The angelic announcement of the Nativity goes to shepherds — the lowest rung of Palestinian society, working the night shift, sleeping in fields. Shepherds were considered ritually unclean and could not testify in courts. The heavenly host sings “glory to God in the highest” to people the religious establishment would not have invited to the birth. The inversion Mary sang about in the Magnificat has begun: the first evangelists of the Incarnation are men whose testimony the temple would have rejected.

From the writers we read together

J.R.R. Tolkien

philologist, novelist, Catholic, author of The Lord of the Rings

Tolkien coined the word “eucatastrophe” — the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous turn that comes at the point of deepest need — and he believed it was the central structural principle of all true stories. The Nativity is, for Tolkien, the Primary Eucatastrophe: the point in the real story of the world where the darkest thing (human sin, captivity, death) is interrupted by an impossible birth in the least expected place. The angels' song is the universe's first recognition that the turn has come. “Glory in the highest” is the heavenly host announcing: this is it. The joyful turn.

Tolkien wrote that the joy of eucatastrophe is not the mere absence of sorrow; it is a joy “beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.” The shepherds in the field are not simply pleased. They are overwhelmed — “they feared with great fear” (Luke 2:9, literal Greek) before they rejoiced with great joy. The angel says “fear not” because the eucatastrophe is larger than they expected. This is how all the best news lands: too big, too sudden, too much to absorb without first trembling.