December 25, 2007
Monday

. . . and smiling you answer”everything
turns into something else, and slips away . . .  
there’s the moon,there is something faithful and mad”
                   — E.E. Cummings, 1894-1962
                       American poet

All was calm, all was bright on Bradley Drive when I went out for the paper this morning just before seven, about a half hour before sunrise. The full moon was hanging over my neighbors’ house, not quite as dramatic as the way I saw it last month, but still something faithful and mad.

I am typically the first one up on Christmas morning because I am the first one to bed the night before. After our church service Lynn goes out to a gathering of high school classmates at a friend’s house and Ron goes to sing Midnight Mass at his church and neither comes in much before two. I like the quiet morning, the sense of being in something of a pause in time, with Christmas almost over and the new year, which starts for me on the Feast of Stephen, about to begin.

While the coffee brewed I opened the paper and shook out the glossy ads into the wastebasket. The first story that my eye fell on was below the fold on the front page of the local news section: “Baby Jesus statue stolen.”

St. Joseph Catholic Church is a large facility on the main street of Mechanicsburg, a borough across the river from Harrisburg that still resembles a small town more than it does a suburban bedroom community spun off from a city. The borough police reported that the statue disappeared sometime between midnight and dawn on Monday. There are similar thefts every year, a state police spokesman said, and the acts are often staged as pranks. Last year five statues of the Child Jesus disappeared from church and private home outdoor manger scenes. One was returned, anonymously, but evidently not all are the work of grateful children who have prayed for a red wagon.

The pastor of St. Joseph’s is the Reverend Chester Snyder. I have in my files several articles he wrote for the diocesan newspaper about the True Meaning. Father Snyder takes a practical and joy-filled approach to living the gospel. He’s all about action instead of introspection, and reading his work helps me get my spirituality out of my head and into my feet. It was his suggestion that I put into action last year when I offered my place in line to someone who seemed impatient, an action which may have made the intended recipient of my kindness feel more uncomfortable than graced.

Regular readers of this space will be able to guess that the story captured my imagination. I am itching to get back to work on my fiction, and the disappearance of the statue at St. Joseph’s seemed to lend itself to the point-of-view exercise I found so useful last month — take a situation and create a dozen characters whose perspectives you can explore.

I had our Christmas dinner (turkey with about half the trimmings — no stuffing and no dessert) on the table by noon. By one o’clock the three of us had enjoyed the meal and each other and dispatched Lynn, now in her Turkey Trot years, to the new boyfriend’s house two hours away. I squared away the kitchen, grabbed my camera and my notebook, and set off on this 50º windless day (almost like Wyoming, but with a smaller sky!) for a meditative transition from Christmas to my regular life.

The crèche at St. Joseph’s is ultra-simple, just the figures of Mary, Joseph, and, in this case, an empty manger. The statue of the Child Jesus is missing, giving the tableau the look that our crèche at home has during Advent, before we place the figure of the infant in it.

There was a note in a plastic page protector attached to the foot of the manger. Father Snyder, in his typical fashion, was counseling against anger and bitterness. “The statue of the infant was taken from the stable,” he wrote. “Therefore, each one of us will have to be the face of Jesus to the world this year. A blessed Christmas to all.”

And isn’t that the way it should be? The preparation and anticipation are over, the celebration is complete, and it’s time to let our joy turn into something else. It’s time to let our faith have hands and feet, to go out into the world strong and loving and fearless to do something new, for ourselves and for each other.

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