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 uncertai
n 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.
Every week there is bread on a table in the middle of the room. But this is not a gathering of St. Lydia’s. It’s a rehearsal for a radical marching band I’ve joined. We’re called the Rude Mechanical Orchestra. Every Tuesday night, a collection of tattered activists in thrift store sweaters wheel up on bicycles rigged to carry a trombone or saxophone, backpacks stuffed with sheet music. This is where I learn to be an activist. And, to be honest, a Christian.
My first night I hustle down a flight of stairs into a cramped basement studio and open the door to a clatter of noodled notes and overtones. There are four sections: low brass, woodwinds, trumpets, and percussion, all facing toward each other in a sloppy square. In the middle of the room is a wooden table, and on the table there is always a loaf of bread, pulled from someone’s bike bag. As more people arrive, other offerings of food are set on this slapdash altar.
“You eat dumpster-dived?” someone might ask before handing me a blood orange or a slice of black pepper salami, as if they’re inquiring if I’m vegetarian or gluten free.
“Yup,” I answer, receiving their offering in a cupped hand.
Dumpster diving is illegal, but if you know the right places you can make out like a bandit and feast like a king. Band members bring entire bags of firm grapes, bars of gourmet chocolate, and bags of almonds, all in pristine condition and one day past expiration.
Adjacent to a gaggle of gleaming sousaphones, I sit at the back of the low-brass section with my trombone and survey the room. The players are bearded and scruffy, at ease in their bodies. A clarinetist leans a head on a friend’s shoulder and rubs their back. The group is gorgeously Queer, bypassing gender norms. We go around the circle and introduce ourselves with names and our pronouns, a practice that’s new to me. I’m supposed to manage to memorize both, which feels daunting. From there, band members take turns leading rehearsals. Changes are scribbled down on sheet music that will inevitably be lost in the cavern-like rehearsal space. We spend a good portion of each rehearsal reconstructing what we decided the last time about whether or not we’ll repeat the B section.
A lot of the players live in communal houses, sharing kitchens and bathrooms and making big one-pot meals on rotation for everyone. They live cheap so they can dedicate their lives to activism. Practically off the capitalist grid, they buy almost everything used or trade for it, making and repairing household items. They always have someone to crash with. Their support networks extend across the country and around the world.
It strikes me that their lives look more like what Jesus was talking about than just about anything I’ve ever seen in church. They’re like a secular monastery, living like Christians did in the first few centuries, sharing what they earned and making sure everyone was fed.
The Rude Mechanical Orchestra adopts me, despite my lack of body hair. They’re always reminding me that we already have everything we need to live. That what looks like deficit to the rest of the world is brimming with abundance to them. Being in the band shows me that what others have thrown away might be enough for a feast.
Jesus, too, had a habit of making enough from a little. Some spit on his hand and a scrape of dirt are enough to make a blind man see. That’s all he needs. A few loaves of bread and a couple of fish become a meal for a multitude. When the wine runs low, turns out water can serve in a pinch. The most important thing is that the party keep going. It doesn’t matter how little you’ve got, somehow it’s enough when God’s at the table.
* * *
—
I didn’t join the Rude Mechanical Orchestra to become a better Christian, though. I was hoping to make friends with someone who wasn’t part of my church. Or maybe, just maybe, meet someone who didn’t send me 3:00 A.M. texts that read, “hey wut R U doin U hot baby.”
Things are rough on the dating front. There are some for whom the Pastor Thing is a no-go. Others seem to fetishize my role, or imagine I can heal or redeem them. One, who initially seemed attracted to my sense of power and authority, turned out to be threatened by it. Another had a subconscious notion that dating a woman of the cloth would make him a better person and fetter the rage he carried. These relationships started out with fiery intensity before explosively flaring out in showers of fights and fireworks.
Now I’m in a long dry spell, punctuated by first dates that rarely produce a second. I zip myself into alluring clothes, feeling like a carbon copy of myself, and try to arrange my body into pleasing, nonchalant poses. I’m extraordinarily bad at dating. I have a tendency to ask academic questions that make dates resemble college entrance interviews. Or I go too deep too fast, acting like a pastor instead of a person. “That must have left you feeling really abandoned,” I’ll say, instead of talking about, I don’t know, a movie. I don’t understand how to flirt. I always text back too soon. I always need too much.
Rachel fields a deluge of fretful anxiety concerning my lack of a dating life. She has men trailing her through the aisle when she’s picking up an angled paintbrush, or asking for her number on the R train, and seems to be an expert on all things attraction.
“You’re dressing like a church lady,” she tells me bluntly one day and drags me off to shop. In an effort to up my game, she stuffs me into skinny jeans and a leather jacket and tells me I look cute. I believe her. I can’t even tell how wrong I feel.
They’re afraid you’ll try to convert them, Mieke says.
They assume you don’t have sex, my friend Tim offers.
You just haven’t met the right person, another friend opines. She is, as yet, unjaded.
It’s funny how deficiency and abundance can live side by side. My life is rich in so many ways. Everything around me is beautiful: tables piled with home-cooked meals and a church full of smart, thoughtful people. There is enough of so much, and more than enough. But pastors experience a strange doubleness. Our relationships with congregants are a one-way street. Our role is a professional one, like a counselor and a teacher rolled into one. I am often vulnerable with the Lydians, but I can’t call them up after a bad day for a good cry. It would muddy the waters of our relationship, make them feel they have to care for me. I created a church because I was lonely, but in the act of leading it, I’ve ended up alone.
A thought won’t stop nagging at me, like a persistent mosquito. Maybe there’s something wrong with you. The only thing in my life that doesn’t feel like enough is me.
The Miracle of 304 Bond Street
The real-estate agent and I stand together inside the empty storefront. Ductwork runs overhead like a network of highway overpasses. The fuse box hangs open. In the back left corner the agent shows me the bathroom: a lone, exposed toilet standing next to a sink hookup.
“Just put up some drywall and you’re done!” he tells me optimistically.
The place is big and the light is good, but it costs eight thousand dollars a month.
For All Who Hunger Page 7