the pageant

thirty-one years ago the story goes that my mom hung up the phone one december afternoon and excitedly told me that i was going to be mary in the st. michael's christmas pageant on christmas eve.

and i promptly told her i had no interest in being mary.  nope, i insisted, after she suggested i think about it.  not gonna do it. so she called back the coordinator and let her know that i had declined the offer.

of course, as early evidence of my severe issue with indecisiveness, i woke up the next morning with a new attitude.  "okay," i said.  "i've decided that i will be mary after all."

and in an early lesson of tough love, my mom barely looked up from the paper.  "too bad," she replied.  "they've already found someone else."

i was devastated, but vowed to be the best pageant angel i could be. and then ... my luck changed.  my mom got another call from the pageant coordinator on the morning of december 23rd, informing us that mary had come down with the chicken pox, and wondering if i'd like to take over.

and a star was born.

ha!  hardly.  for all the hype and hoopla surrounding the casting of mary every year, she really doesn't do much.  gabriel, of course, steals the show, and even gets to hold a microphone to proclaim the good news.  joseph talks about how his wife is going to have a baby and asks about room in the inn.  shoot, even the innkeeper gets a few lines.  but mary?  nada.  she just walks down the aisle looking as serene as possible and later places a baby doll in a wooden trough.  still, i practiced all that day and the next, leading up to my big moment.  and i suppose i did a satisfactory job, because there aren't any family stories of failure or embarrassment; of course, there aren't any pictures either.  (maybe i have made this event into a bigger deal than it actually was at the time.)

but here's where i think the story actually does become a big deal, at least to me.  thirty-one years later to the day, i sat in the front pew of the exact same church, and watched our daughter walk down the same aisle in the same costume.  susanna was also mary -- a serene, sweet mary -- and surprised us all with her confidence.  i felt sure that she'd get to church that morning and balk, since she has a tendency to change her mind at the last minute.  (not quite sure where she gets that.) so i was mentally prepared to resort to bribery to get her to walk down that aisle.  and who could blame her?  it's one thing to agree to do it a few weeks ahead of time; it's quite another to stand at the back of the church and muster up the courage to trek down a 50-yard aisle with 500 pairs of eyes focused solely on you.  but apparently we didn't give our reserved second-born enough credit -- because she never wavered.

and when i looked at her, i could actually see in susanna's eyes the same kind of reaction to gabriel's tidings that mary has in the bible.  i could see her half-smile, her reluctance to bask in the limelight but her willingness to do what was asked of her.  i could imagine susanna quietly accepting gabriel's news, surprised to be chosen, but sure of her abilities.  decades ago, i had initially declined the offer.  i wasn't sure i wanted to take on that responsibility; i didn't know that i was the right choice.  but susanna?  she knew that she could do it.  she never doubted the outcome.  she said yes.

"i am the Lord's servant," mary says in the gospel of luke.  "may it be to me as you have said." with those two sentences, mary became one of the most important people in the bible, and certainly the most important in the story leading up to Jesus's birth.  despite the amount of lines that are uttered in the pageant, we all know that it's not joseph's, or the innkeeper's, or even gabriel's big moment.  it's mary's.  mary really was the star of the show -- thousands of years ago in nazareth and bethlehem, and on christmas eve of 2011, in the form of a quiet and trusting blond-haired, blue-eyed, five-year old little girl.

receiving gabriel's message

mary, the little gray donkey, and joseph

lovingly placing baby Jesus in the manger