Idyll Banter (17 page)

THE
CHURCH
WITH A
WEATHERVANE
ATOP THE
STEEPLE

A FENDER BENDER WITH BABY JESUS?

I HAVE MANY FEARS,
some more rational than others, but one is about to go away for a little while because Christmas is coming.

For the next few weeks, I will no longer fear running over the baby Jesus in his creche.

This is actually one of my more rational fears.

Specifically, I fear that some day between mid-January and mid-December, I might have to pull myself together after a tremendous calamity has occurred for which I am responsible, and struggle over to the United Church of Lincoln and explain to the congregation, “Ummm, there's no good way to say this, but I think I just ran over the baby Jesus. I'm really sorry, but I accidentally put the car into drive instead of reverse, and you know the incredible pickup those Plymouth Colts have.”

This could happen. This could happen because my church's almost life-size nativity scene is stored inside my barn after Christmas, and it is stored about a foot from the front bumper of my car after I've parked.

Add to this the fact that I am an incredibly incompetent driver, and some days I am getting into my car at six in the morning—a time of day when I'm an even worse driver than usual, because I haven't yet hooked up the intravenous caffeine feed that keeps me awake—and we have a prescription for disaster.

Ironically, it was my lamebrained idea to put the creche where it is in the first place. About five years ago, the stewards asked if the church could store the nativity scene in my barn instead of my neighbor's, where it had sat for years. I knew this nativity scene well, I knew the faces of the folks in the manger, and they seemed like nice enough people. So I said sure, they could summer in my barn.

What I didn't know was that the nativity scene weighed a little more than a backhoe. This isn't one of those particleboard nativity scenes, this is no spit-and-polish plastic affair. This is a nativity scene with a five-foot-high manger, wooden adults who have eaten well for most of their wooden lives, and a floor with an aircraft carrier hidden inside it to keep the thing stable when the December winds blow hard off the mountain.

It takes six strong men to carry it the fifty yards from the church to my barn.

For four years we put the creche in the back of the barn, on the wooden floor far from the car. Over time, however, the flooring began to sink under its weight, and the wall beside it started to sag accordingly.

So this past January, I suggested we put the manger on the edge of the cement pad in the front half of the barn, where I park. There is just enough room in this garage bay for the nativity scene, the car, and one thin person to stand.

Consequently, when I drive into the barn at night, my headlights beam the creche. When I start the car in the morning, there are three shepherds, Mary and Joseph, and the baby Jesus staring back at me from the manger.

This is a very weird sensation: bumper-to-bumper with the baby Jesus.

It is also, however, an extremely moving one. In addition to the symbolic meaning of the creche to Christians worldwide, this particular creche has additional meaning to the members of one small church in Lincoln.

No one knows who built it. It appeared, mysteriously, on Christmas Eve, 1981, on the lawn of the church the year the church had burned to the ground. When I see the creche, I am therefore reminded that while one old church may have disappeared in smoke and flame, in its ashes was faith, and from that faith a new church arose.

So in three weeks, when it's time to move the creche back into the barn after Christmas, I probably won't find a new spot. But I will learn to drive with the parking brake on.

CLOUDS CAN'T HIDE THE SUN
ON A SPIRITUALLY BRIGHT
EASTER MORNING

MOUNT ABRAHAM HAS
no Himalayan aspirations, no delusions that it is part of a particularly grand massif. Just above four thousand feet, it is among the taller mountains in Vermont, but it is still less than one-seventh the height of Everest.

Nevertheless, it towers above the village of Lincoln, its summit just east of the town, and offers a remarkably different visage when scrutinized from different angles.

Peter and Sue Brown, for example, who live to the southwest in a farmhouse Robert Frost once tried to buy, see what has always looked to me like a gargantuan toppled pear. John Nelson and Christine Fraioli, who live due west of the mountain, see instead a more gently sloping incline: A colossal bunny hill for a giant just learning to ski.

It is not uncommon for there to be a layer of clouds just below the summit but nothing but clear sky above 3,500 feet. When this happens, the peak can look a bit like a boulder at the seashore at low tide: The clouds become sea foam and the mountaintop—white in the winter, brown in the spring, a deep green in the long days of summer—grows reminiscent of a stone in the breakers.

When this occurs in the very early morning, before the sun has come fully over the top, the clouds become an almost nuclear shade of orangy red.

One of the best views of the mountain is from Gove Hill, a gentle knoll south of the center of the village that is bordered by woods to the west. The hill is just steep enough that in the winter children can race down it on their snowboards and sleds.

This morning, Easter, a good number of us from churches in Lincoln and Bristol will gather on that hill and watch the mountain to the east. We will arrive there before 6:00
A.M.
, and we will hope that today will be one of those sunrises in which we do indeed see the great star slowly emerge over Abraham. We do this every year, a ritual we share with congregations all over the world.

One of the great idiosyncracies of the sunrise service on Gove Hill, however, is that we never know what to expect in terms of the weather. This is Vermont, after all, and Easter falls in that time of the year when the climate can only be called capricious. In recent years, the small congregation has gathered in the midst of howling snowstorms, and on balmy spring days when the daffodils and crocuses have already pushed through the boggy ground—kaleidoscopically beautiful signs of rebirth.

There have been many Easters when the mountain has been completely obscured by fog and clouds, and the only evidence we've had that the sun is up is that the asphalt-gray sky has grown marginally lighter.

At the same time, there have been Easters when the clouds have been a pure white woolpack just below the summit, with the sky above them a cerulean blue. Those mornings we have sung a hymn, and the sun has appeared miraculously over the mountain—seemingly at the same height as our little perch on Gove Hill. Those moments are a particular blessing.

But gather we do, regardless of whether we need to tromp up the hill in our mud boots and parkas or in light sweaters and sneakers. Sometimes there are fifty of us, sometimes there are a hundred. But the size of the congregation is less relevant, it seems, than the fact we are a part of a fellowship. We have been taught, after all, that it takes only a few of us to gather for there to be a church.

Likewise, the unpredictability of the vista before us and the fact the sun and the mountain may be obscured are gentle reminders of just how little we know and how much we must take on faith. The sun will rise, we believe, regardless of whether we see it.

Happy Easter. Happy Passover. Peace.

FAITH GIVES A CHILD SERENITY

MY WIFE,
my three-year-old daughter, and I are sitting around the kitchen counter where we have breakfast and lunch most weekends. It's just after noon on a Sunday.

With the pensiveness that is peculiar to small children—my daughter's lips are drawn tight and her chin is tilted down toward her chest, but her eyes are looking up without a trace of a pout—she asks almost abruptly, “God's really strong, right?”

“Certainly,” I answer, and then quickly translate my response into one of the colloquialisms she hears around the house all the time: “Sure is.”

And although I'm not surprised that God is on her mind—she has, after all, just returned from Sunday school—I inquire as casually as I can, “So, why do you ask?”

“Welllll,” she says, drawing the word out the way she does whenever she's figuring something out. “Your mommy died. And mommy's daddy died. And God had to carry them both up to heaven.”

I nod, desperately in love with both her logic and her faith. (Meanwhile, the literalist inside me I've never liked much is thinking, “Well, they died four years apart, Grace, so God didn't have to carry them up to heaven at exactly the same time. There were probably two trips.” Fortunately, I keep my mouth shut.)

“Yeah, I thought so,” she murmurs, and then contentedly takes another bite of her cheese sandwich, moving on blithely to the next question in her head: whether her mother and I will allow her to inebriate the cat with catnip that afternoon.

I pray that my daughter never loses her faith. I pray that children of every faith retain their assurance that there's more in this world than they can see and comprehend, and that their confidence always remains a part of who they are.

Some days, of course, that prayer seems more reasonable than others. I've certainly sat through funerals in which my own faith was challenged: the funerals of friends who in my mind died way too young. Sometimes I marvel that faith even survives in a world that in recent history has offered us ethnic cleansing in what was once Yugoslavia, mass slaughter in Rwanda, and people willing to blow up whole buildings in Oklahoma, Argentina, and Dhahran.

I have an older friend who attended divinity school with every intention of becoming a clergyman. But he found that in his case, the more he studied, the more his faith diminished. Eventually he dropped out and went on to a successful career in market research. In his life's work, the thorny issue of blind faith was made irrelevant by focusing instead on those questions and problems that lent themselves to statistical analysis and concrete projections.

And there's no doubt in my mind that faith is capricious. My mother-in-law is an unwavering atheist, while her brother was for decades an Episcopal minister who works now for the Episcopal diocese in Chicago.

But faith is also accessible. It's a gift given to the soul the moment we begin to sense the mysteries that surround us: an absolute intangible such as love. Those small and large acts of seemingly unreasonable selflessness that pepper our days and our nights. The astonishing goodness and beneficence that bob like buoys in the maelstrom that is this planet so much of the time.

There's something miraculous in the very premise of spring.

And faith is a boon that seems always there for the taking. Sometimes it demands a little work: a participation in the rituals the soul is craving. Acquiescing to the likelihood that we don't know quite as much as we thought. A willingness to bow before the notion that for once in our lives we have to swallow our pride and ask for something we need.

But the gift has always struck me as enormous: a whole life lived with the peace of mind of a three-year-old.