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Good morning. There’s a line in Kamila Shamsie’s novel, Burnt Shadows, that stays with me. It’s when Hiroko, a survivor of the American atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki, says, ‘My stories seemed so small, so tiny a fragment in the big picture.’ Great novelists bring these small stories to life, going behind the epic tales of empires, wars and conquests to show us the lives of ordinary people caught up in extraordinary events. As someone who grew up in Zambia, I love novels that invite their western readers to explore the underbelly of modern history and politics, and to recognise how our own stories are inextricably entangled with those of the people we have at various times colonised, ruled over or waged war with or against. Theologian Johann Baptist Metz writes of the ‘dangerous memories’ of those whose stories have been silenced or twisted to fit the dominant version of history. Postcolonial authors use these ‘dangerous memories’ to bring to life the characters who so often appear as outsiders or enemies from the perspective of modern liberalism. The story of Jesus is about a person who was also regarded as an outsider and an enemy – a refugee, a man who stood up to authority, a man who despite a radical message of love, was brutally tortured and put to death. Christianity calls its followers to recognise God in this small story, this tiny fragment in the big picture, even as time and again it has betrayed its own message by aligning itself with the gods of imperial power, religious persecution and military conquest. The Gospels tell the story of a God who takes the side of all the victims of violent and abusive power, including or perhaps especially those forms of power which claim to have God on their side. In the words of Mary’s Magnificat, this is a God who fills the hungry with good things and sends the rich empty away. It’s hard to believe that revolutionary hymn of praise when, more than two thousand years later, the hungry are still hungry and the rich are as rich as they ever have been. Nevertheless, Mary calls the followers of her Son to seek God in the small stories and tiny fragments of those forgotten, abandoned and betrayed in the making of history. For me, that’s what it means to seek God among the beasts and the shepherds and to find him lying in a manger.