Last week I find myself wandering around the CVS looking for pens and cat food, trying to keep my spirits up in the face of impending finals. I’m surrounded by holiday festoonery, red, green, and gold crap made out of paper and tinsel. Over the loudspeakers is some God awful country crooner, singing a rare non-holiday song. I can vaguely make out that her caterwauling is about some woman worried about telling her boyfriend she’s pregnant. “A baby changes everything,” is the constant refrain.

And somewhere, between the toilet paper and the stationary, I realize that she isn’t singing about some sad ersatz Bristol Palin, she’s talking about Mary. As in, Mary, Mother of God. The original unwed mother.

The woman who taught me Bible stories, my Palestinian grandmother, was from the same zip code as Christ. The characters seemed ordinary, as commonplace as my neighbors, or my friends parents, or the people bustling past me in the pharmacy. The story of Jesus, of Mary, of the whole lot of them, is one of human beings being asked to do something they didn’t want to do, that they begged not to have to do. A totally human reaction. But then they did something extraordinary: they did it anyway, for the good of their friends, their family, and people they didn’t even know.

I don’t know if Jesus was the son of God, and I don’t know if he rose from the dead, but I know this: Jesus himself pleaded, “take this cup away from me.” What kind of a god is afraid of death? A human one. A little boy, born in a barn, to a mother who’s in one of the worst situations a woman can be in, and a (human) father who’s not quite sold on the whole enterprise. The Christianity born that night isn’t about divinity. It’s about humanity.

I can believe in that.

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