A Different Kind of Christmas Story

A Different Kind of Christmas Story

At their feet spread the great Egyptian desert, a shadowy ocean of sand rolling southward into Africa. The woman, a pale redhead with dark rings of sorrow under her eyes, had otherwise the look of ease and city life about her. Her child seemed even more incongruous: a scrawny, big-eyed boy, five, perhaps, six years old, with an ominous, unending cough; a dark, mixed-race runt with a head of kinky yet unmistakably Celtic red hair.

Most Roman women would have exposed this child at birth, or aborted him early on, at the first signs of a difficult pregnancy. This woman was different. She clung to her pathetic little offspring as if he were a bag of gold and even now she was taking terrible risks, breaking Caesar’s law, on his behalf. Other mothers were nearby, they stood together with only the occasional whimper of grief, patiently waiting for the gaunt, somber men who were coming to carry their sons away.

Presently, the riders themselves came into view, “the Children of Israel,” as they had been derisively known by the city Christians, five tall, bearded men between eighteen and thirty, deep voiced, dressed in skins, courtly and old-fashioned in their speech.

As the brothers sidled up to the group and began to dismount, the woman looked down suddenly into the eyes of her son. This was it, she realized—the final moment. All around her, she sensed the other mothers coming to the same realization, felt them instinctively tighten their grip on the boys.

The mother gathered her child into her arms. She kissed him roughly on the side of the face and then thrust him into the hands of the closest brother.

“His name is Athanasius,” she told him.

“We will take him to Antony,” the quiet, cow-eyed man answered.

At last, with all eyes fixed in her direction, the woman turned decisively away from her baby.

The brothers began to move quickly among them, gathering up the children. There would be no time for extended farewells tonight; Caesar’s spies might have followed this little exodus, might be watching even now.

The boys cried out for their mothers from the arms of their new fathers as the caravan remounted, the men pronounced a final word of benediction. Then it was all over.

Most of us today will have noticed the biblical parallels in this story. The Holy Child of Bethlehem, for instance, was carried, three centuries before, into this very same desert to escape the wrath of another tyrannical potentate, King Herod the Great. As a matter of fact, little Athanasius’s departure may actually have happened during the Christmas season.

The year was 304 and Christmas was, as yet, a very minor feast on the calendar, celebrated nowhere with any particular fervor and not at all in many Christian communities.

In this story, however, the tyrant is the Roman emperor Diocletian, and his late campaign to finally extirpate “the Christian superstition” once and for all is known to historians as the Great Persecution, the final and fiercest of the ten general persecutions through which the early Church had been destined to pass.

There are no angels or shepherds in this Christmas story; no one here knows any Christmas carols to sing. The only music is the cry of a lost, imperfect child receding slowly across the sands, swallowed finally by the vastness of the desert.

Yet this pitiful runt, this redheaded stepchild, is fated, though no one knows it yet, to save Christianity—to save, in fact, the world. Had anyone thought to spare him his compromised quality of life, to put him “out of his misery” after the fashion of the pagans, that world never would have been saved.

If it is to be saved again, from the new and frightening rebirth of paganism happening in our own time, we would do well to remember Athanasius. His is a Christmas story worth telling again, even in the twenty-first century, full of new life and hope.