1: O little town of Bethlehem
God the Father and the baby Jesus were the spiritual lights in my young life. Bible stories, especially about the birth of Jesus, were magic, lit with words like swaddling, manger, and dazzlers like gold, frankincense and myhrr. The son of God, was so desired and precious and so poor and despised.
And the stories came with wonderful songs – O, Little Town of Bethlehem, We Three Kings of Orient Are, Bring the Torch, Jeannette Isabella, Hark the Herald Angels Sing, O Come all ye Faithful, Silent Night, It Came Upon a Midnight Clear, Joy to the World, Good King Wenceslas, God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen and Away in a Manager are just some of them.
We sang these songs together in December every year and every year they brought light and joy and burrowed their way deeper into my heart so that 65 years later I still remember the words and can bring up the images of following a star to a barn. In cold, snowy Buffalo, NY, I saw Jesus’s birthplace as a barn full of warm animals and piles of hay.
Every year, my mother’s church held a silent nativity scene the Sunday evening before Christmas, with a family – father, mother and child, a hay-filled manager, shepherds, sheep, three wise men in sparkling costumes and turbans. The churchgoers would bring gifts wrapped in white and leave them to be distributed to the needy.
When she was six, my sturdy and demanding sister, scanned the scene and asked in a loud voice, “Where are da camels?”
Then it was embarrassing. Looking back, I think it was a moment of God’s presence, reminding us that even in the times when we are united, we are each different, when we are solemn, humor breaks through.
2: Miracle and prophecy
Over the next ten years or so, my spiritual life was in church.
I’m a sucker for big words and ideas. How could I resist religion? Apocalypse, transgression, messiah, blessing. Even the simplest of words – sin or cross – contain depthless mysteries. (Why would any creator God burden us as a “sinful” people? Who chose an instrument of torture or death to symbolize our faith?)
While I struggled in school over ideas like metaphor or square roots, church offered ideas like eternity, forgiveness, and trinity. And these ideas unfolded into amazing realms: grace, the Holy Ghost. Miracles and prophecy
3: The church in the world
- Civil rights, the war in Vietnam. If God saw us as equals, and the world treated some harshly, what should we believers do to restore balance?
Our youth group studied and read and questioned. We volunteered to bring snacks and teach reading to children.
I went further and signed up for a summerlong program called Intentional Community. Under the umbrella of the national church, 12 high schoolers and two chaperones left home and lived together to work to support ourselves and study. Like the disciples, they said.
My community was in Hebron, Nebraska, in an agricultural county in the center of the state. By day we were farmworkers or stoop labor, as we were known, earning enough for food
Evenings we would cook our dinner and read and discuss the Bible, probing for meaning, wrestling with our role in the world.
When I returned from Hebron, the church set me up with a couple of after-dinner talks. Clergy and young people, a few other adults. I talked about my summer and what I had learned. The talk celebrated the questions and the challenge of finding a mission in our turbulent world.
After my second talk, I sat down next to the local minister. He turned to me and asked in a superior tone if I had ever considered it my mission to marry a clergyman. It was a bolt to the heart and brain. I heard him say I wasn’t a person. And at 17 that was the first time I had not been able to soften it. I left the church.
4: Reading towards salvation
Even without the church, I had the Bible. At 18, I opened the Good Book again and began to study. And unlock meanings.
Book number 3 – Numbers – was tedious to read, but fascinating to study.
Numbers 1:4 – A man from each tribe shall be with you, each man the head of his ancestral house. These are the names of the men who shall assist you:
From Reuben, Elizur son of Sheduer
From Simeon, Shelumiel son of Zurishaddai
From Judah, Nahshon, son of Amminadsb
From Issachar, Nethanel son of Zuar
Why did this roll call keep its place in scripture? Did no one think, after millennia, these names are just meaningless syllables.
Maybe for religion, you need the names of your forefathers. But the why? It seems “boring” “irrelevant”. Then the thought creeps in that this passage reminds readers that no one is forgotten. Through centuries, every single person counts.
(Well not women but men.)
5: Winifred
It didn’t occur to me until well into my forties that God was among us, not just in reading and thinking – but seeing and feeling. Angels are with us.
My grandmother, Winifred Mariah Allen Short, built a rich long life on a ruined body and love of family. As a preteen, she contracted osteomyelitis, a bone disease requiring surgery that left her with more than 80 scars on her arms and legs and one leg more than an inch shorter than the other. She also lost a kidney. Her family moved off the farm to Buffalo where she wouldn’t be isolated. They sent her to college because with her handicaps, they assumed she couldn’t marry. Then she married and though her doctor thought she’d die, had four children. After 20 years, my grandfather divorced her for an able-bodied woman who could stand in reception lines with him. She refused alimony and became live-in help to a woman who lived close to us so she could see her grandchildren. She had slumber parties for us and she let us ask about her scars – and even count them. My grandfather eventually divorced his second wife and came back to Winifred so she could nurse him through his final illness. Life heaped the hardships on her but she never succumbed. She didn’t spend much time worrying the scales of justice. She enjoyed life. I could have learned more from her.
- Resurrections
My grandparents, my parents, my aunts and uncles are dead. They’ve been dying for decades and I have felt their loss deeply. And hoping to see them again somehow, I have questioned preachers about resurrection.
Now that my own future is shadowed with death, resurrection is real. A resurrection of sympathy. I return to the past, and it’s not the same. I reach out to my lost dead, not expecting them to come to me. But I can see anew their strength and purpose, their love and precious failings. They are different to me than they were when we lived together.
- My theology
Life is serious to me. But I believe God appears in questions and laughter, not answers: When I am shocked and surprised– a rainbow, a child’s somersault, I believe that is of the spirit.
On a walk last Saturday, I saw paradise. It was a baseball game a group of young men and women playing ball and dozens and dozens of spectators. Looking more closely, there were too many players in the field and no bench. The pitcher’s chatter was wrong, more of a countdown. I stopped and looked.
Except for the pitcher and catcher, the players were visually impaired. A ball was rolled, not thrown, in from the field. There was one base not three.
It’s called Beep Baseball, and it made me smile because of the community that forms when it’s reshaped for the people on the field.
~Deborah Hudson