Creasters

Some years ago I heard a term for those people who swell churches on special events like Christmas and Easter: Creasters. It was uttered with some derision, which is how I uttered it subsequently, caught up as I was in my new Christian's sense of moral superiority. The intervening years have taught me, however, the stark difference between debasement and abasement, between the corruption that I have wrought in this often losing battle between spirit and flesh, and the redemption that a humbled Christ brought for the likes of me. We have debased ourselves, and because of this, out of love, Christ abased himself.

Those peaks of the traditional Christian calendar -- Christmas and Easter -- are the peaks as well of Christ's humbling. He came weak and poor and hunted, he left on a cross amongst felons. I think about these people we call Creasters, who haven't the discipline or burden of religiosity to bring them dutifully to church, yet who come nonetheless, to the humbled Christ. They come in jeans or in suits, and they slouch or sit stiffly in strange pews, and they sing hymns with us though they are aware that they do not belong to our community.

It's easy for me to go to my church, but perhaps not for the Creaster. Sometimes -- too often -- I come out of habit or duty, but sometimes I come out of the deepest yearning. I wonder if the Creasters feel this, if it is why they come during this season and at Easter. I wonder if they, in their alien state, don't come closer to a true heart than I carry most Sundays. They come, though it doesn't fit their routine. They come, in spite of the discomfort in not belonging. They come because something draws them -- a faint sense of holiness evoked by the season, or because we are more inviting, or for the music, or maybe because the baby Christ and the murdered Christ are images they can relate to best in their fear and need. They come, with their doubts and their poor attendance records, and somewhere, most importantly, the hope that it isn't all just a myth, that the baby was and is Immanuel, God with us. May they, and all of us, see in that birth and death and resurrection a world overcome, and have peace.