Stealing Christmas

This week near Bethlehem, Pa. in the middle of the night, a woman approached a Nativity scene outside a local church. Surveying the deserted street around her, she crept into the manger drawn to the porcelain statue of the Baby Jesus. She gently picked up the statue,cradling it. Then looking both ways,she slipped it beneath her coat and hurried away. The next night a nervous young man, who spent his entire life savings on a ring, fell to his knees in Times Square. He was about to ask the only girl he ever loved to save from loneliness. To marry him. As he stammered and reached for the ring it slipped from his hands, rolled away and disappeared into the black beneath a subway grate. The following morning a little girl in Mexico carefully wrote a Christmas letter to Santa Claus. The letter said that the girl's mother worked three jobs. That she was tired and sometimes late at night the girl could hear her crying. The letter asked, 'Please Santa can you send something brave,something like courage...to my mom.' And though the girl wanted many childhood things she wrote, 'Please Santa... Please. That's all I want for Christmas.' Then the girl did the only thing she could think of to send her prayer to the North Pole. She attached it to a balloon along with her address and let the wind sweep it away into the night sky. In NYC the tabloids all carried the story of the ring lost in the grime beneath the city. Hustlers and scam artists spent days futilely combing through the filth looking for the windfall. But a day later, an old man, sweeping out his subway newsstand saw a gleam near the third rail on the D train tracks. He pointed it out to a lady cop, who climbed down between trains, recovered and eventually returned the ring. She said yes. The girl. The tabloids all covered the story of love found beneath the city litter. And hustlers, cops, cab drivers and other orphans of the night for just a moment felt themselves changed. Each restored for an instant, saved by some mystery each could feel and none could understand. The balloon never made it to the North Pole. It caught on a barbed wire fence near a Texas border town ranch. The owner, a widowed rancher, had just about given up hope of ever feeling anything but grief again. But on Christmas Eve as he read the letter, he felt something. Something like an offer brushed past him. An offer to do something right...to feel something right again. An offer to change something for an innocent and so be changed himself. He pushed away the worry that he was acting a fool and decided right there to answer that little girl's prayer. The next day he climbed into his old truck,crossed the border and found his way to them. He explained about finding the balloon and barbed wire fences he had built around himself. He said that he felt something stronger than his doubt take hold of him. Then quietly he offered the girl's mother a job. He had plenty of room he said. Then he quietly added that life was too lonely now. Tired and scared the girl's mother was about to say no when the rancher handed her the little girl's letter. She read it,then through tears looked into her daughter's face. Turning back to the rancher she felt something she had nearly forgotten. Something that felt like courage. And looking up into the rancher's face she heard herself answer. 'Yes.' Christmas morning the priest saw that Jesus was missing from the manger. But later as his parish gathered he didn't tell them that the Baby Jesus had been stolen. He did not say that the world is cruel and a thief had tried to steal Christmas itself. Instead, standing at the pulpit he told the gathered crowd that someone who needed saving saw a Savior and took hold of mercy the only way they knew how. He said at that very moment the Savior of the World was busy working on the one soul he was sure needed him. He said that Jesus was not missing. He was not stolen. He was about the work he was sent to do. From the back pew of the church a rumble began as a whisper. Soon hands began to clap. The sound rose like wave as the congregation, certain that it had finally heard something true, responded. The sound rose until it rang out like a near forgotten hymn from the back of each throat. The woman that needed saving so much that she stole it, had put the statue in her infant daughter's crib. The girl was terribly sick and for a time, near death. Fear makes people do things, things they cannot otherwise imagine. They commit great acts of faith that can sometimes seem like crimes. Sometimes trying to save themselves they try to steal hope or love or time. But late that night the woman's husband, certain the child was failing, called a priest to give last rites. When the priest arrived he went straight away to the girl's crib. And laying there next to her he saw the statue. Turning to her mother he listened as she begged through her tears for forgiveness and for mercy. The priest, humbled by such great faith, prayed that the girl would be saved. And God said yes. Rings are lost. Balloons can fly only so far before falling. Both love and faith can be worn away by worry and heartache. And everything that ever was can fall. Fall like a ring into darkness, fall like a balloon in a storm, fall from the fear of loss a child's life or love or faith. But I will tell you something I have come to believe. Something that has pierced my black Irish heart in ways it could have never imagined. Some truth that waits for me now in the space between my heart and my imagination. It is this. Yes, so much falls. So much of it all. We are pulled down and away by some undiscovered force like gravity. It happens every day. But there is a much less understood force that science has not yet divined. It pulls from the bottom of each broken heart. It swells with hope like a balloon in a night sky. And as it rises the elevation changes hope to a kind of faith. And somehow a part of us afflicted so long with the weight of living is finally offered the endowment of wings. And though all of it falls, in time everything ....all of it... eventually rises. The Savior of the World was born on this December day. But He comes too on every other, disguised as ourselves, asking our small hands to join His great work. The Savior comes as an old man sweeping an underground newsstand and a lady cop brave enough to climb down into harm's way. He comes as a small girl and her simple written prayer sent high above the reach of doubt. The Savior comes as a old widowed man driven by loneliness to answer an innocents cry. And the Savior comes in a mother's desperate act of faith trying to steal God's mercy from where it lay in plain sight in a winter's manger. So this Christmas say a prayer for all the mutts and outcasts, for all the hopeful people on their knees in Times Square, for the writers of impossible stories they send up like balloons flying far above the reach of the barbed wire fences of disbelief. Say a prayer for the word scribblers and the song seekers, for the worried mothers and fathers trying to save the world of their children. And especially this, to all of us orbiting outside Bethlehem, trying to steal love. So often we get it backwards. Lay down your dyslexic hearts. Try it the other way. WLM