“Come, one and all!”
Charlotte summons us, declaring her invitation to the night wind. It’s Christmas Eve, and we’re standing at Fourth Avenue and Union Street between an Exxon station and an overflowing sidewalk garbage can. Beside us, traffic barrels along the avenue, taxis bearing down on their horns.
“Come, shepherds and sheep!” Charlotte yells over the din. “Come, kings and sages and magi. Come, all who are wise and all who are foolish. Come!”
Our ragtag band (accordion, guitar, and trombone) pipes up, careening through the melody of “O Come, All Ye Faithful.” We toot along as fifteen or so brave congregants lift their voices in exultation and two drunk guys tumble out of a corner dive bar, shouting expletives, lurching at each other aggressively.
Behind us, a semitruck pulls into the gas station, misses the sharp turn, and backs up, engine roaring into reverse. Next to me, a congregant is pulling extra hats and gloves out of her bag, already shivering. The semi lets out a great belch of black smoke from its muffler.
It’s possible this was a bad idea.
We dreamed up the St. Lydia’s Christmas Eve Pageant Parade because we can’t be in our usual space on Christmas. A few weeks ago, I pitched the parade to Rachel and our interns as a festive spectacle, marching across Brooklyn in our makeshift costumes, singing carols.
A few years into our scrappy church project, St. Lydia’s has moved across the Brooklyn Bridge and landed at the Zen center. We’ve grown, stabilized, and even attracted Ezra and Zachary, two seminarians who want to learn from the chaos of church planting. Zachary is a dreamy student at Union Theological Seminary—a multi-instrumentalist from a multiracial family, with tight coils of hair and a five o’clock shadow. Ezra, who often has a slim book of poetry tucked under his arm or in his pocket, has a shaved head, a growing beard, and a heaviness in his countenance.
At his first Dinner Church service, he asked to speak to me during cleanup.
“I just wanted to let you know that things have become a little crazy in my life,” he told me, rubbing a hand along a crease in his forehead. “My wife just asked for a divorce. Last week.” He started his internship anyway, doing his best to hold things steady for himself and his two small daughters.
Ezra likes the idea of the pageant parade. “Joseph and Mary wandered,” he offered when I brought it up. “They were pilgrims when they looked for room at the inn.” Maybe he empathized, in the midst of his own destabilizing experience.
“Everyone’s gonna be freezing” was Rachel’s comment. “And grumpy.” So we decided to end our procession at a warm pub with snacks and beer. Problem solved! Maybe we’d even pick up some neighbors as we went—people stopping for a few minutes to listen to the story or even join in on a carol.
All through Advent, I had preached about the fundamentally disorienting promise of God’s incarnation. The story of Christmas is not about Mary and Joseph taking an idyllic journey through the desert on the back of a donkey, I told the congregation, but of life coming apart at the seams. Mary is a young woman from a poor town who has a good thing going: someone wants to marry her. A woman in that time was entirely dependent on either her family or her husband for income and security. Without them, she’d end up out in front of a gate somewhere, begging for spare coins, or mooching off an uncle or cousin for the rest of her life. But Mary was set. She had cut a path toward a secure future. And then God showed up and threw everything off course with a totally worn-out cliché: becoming a teenage mother. Saying yes to God meant risking everything. The meager living she and her husband would earn, their new life together, the possibility for better things. When Mary says yes, she abandons everything for God.
“This is a story of disorientation,” I preached as December deepened, “not a cozy tale of a baby in a manger.” The Christmas Eve Pageant Parade seemed like an opportunity to travel the streets as Mary and Joseph did, and make our Christmas just a touch less comfortable.
That was the vision. But now, desperately looping carols over the idling of semis as my congregants shuffle their feet to stay warm, I experience a sudden hit of terror. It’s possible we’ve gone too far. The temperature plummeted yesterday and everyone is already freezing. Commuters are rushing out of the subway stop across the street, brushing by our ragtag band without a second glance as they pop their coat collars up against the wind, and scuttle home. No one is curious.
Well, I think, launching into the melody of “God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen,” if a lack of comfort is what we wanted, we’ve got it.
Charlotte (who stuck around despite the meager attendance at her first service) rehearses the crowd, teaching us to baa and moo like barnyard animals. She enlists Ezra’s elder daughter, Anna, to carry a star on a stick. James, a British sociologist who always looks doleful, is positioned behind Ula’s wheelchair, wearing a dish towel on his head, ready to push her along. Ula sports a battered Santa hat.
Jason, an engineer, has constructed a towering angel puppet by hinging together two long cardboard mailing tubes and affixing white satin fabric and silver spray-painted wings. He stands at the edge of the crowd, pulsing the cardboard tubes on their hinges. The angel flaps like a gentle, looming bird.
I hand around glass vigil candles, the kind you place on outdoor shrines. Each congregant is supposed to carry one in our procession, creating a beautiful scene as we follow our path through Brooklyn. But as soon as I have mine lit, it’s whipped out by the wind. Everyone else is having the same problem, standing in huddles, hands cupped around the flames. Finally we give up. My congregants look at me, defeated.
Okay, I think. It is what it is. Let’s start.
Charlotte beckons us along Union, and off we go. We stagger along, plunging into the relative darkness of a more industrial corner of Brooklyn. By day the area exhibits medium-level grit and grime—nothing out of the ordinary for New York City. By night, however, it looks like the set of a true crime show. James pushes Ula’s wheelchair stalwartly over shattered glass and crushed beer cans.
“Glo-o-o-o-o-ooooo-o-o-o-o-ooooo-o-o-o-o-ooooo-RIA,” we sing, fighting to join our voices as the wind picks up and whips them away. Ezra’s younger daughter, Isla, three years old and wearing angel wings over her winter coat, buries her head in her father’s neck as he carries her.
“Daddy,” I hear her say, “I’m so cold!”
This is the moment when I know I’ve made a terrible mistake. Oh God, I think. I’ve ruined Christmas.
We grind to a halt on the corner of Bond and Butler, across from the brick public housing units called the Gowanus Houses. They’re kitty-corner from my new apartment, where I’ve moved to be closer to St. Lydia’s. I walk these blocks all the time, and find them friendly and connected. Neighbors stop to chat with one another on the sidewalk. Men hold forth in front of the bodegas, calling out to friends passing by or giving a dog a scratch behind the ears.
Tonight, though, the bodegas are closed up. The stoops are empty, and I notice only a few scattered windows lit in the apartment buildings. It seems almost everyone has gone away for Christmas, headed to see family someplace else. The feeling left behind, like a residue, isn’t so cheerful. The neighborhood is in a different mood tonight, thick and desolate. We’re standing there on the corner in tinsel halos and spray-painted wings. Suddenly I feel incredibly naïve. I chose a route that would take us by the Gowanus Houses because we are all one neighborhood, and all part of God’s story. But standing on the emptied sidewalk, I feel like a stranger. Our story feels flimsy next to the reality of this block. It seems terribly presumptuous for us to tell it here, when we walk these blocks but don’t live on them.
On that street corner, Charlotte tells the story of the angel who visits Mary to inform her that she’ll bear the child of God.
“Most favored one, the angel called her,” Charlotte says, “and Mary wondered how it was that she, young, poor, and knocked up, was favored.”
Charlotte tells us about Mary’s song of revolution—of the new creation being knit together in her womb. The powerful have been brought down from their thrones, she sings, and the rich are sent away empty. She tears down the empire with her words.
I wonder what our jovial, well-fed church has to say about the hungry being filled or the powerful being torn from their thrones. What can we claim to understand about this story? What can we say that the teenage girl on the sixth floor of the houses hasn’t already lived?
Mary’s song is my favorite passage in the Bible. I return to her words; they remind me what it means to be Christian. But standing here, I’m not sure if this story belongs to me.
Most highly favored lady, we sing, and turn our faces north. I wonder if I’m the only one who’s shaken.
The next stop is outside the Brooklyn Inn, a bar on Hoyt Street. I thought carefully about the route, even walked it a few times to make sure it was the right distance. It’s just a few blocks, really, from the corner of Union over to Bergen and Smith Street. Fifteen minutes, maybe? What I didn’t calculate, however, was the pace of a small herd of grown-ups, multiple children, and a person in a wheelchair shuffling down the sidewalk, stopping at every crossing to wait for the walk signal, while singing. It feels like we’ve been out here for hours.
At least this part will be cheerful, I think as we approach the friendly striped awning of the bar. Multicolored Christmas lights glow inside. I often stop here for a drink with friends, and it’s always a mellow crowd. We process up to the corner and hold position outside, lustily singing “We Three Kings.”
On the second verse, a band of drunken, bearded men assemble in the doorway and begin to leer at us. “Merrrrry Christmas,” they crow, beer sloshing out of their pint glasses.
“MERRY CHRISTMAS!” we all say, suddenly aware that we’re wearing dish towels.
“We’re telling the Christmas story,” Charlotte tells them, and launches into the bit about the star rising in the east.
“I don’t give a FUCK about fucking CHRISTMAS!” one of them exclaims belligerently, pointing a finger at us, punctuating his statement with a swig of his beer.
“And they knelt down and paid him homage!” Charlotte shouts to us through a forced grin, “and then they went down the street to the next stop. Merry Christmas!” She shuffles us down the block, men crowing behind us.
This is a nightmare, I think, cheeks burning behind my scarf.
At our final station, the corner of Smith Street, the script instructs us to place our candles together in a makeshift shrine, as if in front of the manger.
I envisioned this as a quiet moment at the end of our sojourn. We would sing “In the Bleak Midwinter,” one of my all-time favorite Christmas carols. “What can I give him?” the hymn asks. “Give him my heart,” comes the answer. I’ve written a prayer for Charlotte to read as the hymn concludes. “We bring you our hearts. Our whole life, which you know better than even we do. We bring you the fullness of who we are.” It will be beautiful.
As our parade gathers together and the guitar begins to play, I flit from person to person, relighting our candles for this climactic moment. We place them on the pavement. They all immediately go out. Huddled together, more for warmth than for anything else, we begin the hymn. “In the bleak midwinter,” we sing, “frosty wind made moan….Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow.”
“We bring you our hearts,” Charlotte begins, teeth audibly chattering. I’m too cold to think about anything but my frozen fingers and toes. Passengers emerge from the Bergen Street subway station and lift their hoods against the wind, ignoring us with the practiced skill of longtime New Yorkers. No one stops to sing a carol.
Warming up in the bar afterward, I laugh and chat with congregants while an oily feeling of humiliation settles in my gut. “Merry Christmas,” I chortle, hugging someone who’s off to a party at a friend’s house. Anna is dancing around, tapping everyone on the head with her star on a stick. Isla chases after her. I watch them, smiling, but part of me wants to crawl under the table.
By now I’ve befriended the discomfort of my role as a pastor. It’s gotten no easier, as a thirty-something Brooklynite, to confess that you believe in God and invite people to sit around a table, take hands, and pray. This is really dumb, a voice whispers in your mind. Nobody believes in God anymore. It’s like sidling along a diving board at thirteen while everyone watches your half-naked, prepubescent body and waits for you to jump.
Tonight, though, I feel something different. I hoped for an experience of beauty and tenderness, our candles lit as we moved through the borough. I hoped for a sense of connection with our neighborhood, of serendipity and surprise. Instead we experienced only wind, darkness, and drunk people. I was a director whose show had too many flaws. When the stage lights were angled wrong, you could see the wires and the rigging—that the sets were just cardboard and the costumes were flimsy. There wasn’t any magic here.
My congregants had trusted me enough to follow me, and I brought them through barbed wire and broken glass. I had probably given two small children frostbite. Ula, most likely, will get pneumonia. On Christmas Eve.
“It’s fine,” I tell myself. “We’re all here, and celebrating.” But I fret internally, as a congregant tells me a story I’ve lost the thread of, that it doesn’t feel anything like Christmas.
An emperor makes up his mind that the world should be registered. While he sits at a banquet table feasting on pheasant and calling for more wine, a couple of just-married kids are wandering the streets of a strange city when the girl’s water breaks. They end up in a stranger’s stable, blood and water mingling with the hay as Mary bears down in pain. There’s no mama or auntie to squeeze her hand or tell her when to push.
Historians say that there actually was no census when Jesus was born. Some guy named Quirinius held one ten years after Herod died, but Luke insists Jesus was born during Herod’s reign. Luke wants to show that Jesus’ birth takes place in the middle of displacement and desperation.
The Gospels tell other stories about Mary. In Matthew’s version, she and Joseph flee to Egypt because Herod has promised to kill this newborn child. The holy family become refugees, traveling miles over land with the baby strapped to Mary’s back. She raises her child in a foreign nation, surrounded by a garble of languages she can’t understand. They have no friends, no family—no one to welcome them.
Christmas is about how God is born in forgotten places. It’s about families forced to undertake a journey they can’t afford at the worst possible time. The powerful men of this world puff and tut about decisions they deem necessary or reasonable, moving pieces on maps or signing their decrees. Meanwhile, in the far-flung corners of their kingdoms, mothers tuck their children in arms and clamber into boats or trucks that will take them across the sea or barbed-wire borders. They pay the bribes, strap their babies into orange life vests. They have been told there is a better life on the other side where their kids can grow up free.
Mary was a brown-skinned Middle Eastern teenager who gave birth alone among animals. She was a poor, despised religious and ethnic minority living in a backwater town under the rule of a powerful and unjust empire. In the years since then, the White Men of History have wrapped her in a clean blue cloth and painted her skin lily-white—a blue-eyed virgin looking up toward heaven. But Mary was all strength and sinew, bite and courage. She was more like the girls that live on the corner of Bond and Butler. Young and dark-skinned. Living in public housing. Unmarried and knocked up. Unimportant to the White Men of History. They’d look at Mary and call her a welfare queen. Put her on line to wait for food stamps. Give her a subpar education. Brand her illegal and send her back to the border.
We don’t call women like her holy.
As her first lullaby, Mary sings a song that unseats tyrants. God will tear down the mighty from their thrones. Remembering this, we might not be surprised to learn that her Hebrew name, Mariam, means not only “bitterness” but also “rebellion.”
As a child, I wore my fair share of cardboard wings and tinsel halos. In third grade, I was an angel in the pageant, wearing a white choir robe. As an infant I even played Jesus, placed in a hay-lined trough as the sixteen-year-old who had been cast as Mary leaned away from me, worried she might make me cry.
We play out the scene every year in our churches: as soothing and predictable as a bedtime story. God is in heaven, Jesus born on earth, a star hangs above, all is well with the world. For a moment on those Christmas Eves, it seems that all must be well. God is here, as innocent as a child. For some churches, whose congregants inhabit lives of comfort and ease, it can be a story to hide behind. All is well for them. They have what they need and can get what they want.
For others, who labor under the grinding weight of minimum-wage jobs, who worry their dark-skinned teenage boy is looking awfully grown up, who wait for the knock of ICE at the door, the story is not only a salve but a call to arms. God is born, the story says, and the woman who bears him calls for your liberation. It’s Mary, that dirt-poor teenage mother, who shows us the paradox of God. To find God, we go not up, to the emperors and rulers of this world, but down. To Mary.
A few years from now, I’ll walk the streets we walked tonight with a phone in my hand, checking Facebook to see how many likes some post got. It will be dark, late at night, and I’ll be almost to my apartment when I pause to type out a comment, leaned up against a neighbor’s wrought-iron fence. In that moment, I will feel a cold, round object pressed to the left side of my head and a hand wrap around my right hand—the one holding my phone.
For a moment, he and I stand as if we are a couple on a dance floor, his body just behind mine, my hand in his, extended. Gimme your phone gimme me your phone, he says clearly, right in my ear, as he slips it from my hand and then gimme your bag gimme your bag, and he takes ahold of the shoulder strap and lifts my heavy satchel from me, spinning me out from beneath it with a guiding hand on the small of my back. In one deft move, he gives me a firm but gentle push to send me walking down the sidewalk, away from him.
I am shaking in fear. I turn back for just a moment to see that he’s not even running. He’s ambling away from me. He’s taken my phone and the bag that contains my wallet, my computer, the keys to my apartment, and my passport.
I tremble for days. A week later, after putting on heels and boarding the subway, I collapse into tears. I feel trapped in the shoes, unable to move quickly enough to escape attack. To this day, I startle unpleasantly when a runner comes up behind me on the sidewalk.
Despite these signs of trauma, I feel no ill will toward the man who mugged me. The moment seemed oddly neutral—devoid of any sense of violent intent. Days later, someone finds my keys on the ground, a half block from the encounter, and, noticing my key chain for my local gym, drops them off there, where they have my number on file. My mugger had tossed them on the sidewalk. It felt like he left them so I might find them. I never saw his face, but we shared this intimate moment. His hand on the small of my back, as if we were dancing. I was terrified, but I never felt like I was in danger.
The White Men of History don’t give a kid like him a lot of chances. A school system designed to ferry him to prison, a neighborhood designed to deliver him to drug dealers.
We don’t call men like him holy.
In the pub, I sit with my beer, watching congregants wish each other a merry Christmas. One by one, they say goodbye and plunge out the door and into the night. Charlotte’s working the brunch shift at Balthazar tomorrow before heading back to see her family in Vermont. Ezra will deliver the girls to their mom and then return to his apartment—his first Christmas on his own. James keeps watch at the window for Ula’s Access-A-Ride, which will carry her back to the nursing home. Down the street at my darkened studio apartment, a smattering of Christmas cards are stuck to the fridge. From them smile babies and toddlers in matching shirts and onesies, grasping stockings or candy canes.
Here we all are, people with lives that are patchy and at times unmanageable. We hold things together with bits of string and spare parts, and keep moving day to day, because that’s what you do. Tonight, we pushed our way over broken glass to tell a story about God coming to dwell in circumstances that were uncertain and untenable, when everything was falling apart at the seams. There was a place at the inn, but the wind still battered at the door.
When you ask for an uncomfortable Christmas, you don’t get to choose just how uncomfortable it will be. Ours had moved from industrial wasteland through emptied public housing units to a bar devoted to a despairing kind of drunkenness. We traveled through places that had been left behind, and told our story among people who had nowhere else to be. We were as anonymous as Joseph and Mary were on the streets of Bethlehem, everything boarded up for the night. When we stood on those street corners, our wings had seemed, for the first time, wilted and flimsy. Maybe we were a bunch of naïve believers, proclaiming a gospel of the oppressed without the lived experience to back it up.
I had hoped for a night that was magical. God didn’t give us magic. But God gave us truth.
“Come all who are wise and all who are foolish,” Charlotte had beckoned. I was wise and foolish. Wise enough to be drawn toward the star and foolish enough to fail to understand what it means—that on the other end are both God and Herod, both divinity and genocide. We will be asked to follow that star places we never wished to go.
There are just a few of us left now, and I realize that the long wooden table and benches of the pub are scattered with the remnants of the Pageant Parade: cardboard wings covered in folded coffee filters and barnyard ears hot-glued to drugstore headbands. I collect them all into a big IKEA bag. It’s light to carry: nothing but fabric and cotton balls, glitter and glue. There’s also the angel, leaned up against the wall, observing the proceedings. Jason is taking the subway an hour home to Astoria. The angel isn’t going home with him. I certainly don’t feel like walking her back along our route to the Zen center in the cold. I didn’t really plan this part so well.
So I decide to take the angel home to my darkened studio. There will be room for her in the corner. We get up and head out into the cold, zipping our coats. Slinging the bag of costumes over my shoulder, I tip the bandleader of the heavenly host forward and through the door, then hoist her onto my shoulder. On the street we hug one another with wishes for a merry Christmas, and wave goodbye as we split off toward our respective subway stops. The angel and I set out toward my empty apartment, her salvaged fabric billowing behind me in the wind.