The face of the Canadian prairies has changed dramatically. In the pioneer decades of the last century, it became pockmarked by small towns strung out along the railroad lines. Most of those towns consisted of just a handful of homes, a general store/postal counter, café, train station, hotel and, of course, at least one of those grain elevators that became such iconic symbols of this part of the world. In those days, most people lived outside of town, on small ‘family farms’ of a manageable size to be worked with horses. It was from those small farms that wheat was hauled to the elevators in horse-drawn wagons, to be sold and then shipped on by rail.
The old elevators are all gone now. Gone, too, are the small towns that once existed because of them, and the family farms that huddled around them. Today, grain is trucked fifty or more miles to the few viable towns that became trading and shopping centers and that offer schools and hospitals and, of course, a whole new generation of modern, mechanized grain-handling facilities.
But in their day, the elevators were often called ‘Cathedrals of the Prairies’ because they were large, tall, and visible from miles around. They even dwarfed the local churches and their modest steeples. (Few of those were as large or as attractive as St. Luke’s Anglican Church in Canungra, Diocese of Brisbane, that I once saw and photographed).
But I always thought the honor of being likened to Cathedrals would far better have been conferred upon the gable-roofed barns that typified the old family farms. They resembled churches far more than those cold, hazardous, and unpleasantly grain-dusty elevators ever could.
Because of my familiarity with those barns while I was growing up, I was never the least bit scandalised by the thought of Jesus being born in one of them. The fact that he was, always made perfectly good sense to me. Oh, I realise Jesus’ stable would have been little more than a shed, but it would have had the same redeeming qualities all barns have.
The old rural barns of my youth looked somewhat like cathedrals. They were substantial buildings, and with the haylofts they were … well, lofty. Moreover, the roofs were always topped by at least one cupola and often two. Well admittedly those squatty cupolas that provided air circulation for the barn were not as tall or as graceful as steeples, but if you let your imagination run wild you will appreciate what I mean. And while you are doing that, imagine this. Our old barn had been assaulted by the strong prevailing northwesterly winds for four decades, so it was beginning to lean. My dad used half a dozen old telephone poles to brace up the long south wall, and the appearance … well again with a bit of imagination … was not unlike that of Notre Dame cathedral in Paris with its flying buttresses!
Like churches, the barns served a variety of functions. Their primary purpose was to be home and shelter for the various animals, of course, and they did that very well. They were places of rest for the weary horses. They had mangers and troughs for food and drink, and plenty of warm bedding straw. They were places of healing where the hurt and injured were tended, where anointings were often administered, and where cows were relieved of their burdens of milk. And they were familiar places. When the animals returned to the barn from their pastures or fields at day’s end, they behaved exactly as we Anglicans do when we go to church. Invariably they went directly to the stall, pen, or pew where they belonged.
But like medieval cathedrals in former times, barns could also be very human places. They were the only buildings large enough to accommodate social gatherings. Especially in the pioneer days, with a bit of judicious tidying up they could become community centers where ‘barn dances’ were held. In fact, it was in one of those barns, at one of those dances, that the young people who would one day be my mother and dad met and were touched by love.
But even more, barns extend a welcome and undiscriminating shelter to those in need, or to those who have been turned away from other doors. No creature of God is too poor, too shabby, too marginalized, or too socially unacceptable to be granted a place and some warmth in a barn. I wonder if that was the whole point God was trying to convey to us by arranging for Jesus to be born in a stable.
The undiscriminating hospitality of our barn was certainly extended to animals of every kind. In the dead of winter when temperatures plummeted to the minus 30 to 40 fahrenheit degrees range, it was not at all uncommon for me to enter the barn and find the dog sharing his bed and bodily warmth with his natural antagonists, the several feral barn cats who cuddled tightly beside him. On one occasion I even found a wild muscrat (like a small beaver) basking in the deep warm straw close to an accommodating cow. Why or how it came to be there, far from where it should ever have been, I will never know. But in the barn, it found a life-saving place to be.
Even for people, and even when circumstances are not desperate, barns offer hospitality. In my younger years, Hoboes (swagmen?) were not uncommon as they travelled on foot in search of seasonal employment. Under strict orders not to smoke inside the barn, they were always welcomed to make themselves a bed in the hayloft and to join the family for breakfast before they left in the morning.
Even ascetically, barns always had a way of reminding me of a church. On chilly mornings one could see steam rising like incense from the warm bodies of the cows as they stood awaiting their turn to be milked, and that wafting incense rose during the milking liturgy itself as the warm milk hit the cold bucket I held between my knees.
Because of its few small windows, the barn was not a well lighted place, so the shadows of darkness tended to hide there from the light during our daylight hours. But to no avail. There were innumerable cracks, knotholes and splits in the walls and roof, and through them the sun sent a thousand shafts and spears of light to pierce the darkness and deny it any claim to sovereignty. And even at night, the flickering flame of my kerosene lantern always reminded me of a light that shines in the midst of a sinister darkness that encircles it but cannot quench it.
Thus, the Christmas Creche has always spoken eloquently to me with its depiction of a stable where sheep, lambs and a heifer look on adoringly as the holy child and his parents accept their gifts of humble hospitality and of a manger to serve as a crib.
It has often occurred to me that over the door of every barn there should be the sign:
By Appointment to the King of Heaven.
Dale