My sister gave it to me. She didn't quite know what to do with it, got it as a gift from an Roman Catholic friend. Through the haze of years, something in my sister harkened back to Sunday School, where she'd been taught that a crucifix is somehow Catholic. She could neither hang it in her home, she said, nor drop it in the garbage, and was relieved when her little brother took it off her hands.
A big picture of Michaelangelo's Pieta is here in my Roman Catholic corner too, a world treasure featuring a Holy Mother in whose immense lap the body of Jesus of seems remarkably child-like. It is said the master used to come by St. Peter's Basilica at night just to stand before his sculpture, not because he was so proud of what he'd done but because he'd grown to love this bounteous Mary, mother of Christ.
I don't believe this corner can rightly be classified as a shrine. I'm sufficiently Calvinist enough to say I'm neither Buddhist nor Shinto and just a bit Catholic. What's here is a few religious icons in my Roman Catholic corner.
And there's a pen-and-ink I picked up in Old Town, Chicago, fifty years ago, an image of Christ as the hippie radical I wanted to be. It's not particularly Catholic, but it does suggest a similar Good Friday theme that, right now, is not at all Christmas-y.
A meditation my wife and read last week reminded us that what is to come in that remarkable baby's life is no picnic romp. "Jesus was born," the writer says, "to suffer and die." That a thousand darling nativity scenes don't say that exactly doesn't mean it's any less true. Now's the time for a baby, pudgy legs and arms up as if he is just now beginning to measure his own reach. Now's the time for Mary adorned in adoration, Joseph, in determined silence, standing by and nodding to some song being played, the music of blessed faithfulness.
But there's no escaping the truth. This child is going to walk and sometimes limp through things that show here in my little Catholic corner. That baby was born to suffer and die for us, for me, "despised and rejected, a man of sorrows." It's not at all easy to draw those two narratives into one.
Small-town museums can be treasures if you arrive when some volunteer docent can give you all of his or her attention. Last year, I toured an immense nativity scene created in 1945 by Nazi prisoners of war in a sprawling camp in Algona, Iowa.
The guide was full of stories. If I lived closer to Algona, he could have signed me up for a few volunteer holiday hours myself. One story I'll never forget. He told me a retired pastor came in with two little granddaughters. He measured their height with his hands. "So big or so," he said.
Despite Grandpa's divine intentions, the little girls were soon bored, he said, and it showed. The story tumbled out. You docent long enough and you learn some tricks, he told me. He told them he had a game they could play. He and their Grandpa would stay in the museum, and they could go back into the nativity and count sheep. "You can't believe how many sheep those prisoners made that Christmas," he told them. "I'm not sure anymore how many are there, but there's tons of them. Count 'em for me, will you?"
Worked. They scampered back into the scene, spent some time quietly inside, then dutifully returned. "Thirty-four," they told him.
He knew how many were there--he'd lied about that--and he knew they were wrong. "So we all went back into the nativity because I had to show them they'd miscounted," he said. There were tears in his story-telling, but then the man loved what he was doing and what we were witnessing.
He went through them all, pointing to the sheep, one after another. "Thirty-three," he told those little girls. "I see only 33 sheep."
Getting out the punchline took some work through a lower lip that was way out of control and hands to hold back tears.
"But what about Jesus?" the little girls said. "He's the lamb of God."
They were not at all wrong
. From suffering his grace flows. "By his stripes we are healed."
Right here beside me there's an old plastic candelabra from the estate of an aunt who passed away a few years ago. Had to send away for replacement lights because it's a relic. But right now it's lit. It stands against a big window to the darkness right now, on one of the longest nights of year; it's light amid the darkness.
That's his story and, most thankfully, ours.
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