I'm the 4th of the Magi...Doofus.

My friend Fred gave me a year...his last.  And even as he lived an died an agnostic, he got me to the Manger.  But I almost missed the whole thing.

We met at a poverty reduction event and struck up a friendship just before he was diagnosed with a glioblastoma, a very aggressive form of brain cancer.  A few weeks ago he died.  In the intervening year, we enjoyed what most of us would compare to Mitch Albom’s much beloved story, Tuesdays with Morrie.  Week after week I’d drive up the peninsula to Fred’s house with my video camera and my notebook, and we would spend time on camera, Fred reflecting on his life for posterity. 

Again and again he would mention the bright young American-born son of Spanish-speaking migrant parents…without immigration papers.  At 12, this boy had come with his parents to a local charity looking for help with tires for their car.  The boy had struck Fred because he served as his parents’ interpreter.  Subsequently, Fred had discovered that the boy, I’ll call him Antonio, was a very bright and hard working student, and he began to find ways of encouraging and mentoring him.  From attending his school events to sponsoring him in a local summer program, Antonio became a grandson to Fred.  When Fred left video messages for each of his three grandchildren to see after he died, he left one for Antonio too.  Again and again Fred would mention his determination to see that Antonio had the same opportunities in life in America that he himself had had as an immigrant from the Netherlands at 15.

In the last week of his life, Fred asked to see Antonio, to express his pride in him, his certainty of his success in life, and his love.  Antonio, his parents and two younger brothers came to Fred’s memorial service.  At the edge of a sea of well-dressed white people, there were Antonio, his father and mother and two younger brothers in clean but worn clothes of the poor.  These were their Sunday clothes…and their Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday clothes too.  This image stuck with me, this meek, respectful family.  I thanked them all for coming and promised Antonio that I would call him to arrange to bring him a copy of the videos that Fred had made for him.

Cue the camels.  Hit the lights.  Enter Magus #4, the Not-So-Wise Man.

Weeks went by with his DVD buried on my desk.  Finally as Kathy and I were putting up our Christmas tree, Antonio and his family came to mind and we were moved to try to share Christmas with them.  I called Antonio and told him that I’d like to bring over the DVD and a gift for his family. 

I came bringing gifts, feeling good about doing it, but at the same time feeling, well, kind of alien.  Antonio had said, when he’d given me directions to pick him up to see Fred, “Watch for a big green migrant camp when you turn right.” 

A big green “migrant camp”.  It had turned out to be a pole barn, a steel-sided utility building perhaps 30 x 90 feet, with a single door on the end, and no windows.  On the right side was a pattern of windows that suggested a row of five or six rooms inside.  When I’d driven up to that door the first time, I’d not wanted to walk up to it, not knowing whether as a gringo I’d be seen as a threat by whatever families lived there.  So I’d called Antonio on my cell and told him I was parked outside the door.  He’d come out to the car and we’d driven off.

So now I am driving up to that door again, Fred’s spirit motivating me, but still afraid of entering that door. I call Antonio and tell him I’m “parked where I was when I’d picked him up before” and he comes out.  Its 40 degrees and he’s in a tee shirt and wearing socks.  I’m between my car and that door, trying to give him the envelope, explaining the DVD inside, and the gift for his parents to use for all of them, and I’m aware that he’s just in his stocking feet, and I’m feeling clumsy about how I’m doing this.  He’s got to be feeling cold.  I just want to give him the envelope and go.  I want what is in the envelope to do what I feel incapable of doing.

But he is, in his meek style, smiling and asking me to please come in.

What follows is a meal.  But it is so much more.

The next morning, I’m sitting with my Tuesday morning men’s group, and we’re looking together at the Visitation.  I’m stunned by the awareness that Elizabeth has, that she knows what’s happening there inside her house that she is certain that Christ is there.  She is so present to all of it.

Was it the word aware or the word present that opened my mind and my soul and my tear ducts?  Here, the week before Christmas, I had been there.  I had sat in this shelter that was so much less than a house, not really designed for a family to bring a child into the world.  I returned in my mind to Antonio’s family’s little room and saw his mother sitting quietly on the couch that Fred had acquired for them, sitting behind Antonio and me as we ate the delicious food she had prepared for us, just as she had prepared the “feast” that Fred had told me about again and again.

Perhaps this makes no more sense to you than the end of the world that was to have happened yesterday with the end of the Mayan calendar.  But I know that I was, this Advent of my 66^th Christmas, there at the manger.  And I had gotten there, and through the experience, and all the way back home, and slept the night and woke up the next day before I realized that I’d been there.  

Like the Magi, I’d come bearing gifts.  But unlike them, I’d not seen the miracle.

The Jesuits encourage a kind of prayer that calls us to put ourselves into the story, to be there, to make the experience not intellectual but sensual, to “apply the senses”.  So I blink back tears as I type this.  When I am at the manger this Christmas, I will see the clean but worn apartment in that migrant camp, and feel the warmth inside that door, and smell fajitas on the stove, and taste the freshly chopped cilantro, and hear the sound of Antonio’s mother asking him in Spanish to ask me why I am in a hurry to leave why I don’t stay longer.

Don’t be a Doofus.  See the miracle.  Stay awhile. 

Next: Christmas Presence

FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.