Starbright, a novel by Andrew Greeley

"It was said by the very old peasants in my country – and now it is said again – that on some very special Christmas nights Mary and Joseph and the Child come back to earth. There is snow on the ground and the nights are cold but not too cold. The blanket of stars in the sky is like a blanket of spring flowers. The angels and the shepherds and the shepherds’ children and the twelve wise men come with them."

"We Russians know better," Odessa said waving my question aside as a silly interruption. "It is also said that when men and women of faith who know where the cave is enter it to gaze on the child, they see something truly amazing."

"They see that the face of the Child is their own face. Then they realized they are the beloved child! Is that not wondrous!"

It sounded like pantheism to me, but what did I know? I was nothing more than an Irish kid from the South Side of Chicago. How did I get mixed up with a Russian mystic who made Alyosha Karamazof look like an earth-bound nerd?

"My family," I observed, "engage in gladiatorial mayhem on Christmas. I’m the referee who is supposed to make peace."

"What a shame," Odessa shook her head in sadness. "They will not see the beloved child. As the Russian proverb says, he who fears wolves will never go into the woods."

I had made a mistake when I invited her to come home with me for Christmas. Our date for the festival was not the same as the Russian date. Christmas was not the great feast in the East that it had become in the West. We were not seriously involved with one another, at least I didn’t think we were. My solemn, mystical grand duchess would not fit with the South Side Irish, especially my contentious manic family.

In a burst of sentimentality I had felt sorry for her that she would be alone of Christmas Day, a thoroughly American and totally absurd compassion. If Odessa wanted to be with others on that day, she didn’t need my help. Moreover she was used to being alone. In fact, she loved being alone.

The sadness in her vast brown eyes had been too much for me. Sad-eyed women are always too much for me. Odessa’s eyes were always sad, that goes with being Russian

We Flanigans are good Irish Catholics. We believe in God, but we rarely mention him save when we take His name in vain in exclamations of anger or surprise or merely emphasis. Odessa, however, talks about God all the time, as though He were someone present in the room with us. You can’t have that kind of talk in an Irish Catholic family which lives in an Irish Catholic neighborhood like ours, can you?