A family visits a life-sized nativity scene, where the narrator is struck by the beauty of Mary and Joseph's awe, only to find the manger empty and the gold paint chipping, revealing the scene's imperfections.
A poem Larry Towell / Magnum Filing out of the family van, we saw snowflakes could float, dust-like, up from the monochrome rug that God had unfurled before Maranatha
Baptist Church. There, at eye level, they kept us for a second from seeing what we’d driven an hour to see,
a life-sized nativity, its figures arranged in semicircle, golden, exotic against the chapel whitescape. I watched
Mother Mary peer into the manger, her smile aglow in the vesper light, and caught myself wanting to worship
her just once without blasphemy, the way Joseph was, staring not down at the baby but over, into her, with a kind of awe
you can’t condemn. My parents looked so old and small next to them. Whose life was this size? Up close, the gold paint was scotched and chipping.
I could see arches and loops and whorls in the wood grain beneath. It took a while to realize there was nothing in the trough but powder.
