How the Boy Found Christmas

November/December 2008 Issue | Posted by Melissa Hartog in Features

By Tom Hoopes

The Miracle of Saint Nic­ho­las is one of those books that aligns all the stars of Christmas for me, and drives the whole Catholic experience home in a way little else can.

You see, there are Christmases and then there are Christmases.

First, there’s Dec. 25. That’s when the Church — and the culture, too, still, to an extent — exerts its energies to get us to think of God and our lives in a whole new way. I’m a sucker for the trappings of Christmas. Like Pavlov’s dog, whether I’m distracted, disturbed, or dubious, the sound of jingle bells always reawakens that old familiar longing.

But then there are Christmas experiences that happen in our lives at unexpected times. These are moments or hours or days when we see Christ as something more real, and our lives as something more consequential, than we ever suspected. It’s great when a retreat does that. But the re­ ­ treat is trying to do that. What’s best is when life presents you with your own private Dec. 25 that you never saw coming.

The Christmas in The Miracle of Saint Nicholas aligns those two experiences in an unexpected way. It’s about the trappings and Christ himself returning, together, to a little village in post-communist Russia … on Dec. 25 at midnight.

The day before Christmas, Alexi asks:

“Babushka, why is our church closed?”

“Soldiers came to our village,” comes the answer. “They did not like churches. They did not want people to believe in God. They warned the villagers, ‘If we find you in your church we will arrest you and send you far away.’”

But the soldiers are long gone, the boy says. “Why can’t we celebrate Christmas tomorrow in St. Nicholas?”

“The church has been empty for 60 years,” the Babushka says. “You cannot celebrate Christmas in a church with an empty altar, with no cross, no candles, no bread or wine, no icon of St. Nicholas, and no priest.”

The story — and the town’s Christmas — build slowly from there.

The book evokes my own unplanned Christmas moments in the sacristy of St. Ignatius Church in De­ cem­ ber 1989.

Until his death in 1995, the sacristan there was Gjon Sinishta. He was an intense, quiet Al­ banian with a gray beard and a wise face. He looked like the old cobbler in The Miracle of Saint Nicholas — and hid a secret that was just as explosive.

I interviewed him for our school paper in college, and slowly got drawn into his personal quest.

Gjon had been a seminarian in Albania in the mid 1960s when the communist regime came in and took over his seminary. They dragged the priests away and locked the students up in a room. They would shoot the priests and eventually force the seminarians to dig a mass grave to throw the bodies in. But in the dark of that room on the first night, Gjon Sinishta made a solemn promise — a bessa. An Albanian bessa is a serious commitment of life. Legends say serious souls will return from the dead, if they must, to fulfill a bessa.

If he ever made it out of Albania, Gjon promised, he would tell the world what the communists were doing.

He did make it out of Al­ bania, and he eventually made it to San Francisco and St. Ignatius Church. He fulfilled his bessa by producing The Albanian Catholic Bulletin, a quarterly bound book hundreds of pages long.

Gjon published it in English, using his own money and whatever donations he could scrape together, but he didn’t speak English very well. That’s where I came in.

I would sit next to him at a long table in the round sacristy under the giant dome of the church, and convert his broken English translation of Albanian Catholic history into U.S. English-major English (though not particularly well, I’ve discovered by reading old issues). I began the work in De­ cember, for Christ­ mas money, but once drawn into an Alba­ nian’s bessa, there is no easy way to back out. It became one of my main sources of income.

Weird light would filter in through high windows, and I had to sit carefully to keep from kicking the crown of thorns on a giant armless corpus of Christ that was kept under the table. It all added to the feeling that we were doing something subversive and consequential. We were reproducing documents that the communists were destroying, publishing them and sending them to libraries across the free world.

We wrote “The History of the Franciscans in Albania” from documents smuggled out and sent to Gjon. We wrote the legends of Skanderbeg, the great Albanian warrior who was kidnapped by Muslim terrorists as a boy, but turned against them at the climactic point of a crusader battle.

And in between, Gjon would tell me stories.

He told me about how the bishops of Albania were forced to dress as clowns and clean public toilets, to humiliate them in the eyes of the people.

He told me how the churches were gutted and turned into museums of atheism. When that happened, families took the vestments and the religious vessels and hid them in their homes.

The Albanian government was determined to root religion out of its people, so government storm troops conducted raids on homes in 1967 to get the religious articles back.

Gjon told me the story of one man who watched his house ransacked by guards. They found a chalice, and put it in their bag. They found a crucifix, and put it in their bag. They found a cross from a necklace, and put that in their bag, too. They left the home a wreck and went on their way. Sputtering with anger, he ran after them.

“Here’s one cross you can’t take away!” he shouted, and when they turned to watch, he made the sign of the cross with his hand.

That same resilient faith drives The Miracle of Saint Nicholas. At Christmas, Christ came to be with his people forever. His coming planted something in people so deep that it can’t be stripped away. It can’t be persecuted out of them, at least not for long. It might be forced into dormancy for 60 years. It might struggle for 60 more years after that. But, like evergreen trees in the winter, Christ never really goes away.

In the story, Alexi decides he will be the one to clean up the church. He chases out the “dancing mice” and cleans the frost off the windows. The villagers are curious, and he tells them all why he’s undertaken this Herculean task: “So we can celebrate Christmas in the church tomorrow.”

That night, at midnight, Alexi goes to the church. One by one, the villagers come, too. The farmer, the carpenter, his babushka, and above all the cobbler, all contribute to Alexi’s plan.

Like Gjon Sinishta, each has kept a secret for all those years. And each made a promise — a bessa, at baptism — that they almost can’t help but fulfill.

The end of that story always gets me. Way more than jingle bells ever could.E

Alexi decides he will be the one to clean up the church. He chases out the “dancing mice” and cleans the frost off the windows.

That night, at midnight, Alexi goes to the church. One by one, the villagers come, too.

The Miracle of St. Nicholas

By Gloria Whelan

Illustrated by Judith Brown

Bethlehem Books

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