A Cellarful of Nose - Future Shoes

And now, up on the steps of the sacristy, I see the kids of the
parish in their shepherd get-ups of bathrobe and flipflops,
guarding their flocks against the mysteries of night. When up in
the sky is a nine year old angel, unable to hide her grin, there to
announce the good news.
And the animals in the stable, gathered by the manger, have
their own hopes of the messiah – redemption from the lion
perhaps chief of these.
For how can there be happiness when a monster rules the
world, unkillable and unnegotiable?
And I think of the wise men, one of them my son, wearing
actual Saudi robes brought back from a parishioner in the 1930s,
traveling across the trekless sands of India and Persia, drawn by a
star, and protected from marauding lions by royal bodyguards.
And I made up a story in my mind, about a Christmas lion,
who followed the magi following the star, lured out of his
wilderness by the suggestion of something new.
Picture him, sauntering a distance from the caravan, head
down, intent on the path, making his way from night to night
under a pinpricked sky, his slightest exhalation an ominous groan.
Uncomprehending but resolved, he traces the arc of a star.
Now imagine this creature as part of the church pageant,
kneeling at the manger with his own present to the newborn king
– the sacrifice of violence, the renunciation of death.
"And the lion shall lie down with the lamb," is one of those
prophecies no one really believes. D. H. Lawrence said a lion
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