Angelus News | December 20, 2019 | Vol. 4 No. 43

THE CRUX
BY HEATHER KING
In this place Christ
wants to be born
“Now he comes to be born in the narrowness
of our lives, to be incarnate in
us, to give his love to the world through
us, through our flesh and blood. That
is one meaning of the Incarnation.
The reason why we are where we are
this Christmas, in this house, family,
office, workroom, hospital, or camp,
is because it is here in this place that
Christ wants to be born, from here
that he wants his life to begin again in
the world. … We did not choose this
place — Christ has chosen it. We did
not choose these people — Christ has
chosen them.”
— Caryll Houselander, “The Mother
of Christ”
I’m not sure I ever chose LA. When
I moved here in 1990, I was newly
married. My brother, a contractor
who lived in the South Bay, had given
us tickets from Boston as a honeymoon
gift. He’d offered my carpenter
husband a job.
LA was the last place I, a lifelong
New Englander, ever thought I’d end
up. Yet bit by bit the place, in all its
unfathomable, sprawling mystery,
grew on me.
I underwent so many dark nights, so
much searching and suffering here,
not because LA is an especially harsh
place; rather, because I’m human,
that over time the very city came to
be incorporated into my bones and
blood, and vice versa.
In recovery programs, I’d experienced
the interesting phenomenon
that I was not healed by people I had
hand-picked, but by whoever happened
to walk through the door on
any given day.
That rough concept of the Mystical
Body prepared me well to come into
the Church, which I did in 1996. So
did the traits with which I seem to
have emerged from the womb: my
love of nature, my propensity for the
outcast, the hypersensitivity that has
made for so much pain but also for so
much consolation and joy.
All that brought to bear when I was
asked in 2014 to write this weekly
arts and culture column for Angelus
(at that time The Tidings). I’d always
walked the city, always closely observed
my neighbors, always befriended
the flora and fauna of our freeways,
alleys, deserts, and coast.
Not in a showy, let’s-start-a-lifestylebrand
way, but in a way that was very
much on a par with the Mass: the
invisible North Star around which my
days had come to be ordered. From
the beginning, I had been fascinated
by the way Mass is both in plain
sight and hidden from the eyes of the
world; the perfect intersection of our
life here on earth and the life that is
to come.
It is from the Mass that I have gone
forth to explore: to walk, drive, take
the train, and fly; to bring home what
I’ve seen, heard, and learned; and to
write this weekly column.
I’m no longer a wife; I’ve never been
a mother. But the Church, as the
28 • ANGELUS • December 20, 2019