Everything Good Comes out of Nazareth

The first two days of winter were brilliant, and then they weren’t anymore.

The sparkling crystal and white thawed into mud, and the sky went cobblestone gray. The dreary neighborhood of LaBelle became drearier than ever, until it seemed the whole world was rust and sludge.

And then Jimmy the Mechanic’s car broke down, for the hundredth time, and he didn’t have the money for parts right before Christmas.

If there were any justice at all in the universe, the expert mechanic who saved me from being stranded so many times, would be zipping around town in a brand new Cadillac.

As it is, he is as poor as we are, and this is the worst time of year to have to go to the junkyard.

I hung the key fob for Sacre Bleu on the hook by the front door. I told him we were sharing a car for as long as he needed. We’ve been passing the fob back and forth like a relay race ever since. He fills the tank with a bit of gas each time, which is good because I didn’t have a penny in the budget after I got the Christmas cooking and baking things.

After one such relay I unpacked all the baking supplies in the kitchen. Adrienne and I cranked up the Christmas music and got to work, making double batches of my infamous cake mix cookies in chocolate and vanilla– some with M&M’s, some with sprinkles mixed in, some with crushed Andes mints, some with crushed Heath bars, so it seemed like I’d engineered four different cookie recipes with very little work. We made chocolate crinkle cookies with the powdered sugar coating, halfway between a cookie and an oversized candy. We made oatmeal cookies, the very best kind of cookie, a chewy delight that will make you swear off chocolate chip for life. The trick is to use real butter and light brown sugar so the flavor profile is that of caramel, instead of shortening and dark sugar that tastes like molasses– and to leave out those raisins and put in white chips. Adrienne arranged the cookies onto plates and gift wrapped them.

The next day, Christmas Eve, Jimmy took the car to run his final errands. I ran around the pockmarked streets of LaBelle, to make Christmas deliveries in the rain. Up and down sidewalks overgrown with weeds, past the derelicts and the vacant lots, stepping through puddles and over garbage with a stack of colorful, delicate packages. Two platters of Christmas cookies to the Baker Street Irregulars.   A platter for Ms. B and her children. Running past the dilapidated house of the Artful Dodgers, who aren’t even home for Christmas, and planning a separate baking spree to treat them when they get back.

When I got home, I handed off the last platter to Jimmy for his family, took the key, and took the car to the vigil Mass with Adrienne.

The Gospel was the Genealogy from Matthew, the one with all the silly names and those four notorious women in it. Jesus was descended from the Father Himself and also from a long line of good-for-nothing people who did everything wrong, just like me, just like the families in LaBelle, just like every human who ever lived. Joseph of Nazareth was his foster father.

Nazareth was a miserable place out of which nothing good could come.

I thought of LaBelle, and my neighborhood friends.

Ms. B is a single mother of four. The Baker Street Irregulars are a collection of half-siblings, living happily now with their grandmother, their mother, and the Man Called Dad. The Artful Dodgers have an exhausted single mom. Jimmy has a wife but some of her children are from another marriage. I love them all. My life would be unbearable without them.

I was raised the strictest of Catholics. I was taught that the absolute worst thing that could happen is that your family could be the wrong kind: that you would give in to your sinful desires and become a single mother, or part of a blended family. This catechizing merged with our middle class economic notions without anybody noticing it had done so. It wasn’t just about moral choices. Making the wrong economic choices could make you “a street person,” as terrible a fate as committing a mortal sin. The only correct way to be a family was to be a nuclear family with a mom and a dad and a middle class income to cover your needs, and four to ten children who looked like you. Anyone else was a cautionary tale.

The God we were trying so hard to impress doesn’t seem to see it that way.

God loves strange families that don’t do what they’re supposed to so much that He descended from Heaven to earth to be part of one. And the Holy Ghost inspired the sacred authors to write down the stories of all these miserable people, so that we’d know exactly what kind of God we were dealing with.

God loves children from families that my parents would have called “broken families” so much, that He became somebody’s stepson.

God loves “street people” so much that He chose to be born homeless in a stable.

God loves miserable towns where nothing good happens so much that He chose to become a Man called Jesus of Nazareth.

God loves ragtag children and working-class people from terrible neighborhoods so much that He stamps His sacred image on every one of them, for all time.

Can anything good come out of Nazareth? Everything Good did.

Can anything good come out of LaBelle? Can anything good come out of Steubenville? Can anything good come out of this disaster of a town where the rust belt collides with the Appalachian mountains? So much evil has been done here. I’ve met so many terrible people who have ruined me. But I have also seen the face of God. Everywhere I have looked to for grace I have found hell itself. And everywhere I’ve been in hell I’ve found  grace.

The world is much worse than I thought, but God is much better, and grace abounds all the more.

We went home in the dark, in a world which is burning to death, a world in which there is no justice and nothing is as it ought to be. But we also went home in the brightness of a thousand ridiculous Christmas light displays, in a world so loved by God that He gave His only Son to be part of it.

All was calm. All was bright.

Everything was grace.