From the Daily Citizen:
Radio City Music Hall Unabashedly and Unashamedly Continues to Feature Jesus in its Christmas Spectacular.
Christmas traditions run deep everywhere, but especially in New York City, and few places in Gotham more dramatically than Radio City Music Hall. For the last 89 years, Radio City Music Hall’s Christmas program has concluded with a live Nativity presentation — a massive procession of animals, including camels, donkeys, sheep and, of course, an actor portraying Joseph and an actress as Mary, both adoring and celebrating the birth of the baby Jesus.
As the scene unfolds, the voice of a narrator is heard reciting “One Solitary Life,” the 1926 poem written by James Allan Francis.
It begins:
He was born in an obscure village
The child of a peasant woman
He grew up in another obscure village
Where He worked in a carpenter shop
Until He was thirty, He never wrote a book
He never held an office
He never went to college
He never visited a big city
He never traveled more than two hundred miles
From the place where He was born
He did none of the things
Usually associated with greatness
He had no credentials but Himself
It concludes:
Nineteen centuries have come and gone
And today Jesus is the central figure of the human race
And the leader of mankind’s progress
All the armies that have ever marched
All the navies that have ever sailed
All the parliaments that have ever sat
All the kings that have ever reigned put together
Have not affected the life of mankind on earth
As powerfully as that one solitary life
The Remarkable Story Continues
It’s understandable to lament the hostility directed towards Christians and Christmas today, the increased references to Santa and the now common omission of the true reason for the season. In a city known for its secularism, and which has even been known to celebrate its sin, thousands of unsuspecting theatergoers are hearing the remarkable life story of Jesus each and every day.
