The following is an excerpt from The Prince of Peace by Albian Goodier.
Christians who dwell in simplicity love to dwell most on this visit of the shepherds to the manger. It is pictured more than any other scene; our cribs always try to represent it; our Christmas hymns, especially our oldest carols, win us with this simple story. It is not difficult to understand why: we see the shepherds “coming with haste,” without any direct command from the angels, without any shadow of doubt in their hearts, and finding, apparently so easily, “Mary and Joseph and the Infant,” and an “understanding of the word,” though what they exactly “understood,” they probably could not have told us. All this is eminently typical of that spirit of devotion which runs through all of Christianity, which makes children “understand” the Blessed Sacrament, and which “draws all things” to Jesus, the hearts of humans finding in Christ our Lord the peace and certainty they can find nowhere else.
The shepherds went away happy men. They had not known happiness of this kind before. They could not have wished to be anything other than just what they were; they would not have exchanged their rank with anyone; even now, wherever they are in heaven, one may safely say, with St. Luke, that they are “glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen, as it had been told them” that night. So often in our lives there are moments which have made all the rest of life worth living, and for which we shall never cease to praise God for all eternity—a conversion, a special grace through the sacraments, a special light which has made us understand, a crisis through which we have been guided, a vocation, a dedication in some peculiar way, a proof beyond doubt of our Lord’s favor, and protection, and guidance, and intense love. We owe our Lord very much, and we thank him very little; thus, the shepherds remind us of this duty.
Two sets of people were affected by the shepherds. The first were the simple people who heard the simple story from their simple lips. “And all who heard it wondered at what the shepherds told them.” They had proof enough in the narrative itself and in those who told it; just as little Bernadette is proof enough in herself of the Lourdes apparitions, or as a child that pours out its little heart in its first Communion is proof enough, in its degree, of the Blessed Sacrament. They wondered; they did not pretend to understand; they were content to revere. Second, there was Our Lady. “But Mary kept all these things, pondering them in her heart.” How did she “ponder” them? What were her reflections? What deepest thoughts of deepest poets could compare with Our Lady’s ponderings? She knew so much, yet so little; and with what that she knew, she lost herself in God’s infinity.
