The Advent the church collapsed

In the Advent season, memories rise to the surface like so many twinkling lights on the tree. We remember those we love who have passed, the happy Christmases, the sad ones. We remember the house where we first waited for Santa, or our childhood church on Christmas Eve. We remember a present that thrilled us, or one that disappointed. We remember wonderful family times or an estrangement that lingers.

I think God holds all these memories, and understands them in ways our faulty recollections cannot.

I remember the Christmas Catholic school kindergarten Nativity pageant, held in our parish church in Anchorage, Alaska. In 1987, my first child was in this pageant, held on a Friday morning. My daughter was chosen to be Mary, Jesus’s mother, so of course I was thrilled to be in church that morning. What was I wearing? How did I feel? Of course, those memories don’t linger. But God has a memory of that entire event; the nervousness the children felt, the songs, what everyone wore, how everyone was feeling in the Christmas rush.

What I do remember is that two days later, on a Sunday morning, the church collapsed during Mass. Yes, it literally fell down under the season’s unusually heavy snow load. For a city its size, Anchorage is rivalled by only a couple of northeastern U.S. cities for annual snowfall. Of course, after the event, there were questions about the structural integrity of the barnlike building, which had only been dedicated six years before.

My family had gone to an earlier Mass that Sunday. But the stories we heard later told us that Father Stan, our pastor, heard a groaning sound as he stood at the altar. With remarkable foresight, he shouted for everyone to rush from the building. He was the last one out, and reported that he felt the wind at his back as he exited. Amazingly, no one was hurt, but the church was destroyed.

Suddenly, the memory of that Friday morning Nativity pageant took on a different significance. What if the collapse had happened then? What if a bevy of moms, dads and teachers had rushed, not out the door, but to the altar to grab their little shepherds or angels, our little Mary and Joseph? Would everyone have made it out in the midst of the ensuing chaos?

The other memory surrounds the days and months that followed. A local strip mall had a post office and a warehouse. The warehouse was outfitted with as many folding chairs as the parish could muster, and I remember Christmas Masses, and others for a long time going forward, being celebrated on concrete floors with garish overhead lighting. But my biggest memory is of the feeling of community that our parish had. We as a parish were blessed and looking to the future. No one had been injured. No one had been killed.

Eventually, we built a beautiful new church. And my other children had roles in the kindergarten pageants that followed.

This memory was a blessing. Some memories are harder. I have memories of being too far away from my mother on many Christmases when I lived in Alaska. I remember being in the grocery store and hearing Bing Crosby singing in the background, crooning “I’ll be home for Christmas.” When he got to the part, “You can count on me,” I still remember the hot tears I shed right there in the produce aisle.

Whatever your memories are at Christmas, give them to God, who has them already, and treats them all with tenderness and mercy. God will help us do the same.

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