A Personal Prologue -- "I Feel Better"

At least I know I wasn't feeling fine that night three days before Christmas as I drove through the rain and sleet to meet my daughter Karen for a late supper at a center city tavern she liked. The world I knew was ending, not just in the somewhat abstract way it always is, but very specifically and painfully.

Karen, my bright, beautiful kid, had dropped out of college to try to deal with some tormenting personal problems. I was scared by what she was doing, but I could only be with her in whatever way I could and however she would let me. In fact, that was why I was slip-sliding along the River Drive toward our rendezvous.

In addition, my mother was dying, and my father was clinically depressed. My first marriage was unraveling, which pained and disillusioned me and my family, hurt and angered my kids, and put my professional future at risk. It actually was the end of the world as I knew it, and I didn't feel at all fine.

I turned off the drive and went past shops and department stores splendidly decked out for Christmas, lights, decorations, bell-ringing Santas, shoppers weaving along everywhere. I figured some of them must have felt as disoriented as I did that night. I know that Christmas is a tough time for lots of people. That year, I was experiencing it first hand.

I drove through the heart of the shopping district into a section where homeless folk camped out over steam grates in the sidewalks in front of stores whose owners had closed early and pulled down security grates over the windows.

I turned onto Lombard Street where row houses, eateries, and small shops existed cheek by jowl. I was lucky to find a parking spot a couple of blocks from the place where I was to meet Karen.

I got out of the car and looked around, as if waking from a dream. Then it came to me, two lines from a poem I'd read years earlier. Why just those two lines came as clear as from the poet's pen, I don't really know. Nor did I recall any other lines or even the name of the poet. Only two lines:

The lines came like a visitation. That night, the world did seem wild to me, and plain things had become strange. And the night was still young.

The sleet had stopped, and the rain was a cold drizzle against my face as I walked down Lombard toward Vince's Tavern at the corner of 19th Street. Somewhere in the block between 22nd and 21st, I came across a row house with the whole front window jammed with a manger scene. Judging from neighboring houses, at some point the residents of this one had enlarged the window to twice its original size -- probably to accommodate this exhibition! It was something you'd be more apt to see in a department store window than in a row house on Lombard Street. The painted figures must have been three feet tall, and each was lit from inside with glowing light. It was truly impressive.

I smiled as I hurried past, silently saluting the piety of the family who gave up half their living room and all of their privacy to display the manger scene in such splendor. Nativity scenes in South Philadelphia row houses are not uncommon, and yet ''strange the plain things are.''

I rushed on to meet Karen. We ate and talked. But the meeting didn't ease any of my anxiety or her pain. When we left Vince's, the rain had stopped. We stood on the corner and said good-bye. There on the street, I hugged Karen for a long time, and she hugged me back. I told her I loved her and asked her to be careful and to stay in touch with me no matter what. She promised she would. Then she went off to meet a friend, and I walked slowly back to my car.

I was thinking so hard about my daughter that when I came upon the row house nativity again, I was momentarily caught off-guard. This time I stopped to look at it more closely. There it all was: the coterie of shepherds, the three wise men, a full complement of angels, a number of assorted animals. They were all gathered around Joseph and Mary, who were side by side, looking . . . actually just about where I was standing. That was strange.

I stepped closer and examined the scene more carefully. My first impression had been right: There was no manger, no infant Jesus in the window! In effect, the street was the manger, and I was standing in it. Out of the corner of my eye, I thought I glimpsed someone smiling and nodding in the shadows behind the shepherds, but when I looked again, no one was there. Had that Lombard Street family intended that the street be the manger?

Intended or not, the scene was strange. The fragment of the long-forgotten poem crossed my mind again:

What made those words float out of the near chaos of my life to the surface of my mind just when they did? Why had I come across that row-house nativity scene on my way to and from meeting Karen that night? I can't tell you. What I can tell you is the nativity scene made that row house, all the neighboring houses, no longer so plain but very strange.

And even stranger became the old familiar story that row-house scene was telling. That night, that old story was being told differently. This time those silent, lighted figures were looking expectantly out on the street for the Christ child, out on the street where the beasts are motorized now, and the milk comes in cartons, and the lambs wool in worsted suits, and people like shepherds sleep on steam grates, and people like wise men dish out food in soup kitchens -- or work in political movements or business coalitions or churches to change things so someday there might not be homeless people or hungry children or addicted parents.

I stood there with tears in my eyes. With a force that lumped in my throat, I realized that just where I was standing, the Christmas miracle happens. In the street, where human traffic goes endlessly by, where men and women and children live and limp and play and cry and laugh and love and fight and worry and curse and praise and pray and die, just there Christmas keeps coming silently, insistently, mysteriously.

I turned and walked back to my car, the mystery of it making me light-headed and light-hearted. I laughed to myself as I thought about a wild stable always being close at hand in this wild world, about the strange, saving birth taking place in unlikely places like Lombard Street where I was walking -- taking place anywhere I would ever walk, any street anyone would ever walk.

I stood by the car and looked in awe back down the street, trying to grasp the revelation of the strange, saving birth taking place again and yet again in all the unlikely places lining our streets -- at the tables where we spill coffee and our secrets; in the beds where the sheets get wrinkled and the dreams disturbing; in human exchanges in taverns or cafes where our hopes for each other and ourselves stumble over our limited power; in the offices where decisions and lives are made, unmade, and somehow remade. It happens in the shops where we search for some item that will be just right but never quite find it; on the corners where we dodge each other in our frantic pace, yet sometimes quickly explore each other's eyes, longing to make human contact in the midst of the rat race. It happens on the steam grates where, once in a while, passers-by fish a coin from their pockets and drop it in the hand of one of those homeless brothers or sisters.

Ah, yes, "strange the plain things are." A Christ come to be close at hand in unlikely people like that row-house family, and my family floundering as it was just then, and countless other families on countless other streets. Jesus born again and again, in a thousand times a thousand miracles, a thousand times a thousand moments, and an occasional heart. God close at hand. Always.

"God does something everywhere, but doesn't do everything anywhere." A teacher I loved said that once, and I keep forgetting it -- and remembering it. I drove home that night, thinking of my daughter, my sons, and of all the pain and struggles we would go through on our particular versions of Lombard Street. In that moment I knew that nothing could keep me from standing by and with my kids. And I thought of other people I loved, and those I didn't love much or at all, and I knew I would do the best I could to stand by and with all the "street people" of life because I had the God-given chance, the small, precious gift of doing something somewhere.

And it also occurred to me that one of the "somethings" God does everywhere -- and certainly at Christmas -- is to bring to an end the world as we know it. That doesn't make me feel fine, but it does make me feel better. Much better. Because the rest of the "something" is that then a new world begins in a small explosion of light no darkness can overcome.

Reprinted from Tracks in the Straw: Tales Spun from the Manger with permission of the publisher, Innisfree Press.

Ted Loder is the imaginative and socially active Senior Ministry of Philadelphia's First United Methodist Church of Germantown. Several of Ted's books, Tracks in the Straw, Guerillas of Grace, and Wrestling the Light are available for purchase from Faith At Work.