I Wonder...

It’s Christmas morning, and the Nativity Stable is crowded.  

My friend Dave shared a thought that really threw me.  “If Mary and Joseph were not able to find room at an inn because of all the people traveling to the census, there must have been lots of other people in that stable, too. In Detroit there are “warming centers” where the street homeless can come in out of the cold.  There are no beds, just rows of folding chairs.  The room smells of sweat as clothes worn for days without access to showers begin to raise the humidity in the bare room.  There is no apparent joy in the room that I picture, in a place that used to be called the “24-hour walk-in center”.  There are dedicated people who staff that room during the day, helping people try to find housing, healthcare, and maybe the odd job.  But at night, it’s just the security staff, whose gift to these lost is not encouragement, but merely alertness and equity.  The chairs are as hard as the life that these lost live, in a city to big and too poor to give them hope.

When Dave reads the Gospel story, I hear that the Shepherds leave and spread the joyful news.  But I’m still stuck in the 24-hour walk-in center, and the smell is in my nostrils, and it is worse than a stable.  What sends the shepherds out with enthusiasm? 

He said that in those times, guys who could not find other work often were hired as shepherds.  These guys might have been day-laborers, the bottom of the manpower barrel.  For the last ten weeks I’ve been working with a crew of homeless guys.  Eleven guys started out at Goodwill Inn, half of them Veterans, just three of them who have remained through the program.  What has made me feel like a failure in working with them is that despite their considerable talent and goodness, I can’t seem to lift their sights higher than mere survival. 

So these three are the ones I see as shepherds in my imagination, and I think “what in this scene succeeded where I have not; what has given them enthusiastic hope?  This morning Kathy and I will go to the morning Mass, what is called “The Shepherds’ Mass”.  The church will not smell like the walk-in center, and none of my three day-laborer companions will be there…not physically.   But I am inhabited by these images, and they will enter the church with me.  

Wonder will enter the church with me this morning.  Not wonder as in wonderful; wonder as in I wonder.  I need to experience whatever those shepherds experienced, so I can leave not in disappointment and despair, but with excitement and joy, eager to spread the story of whatever they saw in that crowded stable.