by Fr. Joe Maier

Published in Bangkok Post, Sunday Dec. 23, Spectrum section:

http://www.bangkokpost.com/news/investigation/386109/story-of-shepherds-and-angels-still-burns-bright

Jesus was born in Bethlehem. Angels travelled from high heaven to tell the news to a small group of shepherds guarding their sheep by night. And of course, the children woke up when they heard the angels speaking to their parents and then singing their heavenly song about the birth of the holy child, and the children were dazzled by the light of an unknown star in the sky.

The music was so beautiful that the children began to sing along with the angels. The shepherd mums said: ''Hush don't be so bold.''

The angels responded: ''That's fine, let the children sing along with us.''

They taught the children the words, so they would remember the song later.

Our children here at Mercy Centre like that story. To them, it's perfectly normal that angels would come to visit and children would sing along with them.

Of course, it also makes sense that the angels could speak Thai and even take a few minutes to show the children how to play the melody on our traditional Thai musical instruments, so that the children could sing and play the melody after the angels had gone back up to heaven.

As the story goes, that very night these shepherds hurried across the hills to see the holy child and to show respect, bringing their children with them because they also wanted to see the baby Jesus.

Visiting the stable and manger where Jesus was born, some of the children fell asleep in their mothers' arms and the blessed Virgin Mary said, ''Why don't you spend the rest of the night here and return in the morning, when it's light and safe. Let your men go home to guard the sheep for the rest of the night.''

Our Klong Toey slum kids like the idea of the shepherd kids going to visit baby Jesus, and maybe bringing along a couple packets of instant noodles – the staple food of homeless kids – just in case. Many of our kids remember being hungry on the street, and they couldn't be sure if baby Jesus and his mum and dad had food.

So our slum kids said that if they'd been there on that night so long ago they would have pooled their lunch money to buy some really spicy dishes from Auntie Owe's food cart down the street from here and share with the shepherd kids and Mary and Joseph. Auntie Owe makes the hottest food in all of the Klong Toey slum, and always gives a bit extra to kids. The way the Mercy kids figure it, shepherd kids wouldn't get to eat spicy Thai food very often. It would be a real treat.

And our slum kids said that if they really could have seen Mary, Jesus' mum, they knew for sure that she'd be prettier than any of the statues of her. Plus, her name was easy to remember – in Thai it would be ''Malee''.

When our children heard of Jesus' humble birth in a manger with the animals close by, one of our girls recalled proudly what her mum told her of how she was born. It was on a wooden foot bridge crossing a stream because her mum was on the run from some bad guys. Our Moken sea gypsy kids from South Thailand said maybe Jesus was born on a wooden boat that sailed the high seas like they were and they thought he would be happy in that life, as they were.

Then the bad guys come into the story. They somehow got word when Jesus was born that this was a child from Heaven. This was unacceptable. They figured this child might grow up and take away their power and money. So the nasty big boss – a guy named Herod – said: ''Find this child from Heaven and kill him. In fact, kill all the baby boys around there, just to make sure. We don't even want this child on planet Earth.''

Our kids understand about bad guys, and how they were coming to hurt Jesus and take his mum and dad away, and maybe even kill them all; at least put them in jail and baby Jesus would be given to strangers and would be all alone without his mum and dad.

Our twins, nicknamed Pizza and Peanut, can identify with that. The police came to take away their own mum because they said she liked drugs. They know that Jesus' mum would never take drugs. They said that they'd never hurt baby Jesus and that their mum and dad wouldn't either.

In our children's world in the Klong Toey slum, dads disappear and mums sometimes have to leave for a while. And so they understood that Mary and Joseph had to leave to escape from the bad guys.

Our five- and six-year-old sisters, Miss Pancake and Miss Off, couldn't remember because they were too small, but their mum told them they got car-sick when she took them on the bus to get away from some bad guys. They were on the run until their uncle, a nice policeman, had a chance to talk to the bad guys and tell them not to hurt mum.

Mary and Joseph journeyed for nine days south to a small hamlet called Bethlehem just outside Jerusalem.It was Joseph’s historical roots, as he was a long distant relative of King David of centuries before. They traveled, forced, by military edict, because the Roman Empire, which ruled the country at that time, had commanded every family head to return to their ancestral home, register, and pay a tax there to government of Rome.

The song the angels sang that night, the light of an unknown star that covers the whole heavens –wherever you are – and the trials and tribulations of Joseph and Mary and baby Jesus all made perfect sense to the children.

So to quote an old song that is very popular at the Mercy Centre: ''May you and your children stop to listen, join in the angels' song, as their music sings along the strings and fills that lonely place between Earth and sky. And know they are singing for you and I.''

Merry Christmas from Father Joe and all the kids.