Walter Wangerin - In the Days of the Angels: Stories and Carols for Christmas

M y daughter cried on Christmas Eve. What should I say to the heart of my daughter? How should I comfort her?

Her name is Mary. Shes a child. She wasnt crying the tears of disillusionment, as adults do when theyve lost the spirit of the season. And she trusts me. I do not lie. My Mary is easily able to throw her arms around me in the kitchen and to hang on with a hugproving that she trusts me. Neither, then, was she weeping the tears of an oversold imagination that Christmas Eve. She hadnt dreamed a gift too beautiful to be real, nor had she expected my love to buy better than my purse.

Nor was she sick. Nor was she hungry for any physical thing.

No, Mary was longing for Odessa Williams, that old black lady. Mary was longing for her life. Thats why she was crying.

Too suddenly the child had come to the limits of the universe. A casket. She stood at the edge of emptiness and had no other response than tears. She turned to me and wept against my breast, and I am her father. And should I be mute before such tears? What should I say to the heart of my daughter Mary?

We have a custom in our congregation: Always we gather on the Sunday evening before Christmas, bundled and hatted and happy, and we go, then, out into the sharp December darkness to sing carols. Down the streets of the city we go, the children bounding forward, adults all striding behind, chattering, making congenial noises, puffing ghosts of breath beneath the streetlights, laughing and glad for the company. Does anyone think it will snow? Its cold enough to snow, and the air is still, and the stars are already a snow-dust in heaven.

Its a common, communal custom. You do it too?

We crowd on the porches of the old folks. The children feel a squealing excitement because they think were about to astonish Mrs. Moody in her parlor by our sudden appearingcarols from the out-of-doors, you know. Shell be so-o-o-o surprised! So they giggle and roar a marvelous Hark! with their faces pressed against her window: Hark! The herald angels sing, Glory to the newborn king

Mrs. Moody turns on her porch light, then opens her curtains, and there she is, shaking her head and smiling, and the children fairly burst with glee. They can hardly stand it, to be so good. She turns on her porch light, and here we are, fifteen, maybe twenty of us, spilling down her steps into the little yard, lifting our faces, lifting our voicesdoing silly things, like lifting our key-rings to the refrain of Jingle Bells and making a perfect, rhythmic jangle. Everybodys willing to be a kid. Nobody minds the cold tonight. The white faces among us are pinched with pink, the black ones (we are mostly black ones) with frost, as though the cold were a white dust on our cheeks.

And down the street we go again, and so we sing for Mrs. Lander and Mrs. Smith and Mrs. Buckman and Mrs. DeWitt.

And though we can be silly, and though this is just an ordinary custom, yet we are no ordinary choir. No: Many of us sing for The Sounds of Grace, a choir of legitimate repute. And some of us have been blessed by God with voices the angels would weep to own.

For sometimes on that Sunday evening, by a decision that no one understands, Timmy Moore will begin a solo in a husky and generous tenor voice. O holy night, the young man starts to sing, and then we are all an audience, listening in a starry dark. It is the night of the dear Saviors birth. Long lay the world, sings Timmy Moore. We bow our heads. Mrs. DeWitt, on the inside of her window, bows her head. We are more than an audience. We are passengers. This strong voice is a sort of chariot, you know, able to carry us out of the streets of the city, through dark night, to the fields of shepherds far away. Fall on your knees, sings Timmy Moore, huge and strong, transported: O hear the angel voices! O night divine! O night when Christ was born. There is locomotive power in this, and truth, and utter conviction, and we can scarcely breathe. O night! O night divine.

So then, Timmy is silent. And what then? Why, then we all sing Silent Night. And then occurs such a sweet and delicate wonder that Mrs. DeWitt looks up with the astonishment that the children had expected at first, but which none of the children notice nowfor they are caught in the wonder too. Mrs. DeWitt looks up and starts to cry. She covers her mouth with an aged hand, and she cries.

For on the third verse of Silent Night, Dee Dee Lawrence, that blinking child, soars high and high above us all on a descant so beautiful it can break your heart. Dee Dee simply flies, high and light, precise, to the stars themselves, to the crystal sphere of heaven, and we are singing too, but we have forgotten we sing. Dee Dee is the winters bird, singing: Son of God, loves pure light, Radiant beams from thy holy faceAnd when that child has reached the crystal sphere, with the wing of her music she touches it, and all the round sky rings. The night is alive. This is the wonder that catches us all. With the dawn of redeeming grace, sings Dee Dee Lawrence, and then she sinks to the earth again: Jesus, Lord, at thy birth, descending, descendinginnocent, I think, of the thing she has just accomplishedfinding her place in the midst of earthly voices again. Jesus, Lord, at thy birth. And she is done. And we are done. We move in quietness to the next house.

Dee Dee Lawrence has a round, milk-chocolate face and an oriental cast to her eyes. Her beauty is not remarkable. Until she sings.

As we walk to the next house, we become aware that we, with Mrs. DeWitt, have been crying. Thats why we are quiet. The tears are icy on our cheeks.

But these are good, contemplative tears. They are not like the tears my Mary cried on Christmas Eve.

And so it was that on Sunday evening, the twentieth of December 1981, we kept our custom and went out caroling. Mary was seven years old then. Dee Dee was eight. Timmy was with us, and the Hildreth children. Most of the childrens choir, in fact, had come along. The night was not much different from those that went beforeexcept for this, that when we had finished our round of houses we went to St. Marys Hospital to sing for several members who were patients at Christmastime. We divided into three groups. As pastor, I myself led a handful of children to the room of Odessa Williams because her condition was worse than the others.

It was Odessa Williams who made the night different.

The children had never laid eyes on her before. When they crept into the ward and saw her cadaverous body, they were speechless for a while. Scared, I think. Marys blue eyes grew very large, and I felt pity for her.

Well, I knew what to expect, but Mary didnt. I had been visiting the woman for several years nowfirst in her apartment, where shed been housebound, then in the nursing homeand I had watched the wasting of Odessa.

Two years ago she had been a strapping tall woman of strong ways, strong opinions, and very strong affections. Fiercely she had loved the church that she couldnt actually attend. Shed kept abreast of congregational activities by telephone, by a gossip-system, by bulletins and newsletters and friendsand by me. She pumped me for information every time I visited her, puffing an endless chain of cigarettes, striding about her apartment in crushed slippers, waving her old black arms in strong declaration of the things she thought I ought to do and the things I ought not, as pastor, to be doing.