Hope and I did not know what to do. There were practical choices and yet Father Richard was suggesting a crazy option. We wished that someone would build kindergarten through college education, but we knew that we could not.
We had nothing, were sad, and practical was practicable. The practicle option was not here and we would have to leave the city of the twenty-first century: Houston.
Houston? We had thought God had called us here, but that was gone with the wind.
Then in the late winter, Hope brought home a Christmas movie and suggested we watch the film.
God knows we needed a bit of Christmas, just that very minute, even if Christmas was months ago and Spring felt forever away.
We love Christmas, so in our bedroom in Sugar Land we watched Come to the Stable.
God knows I needed the movie. Loretta Young is illuminated. The music is profoundly beautiful and the faith of the nuns in doing God’s will made my practical tendencies seem impractical.
Faith is the substance, the reality of things hoped for.
Hope and I were not all in just because of this movie, but because God was calling us and the movie was an outer sign of the reality. This year, once again, we watched the film and laughed and wept.
Why?
Unbridled chastity is more powerful than money, crime, or politics. Uninhibited faith is unstoppable. One of my children noted that the Bishop should have asked God for more, because when the nuns appeared, the nuns with real faith, nothing was impossible.
If the times are difficult and the institutional church seems wretched, remind yourself that you are the Church. We are the Church. The one certainty is that political parties will come and go, criminals will come and go, governments will come and go, but the Church?
She will go on.
The message of Come to the Stable is simple: the divine is in the barn.
This is the message of Emancipation: the bottom rail is on the top. It is better to side with the simple nuns than the powers that be, because the powers that be are more likely to side with the nuns than the sell out syncophants who do the practical over the Providential.
You can guess how it went.
Hope turned to me and said (in so many words): “Do it.”
And so we did.
Of course, oddly, we did nothing. We just turned from the expected to the Certain, in God’s economy, and all was well.
Our patrons? God love them, for them I would die. How did it all happen? Come to the stable: Somehow that is how.
Watch the movie. You will see that there was a time when a good woman like Loretta Young could make a great movie with a message of Faith. Why did that matter?
I am sure for so many great reasons, but here is a small reason: when Hope and I were afraid, we gained faith.
God help us, we came to the stable, prayed and saw the True Light. I am ashamed it took a Hollywood movie to help me, when I have the liturgy and the Bible. So it was, however. Maybe it can help you as well.
Get the movie.
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