Three years ago, I needed to re-home the nativity set that my sister gave me. But rather than giving away the eight ceramic figurines (chipped and broken after years of use), I found new homes for them in strategic places throughout our half acre backyard.

I didn’t know what to do with them, you see. The iconic manger inhabitants, those touchpoints of Christian mythology, were no longer needed in my household. Being broken and chipped wasn’t the problem. The real problem? A complete loss of faith.  

Four years ago, I woke to the news of a vote. The night before, I hadn’t considered the vote, but the news the next morning was a turning point in my life. The Anglican Church of Canada had failed to approve a motion to permit same-sex marriages in the church.

WTF?

A lifelong church member, albeit in the US Episcopalian tradition rather than the Canadian Anglican version, I was dumbfounded that the religion had been restricting marriages to heterosexual unions only. How did I not know that?

Throughout my life I’d steadfastly believed in God. Grew up attending church, got baptized, confirmed, and volunteered in many capacities: an acolyte, an office assistant, Sunday School teacher, Sunday School director. Though I held a deep belief in God, I wasn’t convinced that Christianity was the one true religion. Simply the faith practice of my culture. I’d spent years in Muslim countries and didn’t distinguish their faith from mine. We believed in God, and that was enough for me. My friends were thoughtful, generous, funny, and faithful human beings who believed in the same God but held different views on Jesus. A prophet, yes, messiah, no. What’s wrong with that, I wondered. Our differences didn’t matter so much as our shared beliefs. 

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I brought my children into the church. Though my husband wasn’t a believer, my kids grew up attending church and learning about Jesus. At a Christmas Eve service, a woman approached my three-year-old son excitedly.

“Do you know who’s coming tonight?” She asked him, her eyes twinkling.

“Baby Jesus,” he said, excitedly.

She opened her mouth, then shut it. She thought he’d throw Santa out there, but no, he went religious on her. In church, no less.

Twelve years later, he told me he didn’t believe.

“Believe in what?!” I demanded. “In Jesus?” That would be okay, even if it broke my heart a little.

“In any of it,” he said simply.

I nodded, walked into my bedroom, shut the door and cried.

Oh, did I mention that the Anglican priests in Canada are allowed to “bless” same-sex unions? Yeah, didn’t make me feel any better, either.

The news of the vote sent me into a faith tailspin. I contacted my local priest, and she connected me with a spiritual director who specialized in people feeling alienated from the church, especially individuals from the LGBTQIA+ community who had been outcast, disowned or discriminated against. We met for months as I tried to reconcile my faith with the church and the forces of organized religion.

I read. I studied. I wrote. I countered the ugliness of Christianity – the righteous anger, the discrimination, its history of war and oppression – with the hope and joy that I’d always felt in my faith. I related to Rachel Held Evans, who questioned her evangelical roots and wrote many books on her struggle with faith before her untimely death at 37. I read Barbara Brown Taylor’s Learning to Walk in the Dark, and found helpful the words of this Episcopal priest, a friend of my mother, who gave up her pulpit in an effort to find an authentic way of being Christian.

And I read Sara Miles’ Take This Bread, an atheist’s account of finding faith. It made me realize, as she described her radical conversion to Christianity, that I felt none of the power or holiness that had once flowed through me.

None. Zilch. Nada.

Suddenly I was done. With church, with Jesus, with God.

So I lined up the nativity figures on the barbeque grill, eight in a row, firing squad style: three kings, Joseph, a shepherd holding a lamb, a donkey with a chipped ear, Mary with outstretched arms, and baby Jesus in his ceramic crib. I thought long and hard about where to put each of them.

One of the kings was headless. I’d tried multiple times to re-attach his head back onto the neck, but the bulbous crown made it impossible to balance. I also tried to glue the head onto his outstretched hands, a macabre offering for the infant king, but it wouldn’t stay. I put him in our small cannabis patch for comfort. Another walked on water for a short time, while the third hung out watching our raspberries.

I picked up Mary and the baby, unwilling to separate mother and child. Yes, I know fathers matter too. But putting aside his reputation as a kind man and the most famous adopted father ever, the Bible says that Joseph is technically not related to Jesus (sure, no questions here…). And I had a different place in mind for the carpenter.

I considered nestling Jesus in the straw of the chicken roost. Seemed appropriate for this baby born in a manger, but once I entered the roost, I knew immediately that I couldn’t put a baby in a chicken shit-splatter zone. In the rafters, perhaps? I liked the idea of Jesus among laying hens, and Mary with her outstretched arms was built for floating in the rafters. But thick spider webs and dust made me reconsider. Not the rafters, either.

I moved to the feeding coop – big, enclosed, lots of places for Jesus. I placed Mary halfway up a plywood wall on a two-by-four, balancing her like a hovering angel. I put baby Jesus down on the base of the same wall, about four feet below Mary, nestled in his ceramic bed of straw and looking up at his mother hovering above him. In the absence of faith, may we seek out our mothers.

The thought made my heart ache. This nativity set was my mom’s, and my sister shipped it to me after her death. It arrived in a Harrod’s box, the London Harrod’s where Mom, who typically wasn’t a shopper, loved to shop. They were painted in faded earth tones – ochre, teal, and sand – with light hair and light skin. If you traded their flowing robes for Carhart’s and flannel shirts, they’d look like Canadian lumberjacks.

The nativity set didn’t come with angels. If I’d had an angel, I’d have put it high in the coop above Mary and Jesus. With no angel, I picked up the shepherd and the donkey. Both of them certainly belonged with the chickens. The shepherd with his lamb went in a corner near a perch in the feeding area, the donkey lying next to him.

Joseph, the only figure left on the barbecue, looked lonely. I carried him to the woodshed. It smelled of pine and larch, and lurching bales of straw, and I tucked him into the wood stacks, satisfied that the carpenter had found his place.

Despite my humor, it hasn’t been easy or funny. If I ran crying into my room when my son told me he didn’t believe in God, I ran kicking and screaming into the world when I realized that I agreed with him.

Years ago, discussing faith with a friend, an atheist whose husband had lost his two siblings unexpectedly four years apart, she said she wished that she could believe in God to make sense of the losses. “Faith gives people hope that life means something,” she said, her voice rising with emotion. “It would be so much easier to say that there’s meaning in all of this. If I could believe, I would. But I can’t. I don’t.” 

Her words troubled me. I felt sorry for her. But I understand now. Belief in God is used as a means to justify awful things. In the Middle East, in the halls of the US Congress, God is a name used to deny, denigrate and destroy the humanity of individuals who simply want to exist. I see Christians turning their back on family, on reconciliation, on forgiveness. But they hold tight their righteousness. 

As the years have passed since I re-homed the nativity, funny things have happened. For a while Mary hovered beatifically on the two-by-four before falling onto a bed of feathers. But she’s been missing for over a year now. No one’s seen her, but we haven’t dug too deep.

The donkey lies, head buried, in the silty soil of the coop, next to his shepherd and the lamb, submerged in feathers. The three kings ended up in the beds of my three grapevines when we dug up and re-organized the backyard in 2022. Kings are fêted with wine and overindulgence, so why not nest them among the roots of inebriation? The headless king’s head continues to loll near his feet. A second king has also become headless.

I don’t know where Joseph is; it’s as if he’s disappeared entirely. It’s been years since I last saw him.

And what of the baby Jesus?

He got separated from his cradle then disappeared entirely from the coop. Two summers ago he resurfaced in the mud of the chicken yard, rising from the muck gradually, naked and whole. How he left the coop and got out into the yard is a mystery, perhaps a miracle. I left him untouched, and he soon sank back into the mud.

One day maybe I’ll see Jesus again and celebrate his resurrection. Or maybe he’ll remain forever hidden. I’m guessing the latter, but I’ll keep my mind open. Though God has flown the coop, the baby Jesus may appear once more.