Christmas Supplement
Broken Nativity set leads woman to conversion experience
By Denise Bossert (Special to The Criterion)
Over 20 years ago, I bought an unpainted plaster Nativity set from an arts and crafts store during their after-Christmas sale.
I spent a substantial amount of time during the next year painting each little piece and constructing a stable for the Holy Family.
For years, my children used the figurines like puppets as they practiced retelling the story of the first Christmas.
Last year, the Nativity set had a little accident. During the installation of built-in bookshelves, my husband rested a large piece of wood against the fireplace mantel. It slipped, hit the coffee table and broke half of my Nativity set.
I was not happy. I had a deep sentimental attachment to that hand-painted Nativity set.
Every Advent, when I lifted the tissue-wrapped pieces from a box, I would smile and replay the memories of creating it. With one loud crash, it had all come to an end.
After some heavy sighs and an errant tear over the mishap, I began to realize that it wasn’t the tragedy that I was making it out to be.
The set was far from a realistic depiction of the first Christmas. The diminutive figurines were cartoon-like little boys and girls dressed up in biblical costumes like a caricature of some children’s Christmas pageant at a local community center. They had infantile smiles on their painted faces. The angel wasn’t even part of the original set. I found her in a bin of ready-to-paint pieces and added her to the Nativity set on a whim.
I realized, after some reflection, that it was time to grow up. It was time to put away childish things. It was time to buy a Nativity set that truly reflects the first Christmas and honors the beauty, the reverence and the gift of the Word-Made-Flesh. No more of the sentimental, childlike Joseph and Mary. We were ready for something more.
Conversion has been a lot like this for me. Cradle Catholics may wonder why it is so difficult for Protestants to begin to see theological truths that Catholics have always known. And once they begin to see and understand, why don’t they run into the arms of the Catholic Church without looking back?
As Catholics who recognize the wellspring we have in our faith, we might respond to potential converts like my husband did when I voiced my deep sadness over the powdery mess of the broken plaster figures on my coffee table.
“What’s your problem?” he had asked me. “We were long overdue for a new set anyway.”
That may be the case, but it still isn’t easy to see it all come crashing down before my eyes. It’s so final.
Likewise, potential converts struggle with deep attachments to the past. I suppose it’s because there is something very special in our previous faith journey, and we don’t want to see any of it come to an end. There is comfort in familiarity. Change is painful, no way around it.
Even so, we realize that incomplete truth and familiar memories must step aside for the fullness of truth to take root, but putting away childish things isn’t easy.
It takes time and a whole lot of grace to say what has happened to us is really very good.
A year has gone by, and I don’t miss the old Nativity set that much. The memories are still beautiful to me—like the memories of the spiritual journey that came before my conversion to the Catholic Church.
It isn’t so much a letting go or a throwing away as it is a growing and accepting of God’s full design for his Beloved. It is such a relief when we see that the faith we once cherished has not been lost, but has been converted into something more, something deeper, something fuller, something long overdue.
The original Nativity set was very special, but the one that graces my fireplace mantel today simply takes my breath away. And so it is with conversion.
(Denise Bossert is a member of Immaculate Heart of Mary Parish in New Melle, Mo.) †