wishing on a star

i thought it would be a snap, one of those simple tasks you can scratch off your To Do list while you're doing eight other things. But finding a star for this year's Christmas pageant sent me on a bit of a journey. i'm not talking Mary & Joseph here, i'm not speaking metaphorical star but literal: we needed a star ornament to hang from a large stick that someone will carry in during the Christmas Eve pageant.

My childhood Christmas trees were topped with a star, first one made of cardboard covered with tinfoil that my Dad made, then, in later years, one that had a tree light inside it. Over the millenia, we've so conflated the Christmas stories of Luke and Matthew, that many people think the shepherds followed a star to the manger, as some of our beloved carols have it. On most of the religious Christmas cards i receive, the star is, well, the star. What else so symbolises Christmas?
So, while grocery shopping at Superstore, i nipped over to the Seasonal section to pick out a star for our pageant. There were snowmen and beany-baby puppies in tuques. No stars. On to the repository of all manner of stuff, the Dollar Store, where i could have bought matching antlers for the dog and i, but no star. On to the greeting card shop, where there was a huge rack of penguins, each with a name on its rotund belly. They also had Elvis decorations, but not the kind of star i had in mind. i was beginning to think i would have to resort to my father's early craft with cardboard and tin foil, but one of those gift shops that only seems to exist in December yielded up the right stuff.
A frustrating pilgrimage it was, searching for a spiritual symbol in this highly secularized, commercialized Christmas culture. Don't misunderstand, i love giving presents (okay, and receiving them, too!), and A Christmas Carol, It's A Wonderful Life and The Grinch are all part of my celebrations. The line between sacred and secular is pretty fluid for me...but why was it so darn hard to find a star, for heaven's sake?
One of my ministry pals likes to say the Bible is a book for jailbirds, written by people on the lam from the powers of their day. It's a book (or, more accurately, a library) for those who don't fit in, for the overlooked, the shunned, the stepped on. So maybe now that Christianity has lost its pride of place, we who try to follow the Way may be closer in spirit than our grandparents were to that jailbird experience. We are mocked, scorned, deemed to be simple-minded, deemed to be responsible for great evil in the world, sometimes tolerated, sometimes called upon to conduct a rite of passage like a wedding or funeral, mostly ignored.
My own hunt for a star made me wonder about the Magi's quest. Perhaps it wasn't like the Christmas card stars, a blazing comet actively leading the way to the dirt floored stable where another child was born to the poor. Perhaps the wonder and wisdom about the Magi's quest is they looked hard into the heavens and saw something nobody else did. Not only saw it, but acted on it. Even though that acting put them on a collision course with King Herod, and necessitated evasive action. They went home another way, not by the same rut in the road.
May all of us look hard into the heavens and into the heaven we call Earth. If we are blessed, we may even see something nobody else did. If we have courage, we may even act on it, we may take another way and get out of our rut. Look hard into the heavens, and into the heaven we call Earth.