Away with the Manger: A Spiritually Correct Christmas Story, by Chris Fabry (InterVarsity, 96 pp.; $10.99, hardcover). Reviewed by David Neff.
Evangelical wit, like conventional wisdom, may be an oxymoron. Or it may simply be a rarity. In any case, when you find either one, celebrate it.
Away with the Manger, Chris Fabry’s satirical tract for our times, is to the nineties what Joe Bayly’s Gospel Blimp was for the sixties and The Sacred Diary of Adrian Plass was for the eighties. Bayly examined the evangelical proclivity for substituting modern technology for personal evangelism. Plass displayed British evangelical discomfort with the charismatic invasion. (He was amused.) Fabry’s fable exposes the excesses of evangelical crusaders in the culture wars of the nineties.
Away with the Manger is set in the mythical Middle-American town of Harville. The narrator is Jackson Grim, a newspaper columnist. The players, however, are the Christians (Pastor Marty Karlsen, and Deacon-cum-hardware store owner Immer Wright) and the forces of secularism (Dierdra Bergman Freep, president of Atheists Against Mangers, and the complicit city council). The crux is the crèche. And when the columnist/narrator publishes a reader’s parody of a favorite carol (hence the book’s title), public discussion and Christian activism are galvanized.
The book offers many moments of gentle humor and embarrassing self-recognition. In addition to the somewhat lame carol parodies, there is some very nice prose. A sample:
Christmas is an endless winter of expectations. The child thinks, I hope I don’t get clothes, while the parent thinks, She’s really going to like the turtleneck and leggings. The mother ponders all the possibilities. I just don’t want him to put it off and spend too much, she says to herself, while the husband thinks, Next year I’m not going to put it off and spend so much, but at least she’ll be happy with this rhinestone hair dryer.)
The husband then focuses on himself. After a harrowing evening of traffic, zigzagging through endless hordes of equally clueless husbands, he muses, Just once, just one Christmas, may it not be a tie. Or a sweater. Or a book that someone else wanted to read-someone who hopes you’ll leave it lying around so they can pick it up. Just once let it be something that makes me feel like a child again.
The story’s resolution rests on God using the foolishness of this world to confound the wise: a retarded boy becomes the vehicle for salvation. But while the resolution works for a small town’s grassroots saints, a similar solution would be hard to imagine on a national, culture-wide scale. Yet, wars are won one battle at a time; and battles are won, one skirmish at a time. Oh, but that’s the wrong metaphor. Read Away with the Mangerto find the right one.
Worth Mentioning A good book to read alongside Howard Butt’s Renewing America’s Soul(see review beginning on p. 59) is In Ordinary Time: Healing the Wounds of the Heart, by Roberta C. Bondi (Abingdon, 205 pp.; $16.95, hardcover). A sequel to Bondi’s Memories of God: Theological Reflections on a Life(excerpted in ct, July 17, 1995, pp. 43-45), this new book takes the form of letters to a fictional friend who desires a deeper experience of prayer. As she did in Memories of God, Bondi tells stories from her own life interwoven with theological reflections grounded in her sustained encounter with the Desert Fathers of the early church. Prayer, she insists, is “such an ordinary, everyday mundane thing”-we must get rid of the notion that it is only for extraordinarily holy people-and yet “the healing work of prayer … is still mightily mysterious. It has a long-term quality to it that both shapes and helps us understand the past and future at the same time.” For Bondi, such healing prayer entails “the painful work of introspection and memory” modeled in her autobiographical probings.
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Last Updated: October 4, 1996
