December 20, 2009
‘We May Not Be Big But We’re Small’ A story for Christmas Sunday 2009
Doug Norris, Rosedale United Church
‘But you, O Bethlehem of Ephrathah, who are one of the little clans of Judah, from you shall come forth for me one who is to rule in Israel, whose origin is from of old, from ancient days.’
(Micah 5:2)
“Hi, I’m Dave.”
“David. But call me Dave”.
“Hi – My name is David – I’m pleased to meet you.”
He squinted in the mirror, clipped a few more loose ends from his hair, freshly cut, and considered what he saw. Not bad – he thought - fit, not yet rumpled, at thirty he was still mistaken for twenty five and that was OK. But now he was ready to make his move, and he was working on his introduction voice in the bathroom mirror.
“Call me Dave…”
He grinned at himself, his best ‘let me introduce myself’ grin, and he remembered the words he had been hearing all his life – words he was now going to put to the test : ‘You’re going to make it big, Dave’ – the people around him have been telling him this all his life – ‘Dave, you’re going to go far – you’re going to amount to something!’
The preacher told him this when he was just a child – said to him one day – ‘You know what your name means, don’t you? David – means ‘Beloved’ it means you are sort of ‘chosen by God for great things’, like King David, who came from a little village and went on to great things. Don’t forget that! David is Beloved.’
For a little while after that he asked his friends at school to call him ‘King David’, and he referred to their bungalow as the ‘House of David’ and that began to wear thin pretty quickly and one day his older brother decided to crown him, and that hurt, so he gave up and went back to ‘Dave’.
But he was good at things – he succeeded at the things he tried and he was strong and bright and as he grew up, over and over he got this message – you’re going to be a success – you won’t get stuck in this little town, you’re going to make it big, Dave, you’ll go far!
So he grinned at himself in the mirror now, and said it out loud : ‘You’re going to make it big, David.’. Then he turned off the light, added some water to the Christmas tree, set the thermostat down, picked up his bags, and moved to the city.
Well, he moved there just for a bit, for now. He had booked a couple of weeks off from the office – it wasn’t hard to do, things went quiet just before the holidays and he wanted to spend some time in the city, where the head offices were, try to find some CEOs, in that happy place just in between their bonus cheques and the holiday parties – wanted to put his name out there, drop some resumes, an up and comer. See what might come of it. You’ll be big, David!
It was day two, and it hadn’t gone well so far. Turns out there are layers of defenses to stop you long before you get to see the really powerful people, layers of other thirty-somethings with better suits and nicer shoes, guarding the doors he wanted to go through, and they themselves putting their names on the table, they themselves told they would one day go far, and Dave’s ‘Hi-how-ya-doing?’ smile wasn’t getting him far. Not yet. It was evening now. He took time out to shop.
He could not get over how slowly the line moved at the bookstore. Which might well have been, as the sign said, the World’s Biggest. He flipped through some of the little boxed gadgets the store had cleverly placed in a bin beside where you stand in line. Little stocking stuffers – nothing over ten dollars. Little collections of magnets you could play with. He imagined that these were the kind of things that executives had on theirs desks, to absent-mindedly shuffle around while they pondered a deal, or waited for a call… Here was one called ‘Crazy Cat Lady’ – you put her on a stand the size of a business card and attach some of the dozen or so cat magnets all over her.
A grandmotherly-looking woman standing next to him in line picked up a box, squinted at it over the top of her glasses – ‘Look at this one’ she said to Dave – ‘little gymnastics people in various poses – you could attach them in various ways. “I could get this for my niece, the woman said – she does gymnastics. Dave looked at the box – it said ‘Fridge Magnet Kama Sutra’. He knew what that meant.
He quickly showed her a different one – a bowling game – this one was a big marble and you rolled it along to knock down what looked like little penguins. He showed her that one. She looked at it and then looked and Dave and frowned – now less friendly. He looked more closely – it was called ‘Bowling With Nuns’. Those little pins weren’t actually penguins. She said to Dave ‘You’re not Catholic, are you?’ And the line moved on.
It was moments later, as he moved out of the cashier line and toward the door, that three things happened in quick succession. He saw the woman he had been in line with talking with what looked like a priest, shaking her head sadly and pointing in his direction, he moved a little further toward the door, bright lights began flashing inside his head, and a piercing sound was ringing in his ears, and as he stumbled and fell backwards out the door, the last thing he saw was ‘World’s Biggest….’ looming overheard, then nothing.
During his brief hallucination he saw the oddest thing. He was sure that he had seen in his vision a very small Oriental man with several bright gold teeth standing in a halo of light and conducting a BBQ right there on the street. He closed his eyes again, wondering if he was having a stroke or some kind of seizure, and when he opened his eyes again discovered that what he had actually seen was a very small Oriental man with several bright gold teeth standing in a halo of light and conducting a BBQ right there on the street.
The man smiled his gold smile and said to Dave : ‘You fell coming out of the store – landed right on my hot dog stand! Store alarm must have startled you. I’m Dan. Merry Christmas. Now have a sausage.’
The sausage was good and Dan was chatty and before he knew it Dave was invited to join Dan and his family for supper, and now he was making his way further and further from the lights and the cheery store-front music and deeper into what he knew was a tougher part of town – people moving more furtively in the shadows, and when he found the place – up three floors, he found the apartment cold and no smell of food, and Dan and his wife and children, all of whom shyly welcomed him had their coats on. He gave them the gift he had brought – a lovely drawing of the three kings kneeling to adore the baby Jesus – realizing as he did so that all the other items in the house were Buddhist symbols. He winced, they loved the picture.
Dan looked apologetic – ‘We’re going down to the drop-in at the mission to eat. Tonight is the Christmas supper. I’m sorry we don’t have a meal for you here. ‘
As they walked Dave took stock. It wasn’t going well. He had made none of the introductions he planned to. He had embarrassed himself at the bookstore. And now he was going to be fed dinner by well-meaning strangers like he was a charity case, a down and out.
Dan stopped and looked at Dave quizzically. He said – ‘You are uneasy here. I can see this.’ They stood in silence together for a moment. Dan spoke again. ‘You are a big man, Dave. I mean, you have important things you do, and I think you have more important things that will come. But if you can become small – if you can move out of the light, then when you don’t make such a shadow, you will see more – see the others that are out here. It is hard for big people to become small…’
They stood in silence again for a moment, Dave noticing now others that were gathering, appearing out of dark streets, the ones who slip around un-noticed through the day, carrying things and sweeping floors and some of them the broken ones we don’t see because we look away – they are bruised and are missing teeth and seeing them frightens us, but here was a stream of people coming now, and at the door of the mission a light was building,
So they went in.
There were going to be introductions for David after all. A small welcoming committee at the door of the mission.
‘I’m Father Sean.’ The priest looked vaguely familiar. ‘And I believe’, said Father Sean with a twinkle in his eye –‘ I believe you’ve met Sister Margaret.’
Dave turned and was face to face with the book-store lady. Of course. Sister Margaret. He stuck his hand out : ‘Dave’ – said Dave – ‘but call me Dave. I mean, I’m pleased to meet me, I’m David. Ah jeez,’ he said, ‘Oh God, I said jeez… to a nun …’
‘Relax’, said Sister Margaret. We like you. Besides, you’ve come with some of our biggest people. The Trongs are some of the best . She motioned across the room and Dave saw that they were putting on aprons, taking their places in the kitchen and at the serving table, not sitting down to eat. ‘They came here six months ago as refugees, and they are full of life.’
‘Anyway, you belong here’, she said, ‘it’s your place!’ Dave looked confused. She pointed to the sign over the door – ‘Didn’t they tell you?
This is called ‘Dave’s Place’. Used to be called ‘House of the Shepherd’ – that’s the name of a little village right beside Bethlehem – it’s where the shepherds saw the angels on Christmas night. House of the Shepherd seemed kind of religious, so we named it for the other David – the big king who was really just a little guy, youngest son from a small town, worked in the fields. He seems more like the kind of guy our people can understand.’
She leaned in and whispered to him : ‘I bought the Bowling For Nuns for Father Sean – he’s going to have a lot of fun with that!’
Dan came up to him, possibly the poorest person Dave had ever met, he came up to him laughing, delight all over him, he had worked hard outside all day and had who knows what ahead of him, and he was so joyous to be in this raucous place – and he saw that Dave was in the groove now, spooning out the potatoes and dancing a little jig when the music picked up, and he said to him – and as he said this Dave understood that all these years he had just slightly misunderstood the message, it was all a matter of punctuation – Dan said to him ‘You’re going to make it, Big Dave…’
And Dave understood something new about what making it big might look like, and what ‘beloved’ might look like. And he believed what they sang, belted out crookedly on the old piano in the corner : O little town, In your dark streets shineth, an everlasting light…