageant, while the angel choir is singing “Silent Night” and the congregation is supposed to reflect on the scene in front of them, Imogene-as-Mary is sobbing. It is not the Mary-at-peace that I have in my Nativity set, or that my daughter has in her picture Bible, or that you see in your church. It’s a terrified girl that nobody wanted in the pageant, who doesn’t know where she is or what she’s doing, and who is depicting a woman that just had a baby she wasn’t expecting, sleeping in a barn because she has nowhere to stay.

I’m not an expert in the theology of the Incarnation, but here’s how I understand it, thanks to The Best Christmas Pageant Ever: there is a family in front of you. They are homeless and dirty and tired and hungry and afraid and, above all, unwanted. And one of them is your God, so you should think about how you choose to respond to that family.

Other theologians have tried to get at this. Here’s Saint Oscar Romero in a homily from 1979: “We must not seek the child Jesus in the pretty figures of our Christmas cribs. We must seek him among the undernourished children who have gone to bed tonight with nothing to eat, among the poor newsboys who will sleep covered with newspapers in doorways.” And here’s Dutch priest and theologian Henri Nouwen in 1982: “A greater displacement cannot be conceived. The mystery of the incarnation is that God did not remain in the place that we consider proper for God but moved to the condition of a suffering human being. God gave up the heavenly place and took a humble place among mortal men and women.” But, in my estimation, Barbara Robinson is the one who did it best.

When I criticize my usual targets in G.O.T.H.S., I’m criticizing them for marrying Catholicism to a horrifying reactionary politics that will eventually lead to mass extinction, or for spreading misinformation in the name of profit, or for being big dumb idiots in general, but I am also criticizing them because they are Catholics who apparently have never given a single thought to the question “how will you respond to that family in front of you?” That family has been in front of us a lot in 2020. Their landlord evicted them in the middle of a pandemic when they couldn’t pay rent. Their bosses forced them to come back to work and risk death to keep making profits, or just laid them off and cut off their health insurance. Their police officers, sworn to protect them, murdered them instead. The luckier ones slept in their cars with their children, but others slept on the asphalt outside an ICE building. Many of the people I’ve covered in this newsletter refuse to even look at these families, to acknowledge that they exist, much less that Catholics should do or say anything to address or respond to them.

And it seems like that’s pretty important! Pope Francis’ 2020 encyclical letter, Fratelli Tutti, spends a lot of time doing a very deep analysis of the parable of the Good Samaritan, but it’s clear from Francis’ analysis that he believes we are looking at a very simple story with a very simple lesson [emphasis mine]:

“The parable is clear and straightforward, yet it also evokes the interior struggle that each of us experiences as we gradually come to know ourselves through our relationships with our brothers and sisters. Sooner or later, we will all encounter a person who is suffering. Today there are more and more of them. The decision to include or exclude those lying wounded along the roadside can serve as a criterion for judging every economic, political, social and religious project. Each day we have to decide whether to be Good Samaritans or indifferent bystanders...It is remarkable how the various characters in the story change, once confronted by the painful sight of the poor man on the roadside. The distinctions between Judean and Samaritan, priest and merchant, fade into insignificance. Now there are only two kinds of people: those who care for someone who is hurting and those who pass by; those who bend down to help and those who look the other way and hurry off. Here, all our distinctions, labels and masks fall away: it is the moment of truth.”

A family is in front of you. One of them is your God. And regardless of your status or title or position or past, you’re either the kind of person that responds to them or ignores them. Boston College professor and priest Michael J. Himes did a similar analysis in 1995, on Jesus’ description of the final judgment in Matthew 25. Similar to Francis, Himes arrives at the conclusion that there are only two kinds of people, and they’re the same two kinds that Francis outlines. Himes notes that Jesus makes His decisions at the judgment based on who helped “the least of these”, fed the hungry, visited the imprisoned, and the like, but He doesn’t bother to ask anyone why they did their good deeds:

“The point is not that you serve your brothers and sisters for the love of God. The point is that you serve your brothers and sisters...the only relevant question at the judgement is ‘did you give yourself away to those who needed you?’ That you did so because you are a Christian may be wonderful, but it is not significant for the question. That you did so because Jesus told you to do so, or because you cannot stand by and see someone starve, or because you simply enjoyed helping the other person is all irrelevant. For what ever reason you did so has landed you on the side of the sheep [whom Jesus admits to the kingdom].”

A family is in front of you. One of them is your God. And you’re either the kind of person that responds to them or ignores them. And it doesn’t matter who you are or what reasoning you use, ultimately you’re going to make a decision to either respond to them or ignore them, and that decision will matter. The youngest Herdman sister plays the angel at the pageant, and she flubs her one line and yells “HEY! UNTO YOU A CHILD IS BORN!” because she wants to jar us and get our attention before we make our decision.

I am not good at making this decision. I have gotten it right only occasionally, and I have gotten it wrong more times than I should. I think a lot of people, including a lot of Christians and Catholics, have a similar track record. My hope is that I will work hard and get better at this as time goes on, and I’m thankful that I have the Herdman family to remind me of what I’m supposed to be doing, and Imogene Herdman especially to remind me who Mary and the Holy Family really are.

Because for me, as for the narrator of The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, “Mary is always going to look a lot like Imogene Herdman - sort of nervous and bewildered, but ready to clobber anyone who laid a hand on her baby”. And we, as it turns out, are the congregation at the pageant, waiting to see the wordless, soothing holy family that we know so well, and someone unwanted has stumbled into the church instead, and Barbara Robinson refuses to let us look away from them or remain unmoved. 

Grift of the Holy Spirit is a series by Tony Ginocchio detailing stories of the weirdest, dumbest, and saddest members of the Catholic church, although this particular piece has more of a Merry Christmas vibe. You can subscribe via Substack to get notified of future installments.