c. 1999 Religion News Service

(Tom Ehrich is a writer and computer consultant, managing large-scale database implementations. He lives in Durham, N.C.)

INDIANAPOLIS – When I walk in my hometown, I like to include a stretch through my old neighborhood.

For a time after leaving for college, I could still see the games we played in those wonderful years _ ages 8 to 11 _ when back yards, alleys and porches provided endless adventure and a narrow street hosted energetic football and kickball games.

On today’s walk, I notice the Thomases’ house still looks uninviting; the house of the mean woman who called the police whenever we played in the street has third-floor dormers; the Phillippis’ house needs paint; the Schnackels’ house is getting paint; the Beams’ house is being expanded; and my old house looks as loved as it always did.

These houses don’t bear such names except in memory, of course. Now that the Ransels have left the house behind which we built forts of castoff Christmas trees, not a single neighbor remains from my youth.

The current residents know nothing about the bully who lived across the street, or the inseparable brothers whose identities were elided into”Briansteve,”or the girl who never could play for long because she had six siblings to care for. They know nothing of the friendship that Frank, John and I had. They are building their own memories here.

When the Gospel of Luke tells the story of Jesus’ birth with layers of detail _ where John baptized, how Joseph and Mary got to Bethlehem, what happened there _ we think we comprehend. Some open Bible maps and find Bethlehem, measure its distance from Jerusalem, then flip back to maps showing the routes of Moses and Joshua.

We cling to those details in the hope of connecting to biblical characters whose world is so impossibly far removed from our own.

In that same way, I can imagine an urban historian driving down my street and saying, “These were the suburbs of the 1920s, the charmed neighborhoods of the 1950s. Notice the front and side porches, good for watching children, and sidewalks good for walking. Look at this map and see how the racial mix changed. Notice the nearby Roman Catholic school.”

Students would take notes, make links between this urban-growth ring and its counterparts in other cities, and think they knew something.

On one level, they would know something. They could write papers about the life cycles of American cities and make recommendations for future growth.

But on the level we actually lived, they would know nothing. They would know nothing about our dreams of athletic glory born between the sidewalks; or the summer’s evening when I suddenly became aware that Margaret was pretty; or endless games of canasta,”chase”and”cowboys”; or what we meant by”Bang! You’re dead!” Not knowing those details, does the latter-day student know anything about the rest? Maybe. I just know that whenever I hear the learned talk about growing up in that era, I rarely hear anything that sounds familiar. Do they lie? Of course not. They just can’t peer deeply into life as it actually was.

In our reading of Scripture, especially at this emotional season, I think we should exercise more restraint about the details.

Finding Bethany on a map tells us little about what John did there. Even when we parse the details of Quirinius, Bethlehem, crowded inn and manger, have we come close to the event itself? We need to take imaginative leaps and fill in busy people, a frightened girl and lonely shepherds, and then exercise further imagining to sense the settled world Jesus both honored and violated, the sound of his voice, the touch of his hand, the compassion in his eyes.

Even then, we know too little. We want to know more, and like the student who has a paper to write, we build intelligent constructs on what we can know. But real knowing takes more than ancient fragments.

Rather than fuss over details that tell us too little, or drown in soupy images that short-change our yearnings, we should reflect on life in its glorious particularity and let the birth of Jesus touch us, not as a brittle fragment, but as a street where our unique dreams can flourish.

DEA END EHRICH